Huntington Beach school’s ‘Green Team’ continues to blossom
Fictional movie character Joe Dirt once said, “Life’s a garden, dig it.”
Huntington Beach resident Daya Oyarzabal has a similar philosophy.
The Green Team that Oyarzabal launched two years ago at Kinetic Academy West, a public TK to fifth-grade charter school in Huntington Beach, is stronger than ever.
There are now five custom raised garden beds on campus, some containing butterfly gardens and some vegetable gardens. The fifth bed, which debuted last week, will be dedicated for use by the teaching staff.
Oyarzabal had 14 Kinetic Academy West students come out Friday to volunteer filling the beds with soil, adding sweet potatoes to the vegetable garden and cleaning up fallen leaves around the garden beds. Several of them put their handprints in paint on the side of the new bed.
Of course, it’s a team effort. Kinetic fifth-grade teacher Julie Rierson, who gardens herself at home, brought some sweet potatoes to school for the kids to plant.
Rierson has a team of fifth-graders that typically comes out on Fridays to help Oyarzabal with the garden, which also includes two donated industrial planters and a garden shelf. Vermiculture compost bins sit in the corner of the garden area.
“It’s just so fun to get to see them learning and to see them be interested in it,” Rierson said. “And it’s nice to see something other than concrete out here.”
Oyarzabal, whose fourth-grade son Salvador is a student at the school, said she has raised all the money to keep the garden going herself. She applied for mini-grants through a Jane Goodall Institute children’s program called Roots & Shoots.
Members of the Huntington Harbour Garden Club have also made private donations, she said. Oyarzabal met the club president while working at her job at Trader Joe’s in Huntington Harbour.
“I’m not part of the staff, I’m not getting paid,” she said. “But boy, do I love organizing all of this stuff for all of these kids.”
Oyarzabal recently made an Instagram page, @greenteam_inspirations, to highlight the work. Not including Kinetic Academy in the handle is intentional, she said, because she hopes to inspire other schools to start Green Teams.
In addition to the garden work, Oyarzabal also sets up beach or park cleanups on Saturday mornings. That’s a win-win for the Kinetic Academy students, who are required to do 10 hours of community service each year, school Principal Tricia Gallagher said.
“Daya’s extraordinary, and we’re happy to have her,” Gallagher said of Oyarzabal. “She’s a rock star.”
Katie Milano, the school’s physical education teacher who is better known as simply “Coach,” spends a lot of her time outdoors. She sees the effect that the garden has on the school’s students.
“I see them interact with it all the time, even if it’s just to look at it,” Milano said. “They don’t necessarily harvest all the time, but even when they walk by, they say, ‘Oh, there’s a butterfly, there’s a bug, there’s worms.’ It stops them and kind of distracts them a little bit from their day, which is cool.”
Over the summer, Milano helped a group of Kinetic Academy West students make caprese salad bites. She purchased the mozzarella and balsamic, but the basil and tomatoes used were from the garden.
Milano said she used a mandolin to slice the little cherry tomatoes, making sure there was a bite for everyone. Some of the students didn’t want to try them, but the majority did.
“Especially as a P.E. teacher, it’s cool to see them exposed to fruits and vegetables and things that they often wouldn’t be supplied with,” she said. “They grew it themselves, they tried it and they enjoyed it.”
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