The Bee funded a pollinator garden project. Students show how big ideas grow in small spaces

Wheelbarrows and plants by the dozen, sprinklers and soil sacks stacked high to build more garden beds on their Folsom campus and schools across Folsom Cordova Unified School District.

For Shagun Juthani and Addison Luong of the Environmental Impact Club at Folsom’s Vista del Lago High School, a $5,000 grant was an opportunity to extend what amounts to a multi-campus laboratory: a network of pollinator plant gardens to revive decimated native bee species, reintroduce native plants, create more green spaces and combat climate change.

“One of our main goals is to increase habitat spaces and take the eye away from all of the concrete — our cities are full of concrete,” Juthani said. “Folsom is so beautiful and there are so many trees, and I missed seeing that. So one of the main drivers of our project was just to (create) green spaces.”

Juthani and sophomore Luong were awarded a $5,000 climate grant for their work by The Sacramento Bee and the Solutions Journalism Network’s Beacon Initiative to address climate change.

“It was a really hard process, but we learned a lot from it and I think we’d like to inspire a lot more people like us for maybe future grants like this initiative because this stuff is powerful,” Juthani said. “Even though it’s a small scale, it can make a great impact in the future.”

The students think deeply about their place in the world and how they can have an impact. Spreading the love, senior Juthani said. Love of nature and green space; of the environment and the planet.

Accordingly, the pollinator project takes on big issues in deceptively small ways: addressing environmental equity by making green space more accessible to students; reintroducing native plants sublimated by suburban sprawl; and encouraging the children coming behind them that even small efforts can make a difference in the fight to preserve the planet.

“We wanted this to have an educational aspect so that even if this isn’t here forever, that they would carry something with them,” Luong said. “Hopefully it’s around long enough that they can take action for the environment around them. Because in this generation we really need more people who are aware about these things.”

Pollinator projects expand to four sites

The project now boasts four sites: the home Vista del Lago campus, Sandra Gallardo Elementary School and Sutter Middle School, also in Folsom; and Rancho Cordova’s W.E. Mitchell Middle School, where tidy beds of succulent plants grow and where Juthani, Luong, and a third member, senior Ethan Walker, spoke on a recent windswept Wednesday.

“Folsom is very much suburbia and a lot of the driving factors around its growth are a lot of identical structures, identical plants, manners in which to expedite the growth of the city,” Walker said. “So, we’re bringing a focus back to these wonderful species that can actually help ameliorate the way that we live, to use less water, to help be more native.”

“And they thrive here,” Luong added. “They’re meant to live here in California. You want students to not have the idea that all of these manicured and square bushes are what plants and nature are about — there’s so many more species out there.”

The project’s footprint is smaller than originally anticipated. The team envisioned erecting beds at each of Folsom Cordova’s 30 schools, but the downsizing expects to deliver bigger dividends.

“When we thought of the idea, we thought, ‘Oh, we’ll be really ambitious and spread the love through all (of the district’s) 30 campuses. But we realized that it would be enough for us to make a really huge impact on a smaller number of campuses,” Juthani said.

They asked Vista de Lago Principal Kimberly Moore to reach out to other district schools. Gallardo Elementary and Sutter Middle School contributed resources to create gardens on their campuses and committed to provide additional help. Luong said the team wants to expand their model.

“We hope that this can show other teachers what we can do for them if they are open to it,” Luong added. “It will be a really good example for more schools and hopefully to expand our impact that way.”

Adaptation and managing expectations

Plants native to Northern California are thriving in the soil at Sutter and at Gallardo, where salvia, wild lilac and stonecrop grow.

“Gallardo still hasn’t been completely finished, so it’s still an ongoing project,” Juthani said. “We have ordered a few more garden beds with the money we got so we’re going to set them up. They have a really nice outdoor area so we want to expand that so children can play around and plant their plants and learn to love the environment.”

The project has taught these students to pivot and adapt; not to manage expectations, but set new ones while creating new outcomes.

Their Mitchell Middle School site provides a ready example. A home-improvement project at Walker’s home inspired the improvisation.

“It was really rewarding,” Juthani said, showing off the garden area, neat rows planted in raised boxes. “We thought this area would be irrigated, but as soon as we planted the garden beds we found out that apparently this place wouldn’t have the irrigation we needed for the plants to survive.

So Walker came up with an idea: a succulent garden.

“We wanted to educate younger audiences at these schools about the pollinator gardens,” Walker said. “My family recently zeroscaped our lawn, so I had this idea of instead do something to promote zeroscaping to help reduce water usage in California. We decided to do a number of succulents every year and install placards to help educate individuals.”

The team also received an education of their own, getting a first-hand experience of the behind-the-scenes work to bring projects like theirs to life. Meeting with teachers and school administrators, working with vendors, juggling paperwork and classwork. Learning that so many around them were eager to help.

“We learned so much about school policies and regulations and how to purchase things through vendors. Before that, we definitely didn’t know anything about that,” Luong said. “So we’ll definitely be more experienced the next time we go about doing something like this.”

“There’s a lot more paperwork and conversing with more individuals within our school, more so than we originally expected, which was a hindrance to what we wanted to accomplish,” Walker said. “But that didn’t mean we couldn’t accomplish something. Especially when you look at this,” he said, pointing to the succulent garden. “This used to be dead space right here and it’s a beautiful garden.”

The lesson: Efforts large and small can make a difference. Trying is the first step.

“A lot of people think, ‘Oh my gosh, how can I help the environment? There’s nothing I can do that will help.’ But even something as seemingly small as this, this can make a huge difference,” Juthani said. “People may not go into environmental ventures because of how hard it seems, but even if you try your best and things don’t go perfectly, you’ve at least made a difference.”