This is a guest post from Paul Sawyer, Helen Miller and Kristi Robinson of Harmony Science Academy of Dallas, and part of ACE’s Spring Into Action blog series. 

Harmony Science Academy of Dallas has two sections of Environmental Science classes and was looking for community service projects that met our criteria: Free, local and good for our community with long lasting benefits.

That is a pretty tall order even for Texas, where “everything is big.” I read about a Dallas City Funded reforestation project and searched the web. I found a contact phone number, called and left a message about our interest in participation.

We read and researched the program on-line web resources and had classroom discussions about the impacts of global warming and the drought that wiped out about half the trees in our state. We all agreed this is a worthy project to get the whole school involved in, not just current environmental science students. We floated the idea to the learning community here and they also agreed to get involved.

Matt Varvir from ACE came to our school again this year and got everybody stoked and ready to take action. We had the Dallas Arborist, Ms. Karen Woodard, coordinate, explain and direct our volunteer group to an existing project near our school. We were able to get the information out, put in the school mail and information bulletins to show up at Arbor Park in Dallas ready to work (gloves, sturdy shoes and clothing suitable for rough terrain).

March 2, 2013, Saturday at 8:00 am (almost freezing temperatures), the volunteers showed up from our school. We joined the City of Dallas crew and neighborhood volunteers to clean up the trash, scrape and repaint barriers, unload and plant 10 trees, and mulch the areas.