Newman Students Planting Seeds of Positive Change

[FULL STORY]

By some estimates, Louisiana is losing wetlands to erosion at the rate of a football field every 38 minutes. Wetlands not only provide a habitat for fish and wildlife, but they also act as a natural buffer, a first line of defense against tropical storms and hurricanes. Over the past seven years, Newman students have worked in partnership with LSU, the Army Corps of Engineers, and other organizations in several wetlands restoration projects. This year, members of the third, fourth, fifth, and seventh grades made two trips to plant trees in the Bonnet Carré Spillway.

On January 17, the third and fourth graders ventured to the Bonnet Carre’ Spillway/Bayou LaBranche wetland area to participate in the LSU’s Coastal Roots Program wetland restoration planting. The students, along with 91 parents, grandparents, older siblings, and teachers, planted 673 Swamp Red Maple and Bald Cypress seedlings.

Over the last year, these same students germinated and cared for the very trees that they would later plant. Beginning in February 2013, the students planted over 1,500 Red Maple and Bald Cypress seeds in the School’s “can yard” nursery. Throughout the year, the students learned about and discussed the importance of the trees to purifying water, combating coastal erosion, and how they slow down storm surge and winds during times of hurricanes. As the culmination of the project, the students took half of the 1,352 surviving seedlings and planted them in the Bonnet Carré Spillway.

With that planting, the students restored two acres of wetlands in the Bayou LaBranche wetland area. This area was damaged by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, and Isaac and was clear-cut when the Army Corps of Engineers built the spillway in the 1930s. This area became Newman’s planting site last school year, and the students will work with the Army Corps of Engineers and five other local schools for at least ten years to restore this fragile wetland area west of the city.

The second planting was held on Friday, February 21, 2014. With this planting, Neman fifth and seventh graders, along with a retinue of chaperones, family members, and faculty, restored another two-and-a-half acres of wetlands in the area. The group planted the remaining 669 Swamp Red Maple and Bald Cypress trees that were still growing in our nursery. The remaining ten trees not planted on this day have returned to Newman and have been placed back in the Coastal Roots can yard. They will become a part of next year’s planting at the spillway. This extra year in the can yard will allow these ten Swamp Red Maples additional time to grow and become larger, thus increasing their chance of survival.

Newman reached a very important milestone within the Coastal Roots Program with this planting. As of Friday’s planting, Newman students have planted over 3,500 trees to help restore our state’s wetlands. Students from the School’s tenth grade down to third grade have helped Newman reach this goal by planting trees on trips over the last seven years. Without our students’ dedication, enthusiasm, and hard work on these planting trips, this program would not be possible.

A number of our trees are tagged for an LSU - National Forestry Service study. Data on the trees are collected at the planting (GPS location, height, and diameter measurements), which we then input into the Coastal Roots database. The trees are monitored for survival rate and growth rate for the next 20 years by LSU scientists and NFS scientists. We will also be able to do our own monitoring with this data and keep track of our trees’ progress. When our second grade students go to Jean Lafitte National Park each spring for their introduction to the wetlands and to the Coastal Roots Program, those students are able to view some of the trees that Newman students planted around the Education Complex in 2009 and 2010. Last spring these trees were around four to five feet tall; it is a thrill to see our work growing.

Participating in the Coastal Roots gives our students a deeper understanding of the challenges facing Louisiana’s wetlands. Working with the trees gives the students a better grasp of the trees’ role in the ecosystem, as well as the time and care it takes to grow a tree. Planting and restoring the wetland regions gives students a sense of empowerment – that they are part of the solution to this crisis. Together, these activities encourage and develop a sense of stewardship for the environment that is vital if such conservation efforts are to succeed. On an individual level, working together on the project also strengthens interpersonal bonds and fosters a sense of cooperation among students. This type of service learning is at once challenging and rewarding. We look forward to working with the LSU Coastal Roots program for years to come.