Students Plant Small Oasis at Barren Campus

The green thumbs of a group of Anacapa Middle School students on Tuesday transformed a sad patch of arid earth at the Ventura school’s entrance into a verdant garden of lilies with a flowering plum tree in the center.

It’s the first phase of a campus landscaping project that will turn tattered turf and barren flower beds into a green educational oasis.

“We think the campus is embarrassing,” said Carmen Grande, 14, one of about 35 members of a recently formed horticulture club who are getting dirt beneath their fingernails.

“It is disgusting. We want more green.”

So did science teacher Joan Curtis when she put together $1,500 worth of grants from private businesses and foundations and formed the club in January.

The campus irrigation system hasn’t worked in more than a decade, leaving bare swaths of ex-lawn on much of the school’s grounds, she said.

Wind kicks up dust in swirling clouds that are whisked beneath classroom doors.

Maintenance workers added to the miniature environmental disaster about 15 years ago, killing three small gardens outside several classrooms with an overdose of weedkiller.

So Curtis and a retinue of eighth-graders embarked on a small reclamation project.

Meeting as often as three times a week during lunch hour, they mixed charcoal with the small gardens’ earth to neutralize much of the poison.

It’s hoped that a scraggly crop of what students laughingly refer to as “toxic corn” will extract the remaining herbicide before other vegetables can be sown.

For the modest, boomerang-shaped plot in front of the school, students selected the vegetation and installed a drip irrigation system.

A strip of hard dry ground that fronts a parking lot will go under the hoe in the fall.

Along the way, students learned about bioassays, took field trips to nurseries and learned the value of working with their hands.

“We’re a good school academically,” said Stephanie Paralitici, 13.

“Now we want to take care of it [physically].”

The club’s work parallels that of a larger effort the entire school is making.

Principal Mike Johnson was appalled at the long-neglected campus when he took over last fall and vowed to remake the school into a place more conducive to not only learning, but living.

Students raised $25,000, and this summer teachers and parents will give the school’s courtyard a make-over that includes an outdoor stage, expanded student seating, fresh turf and new landscaping. Meanwhile, the students’ work on Tuesday gives them an emotional investment in beautification, agriculture, the environment and school pride that cannot be duplicated by a textbook, Johnson said.

“I’m not so sure all the lessons are to be learned in the classroom,” he said.

“To do things that all people are going to benefit from is perhaps the greatest learning experience you can have of all.”