Keep North Carolina Beautiful awarded students in the Downtown School’s Eco Club a Window of Opportunity grant worth $1,000 for their urban wildlife habitat project this week.
Students at the Downtown School participate in Enrichment Clusters, which are specific courses of study proposed and designed by the students themselves. There are weekly programs centered on videography, studio arts, coding, and much more. The Eco Club is one such Enrichment Cluster, and it’s garnered lots of attention from students who want to know more about the natural world and how to preserve it.
“Enrichment Clusters are student-driven, student-led passion projects,” said Allison Barham, one of the teachers who leads the club. “Anything that students are interested in, there’s an Enrichment Cluster for it.”
One of the Eco Club’s biggest projects is the school’s garden space, which they hope to transform into a wildlife habitat in the heart of downtown Winston-Salem. The space already has a bee hotel and milkweed plants for caterpillars and butterflies, but they’d like to add bird feeders and houses, animal food stations, and more native plants to attract various birds, small mammals, and pollinating insects.
The Window of Opportunity (WOO) grant will allow them to do just that. Keep North Carolina Beautiful, a nonprofit focused on environmental education and beautification, sponsors the grants each year to foster projects that will teach more young people about the state’s natural beauty and encourage them to join the effort to protect it. The Downtown School is one of 25 schools across the state that have earned the grant this year.
“The WOO grants are for beautification, replenishment, and recycling projects that educate the youth of North Carolina on the impacts of preserving and enhancing our state’s environmental sustainability,” reads the Keep North Carolina Beautiful website. “The funds are meant to provide resources for materials critical to the learning project/environment and are intended to provide hands-on learning opportunities for students.”
Davis Lee, another of the club’s organizing teachers, is confident that the wildlife habitat will serve that purpose well. Students at the Downtown School spend plenty of time outside and enjoy every opportunity to get out into the garden. Most of these students don’t see many animals in their daily lives because they live in the city, and experiencing wildlife up close at school will enhance their appreciation of nature.
“We eat lunch out here every day when the weather isn’t gross,” Lee said. “They’re going to have a lot of chances to come out here and see whatever animals we attract.”
The Eco Club’s membership is already keenly aware of how important it is to take care of native plants and animals. They’re glad that the Eco Club gives them a chance to do more for the environment, and they’re looking forward to improving their garden so that they can share their passion for the planet with their classmates to a greater degree than ever.
“The planet is eventually going to be destroyed by the stuff that we’re trying to prevent,” Fourth Grader Camden Jordan said of the club’s efforts. “It’s a beautiful planet and we want to save it.”