MISSOULA — For many high school seniors, it’s easy to slide through the last month of school, but at one Missoula high school, students are staying engaged by getting their hands dirty.
The students of AP Environmental Studies at Sentinel High School are spending their last few weeks of the school year doing community service. They’re helping create the Rocky Mountain Gardens at the Missoula County Department of Ecology and Extension.
The AP Environmental Studies course is being taught at Sentinel for the first time in six years. Biology and wildlife biology teacher Lindsay Manzo took on the class as a way to get back to her conservation roots.
“Yeah, this is more my passion,” she says.
AP students take their final tests early May, so Manzo was looking for something to engage the kids in their final weeks. She decided community service would be the best option.
Manzo is a member of Missoula’s Bee City USA group and has worked with the Department of Ecology and Extension garden manager, Molly Anton, before.
Anton has been developing the new Rocky Mountain Gardens and needed a few extra hands.
“This garden brings in a lot of the units we’ve studied this year, like water pollution, irrigation, land management and carbon sequestration, so it was perfect,” Manzo says.
The students helped move rocks, lay irrigation and mulch, and even chose where to place certain plants and vegetables.
“It honestly amazed me with how much that we got to do,” senior Addie Paxinos says.
Manzo’s class was eager to help in the garden and apply what they’ve learned all year. In fact, their attendance has been almost perfect since the project started, according to Manzo.
For some, like senior Braelon Bahm, the chance to leave his desk made the community service easily engaging.
“I don’t really like the classroom environment so getting to learn outside makes it easier to stay engaged and pay attention,” he says.
Many of the students chose to join AP Environmental Studies because of their love for Manzo, but they’ve learned to appreciate the class because of the real-world application.
“It’s not just about like global warming like a lot of people think, but it’s also like, for example, doing this, and how many opportunities do you get to do that?” senior Kaidan Houppert says. “There’s a lot of gloominess… like you see on the news ‘oh the planet is dying,’ but there’s a lot of good going on too.”
Sentinel’s contribution to the Rocky Mountain Gardens was a way for the students to not only wrap up their time in Manzo’s class, but wrap up their time in Missoula.
“I’m really excited to be able to come back and like see how it turns out and just like know that myself and the rest of my class put a lot of work into it,” Paxinos says.
The gardens will likely be open to the public in July, with a full, grand opening this fall. More information on the gardens and opportunities to volunteer can be found here.
