Maintenance personnel found a way to get Gator vehicle (for loading and
transporting dirt and macadam) through a school hallway (top) to the Lincoln
School courtyard where planter boxes (center) were assembled and
4H students busied themselves in the rain garden (above).
KEARNY –
The transformation is pretty much complete: Lincoln Middle School’s courtyard is now fully equipped with an outdoor “green infrastructure” classroom.
It’s a place where students will explore “how rain gardens, rainwater harvesting systems and other ‘green’ technologies can reduce flooding and other hazards ….,” according to a Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission statement.
This summer, the PVSC partnered with Rutgers Cooperative Extension Water Resources Program to design and assemble the project in time for the opening of the fall semester.
And it didn’t come easy, said PVSC multi-media program coordinator (and Kearny resident) Chris Brooks, who outlined how the project came together at last week’s Kearny Board of Education meeting.
“In the 48 towns our agency serves, no one has anything like this,” he asserted.
Among the issues that came up – and which, he said, were successfully negotiated by a combination of PVSC restoration staff and the BOE’s plant operations supervisor Robert Elsmore and maintenance crew John Fearon and brother Brian – included maneuvering the PVSC’s heavy equipment through the school building to access the courtyard.
Doors were extended sufficiently wide to get an excavator through a side entrance and then 50 sheets of 3/4-inch plywood were laid down to protect the hallway floor and to minimize disruption of summer school classes, Brooks said.
Then came the task of beginning the conversion process by dismantling a 1,000 square foot macadam courtyard, partly by electronic saw and partly by hand. “We were in uncharted territory here,” he said. That was followed by digging out 15 yards of exposed dirt to create a depression for the rain garden.
Workers then installed 30 cubic yards of clean topsoil, 25 cubic yards of mulch and 10 cubic yards of stone for proper drainage for the rain garden where Lincoln’s newly formed 4H Club were busy – even during a week of 90-degree days – planting seeds.
They also assembled 10 wood planter boxes, with some designed for access by up to five physically impaired plus possibly senior citizens (if the garden is opened to the community) and several reserved for small children, with each box held together by gluing and pinning and then filled with soil.
To create access for the impaired, workers built and laid out 700 linear feet of boardwalk decking as a ramp for wheelchairs to navigate.
For the makeshift classroom, workers fashioned six benches made from trees recovered from the Passaic River and anchored by three cubic yards of concrete footings, along with a wood teacher’s podium.
Workers – with help from Lincoln’s newly formed 4H Club — planted three dogwood trees, a plum tree and hundreds of landscape plugs.
And the last piece was the arrival of the greenhouse, complete with stove bottom, anchored into the ground and positioned to get maximum sun exposure.
Total project cost, including materials and disposal, was $16,300, Brooks said.
The site, Brooks suggested, could also be an ideal spot for such activities as evening astronomy study or music performances.
A companion piece to the garden will be a new afterschool STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math) Club in which 20 Lincoln kids will engage in “WaterBotics,” building robots and maneuvering them under water.
“This really is what a 21st century class is all about,” said Schools Superintendent Patricia Blood. “More great things in Kearny schools.”
– Ron Leir
