A garden for citizen scientists
By Lisa Coster
As part of Citizen Science Month this April, Reading Fleming Intermediate School (RFIS) in Flemington unveiled a pollinator garden and outdoor classroom in a nook of available space on the school grounds next to the community woods and watershed.
Through the NJEA Frederick L. Hipp Foundation for Excellence in Education, we were awarded a $10,000 grant to improve safety features and signage in our school’s outdoor classroom. This improves accessibility for students who use wheelchairs or who have stability limitations.
Thanks to over $30,000 in grants and donations and dozens of volunteers, the garden and outdoor classroom offer the fifth and sixth grade students and the community a physical location to learn about biodiversity, become citizen scientists and join together as a community to maintain and expand the project.
A school and community effort
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, local volunteers, students and scouts were recognized. Over the long winter months and last summer, they planted seeds, cleaned up garbage, assembled garden structures, spread mulch and pulled seemingly endless loads of weeds.
Hundreds of native plant plugs donated by the Xerces Society were planted first in June 2022, but the hot summer months singed the small plants. In June 2023, the Flemington Borough Department of Public Works and J&J Landscapers came to the garden’s rescue, dropping five truckloads of root mulch and rototilling the area. After that, students, parents and staff volunteers, under the guidance of Raritan Headwaters and SEEDED, planted an even larger selection of native plants, again from the Xerces Society, and installed an upgraded sprinkler system.
The efforts worked, and the plants thrived over the summer—but so did the weeds. By August, the weeds reached four feet high, and now the team, led by nature lover and local resident Julia Whitley, focused on weed pulling and damage control. But all was not lost; over the next few weeks, the entrance arbor, deer fence and gravel path were installed and tamed the area.
Now, a beautiful wooden arbor, donated by local charities Safe Harbor and the Grandview Grange, welcomes visitors to the garden before they enter the deer fence that surrounds the one-tenth acre garden. To make the area accessible to all visitors, a crushed gravel path meanders through the garden, passing information signs and a lending library full of nature-inspired books for all ages.
The signage acknowledges sponsors and notes the various certifications and programs the garden and school are participating in, such as Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park®, the National Wildlife Federation’s certified Schoolyard Habitat® and Raritan Headwaters’ River-Friendly School Program. The school recently added EcoSchool’s Green Flag, the highest level, to their list of achievements.
Students rise to the challenge
Students have been fundamental in the creation of this space. Beginning with a 2022 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Planet Stewards program, the school received funds to clear dead trees in the area. In return, the students committed to a series of tasks to support biodiversity, habitat restoration and the removal of invasive plants and marine debris from the watershed.
The student council rose to the challenge, cleaning up garbage, removing invasive prickers and planting donated tree saplings. Other classes joined in expanding the efforts, building bee motels and planting milkweed in repurposed milk gallon jugs. Local scouts pitched in on several occasions, primarily spreading mulch. One of the scouts, David Berger, a junior at Hunterdon Central Regional High School, built 16 birdhouses with his grandfather using materials donated by Fox Lumber of Clinton.
In order to increase awareness and involve guests with Citizen Science studies, the garden’s kiosks feature ongoing Citizen Scientist campaigns with QR codes. There are even QR codes on the garden’s trash and recycling bins so that the various types of garbage can be tracked in a Google Form similar to National Geographic’s Marine Debris Tracker app.
Coming soon—as the hundreds of milkweed plants begin to grow—a monarch butterfly release day will be announced so that everyone can learn about the importance of the monarch butterfly and how RFIS is a registered Monarch Waystation. Attendees will also release butterflies raised as caterpillars.
Opportunities for educators, students, community
This past spring teachers had the opportunity to participate in asynchronous professional development sponsored through a grant from Sustainable Jersey. The training addressed the importance of placed-based, outdoor education as a means to provide hands-on science lessons on water, soil, air and sustainability as part of fifth and sixth grade curricula.
Citizen science campaigns and student-led data collection inspire student advocacy and address climate anxiety and mental health issues instead of students interpreting graphs and tables without a connection to the situation.
Outdoor exploration promotes collaboration and offers further opportunities to engage in universal design for learning practices as well as chances to demonstrate connections to STEM and outdoor careers that are often unknown to marginalized learners.
Finally, community service projects unite a diverse community in environmental sustainability education and collective action. Teachers can access the training and online resources on the garden’s website. In lending lockers found just inside the school doors near the garden, they’ll find magnifying glasses, clipboards and nature books. This fall the will be lockers decorated with painted flowers, butterflies and bees.
A place for quiet reflection
Offering a balance to the stimulation of the pollinator garden, the outdoor classroom is quietly situated just outside the garden at the edge of the watershed in the shade of mature trees. Here a modest display table offers a stage for demonstrations while seven gray benches await students to sit and journal or reflect.
Upon a closer look, speckles of color can be found in the benches made by the plastic caps and lids that were collected by the school and then melted and molded into benches as part of the ABC Promise Partnership of Green Tree Plastics in Evansville, Indiana.
The school collected 700 pounds of caps and lids and used funds from an NJEA Frederick L. Hipp Foundation for Excellence in Education grant and the collection of loose change to purchase the benches. A grant from the Foundation for Impact on Literacy and Learning paid for a Home Depot rental truck to bring the collection to Evansville and the benches back. In addition to the classroom benches, four larger benches with backs are placed along the school’s walking path.
We have so much more to do. Our next steps include:
- Placing more shade trees around the walking path.
- Installing indoor seeding stations and a hydroponic planter funded by NOAA Planet Stewards.
- Hosting a Monarch Release Day.
- Creating a fundraiser for student programs.
- Maintaining and enhancing the garden.
Participating in the GLOBE Trees app and Planet Stewards carbon reduction programs among other initiatives.
There is something to learn here for everyone and countless ways to contribute to the betterment of our biodiversity and the children of the community. My hope is that it grows into a movement beyond the walls of the deer fence.
Lisa Coster is a sixth grade special education math and science teacher at Reading Fleming Intermediate School in Flemington. She can be reached at lisa.coster@frsd.us.
Apply for a Hipp Grant
The pollinator garden and outdoor classroom described in this article is the result of numerous grants from a variety of providers, including a $10,000 grant from the NJEA Frederick L. Hipp Foundation for Excellence in Education.
The Hipp Foundation provides $500 to 10,000 grants for educators just like you regardless of your job title.
The only foundation of its kind in New Jersey, the Hipp Foundation supports initiatives to promote excellence in education. Since 1993, the foundation has disbursed more than $2.3 million in grants for innovative educational projects.
Apply by March 1, 2025, at njea.org/hipp.