Plant a tree, help the future grow on campus
Last week the Lower Colorado River Authority brought a trailer with 20 saplings to help landscape the campus, which is undergoing a $15 million upgrade thanks to a November 2006 bond issue approved by voters.
Though construction continues at the campus, district officials are rightly enthusiastic about the donation of trees from the water and power company because it will make the bare grounds look better.
There is no doubt trees are really going to help the campus.
The students and an LCRA official unloaded four different species of trees — bur oak, Monterey oak, Texas red bud and crepe myrtle, all part of a conscious effort to promote bio-diversity.
The two oak species are members of the white oak family, which has greater resistance to oak-wilt disease than many local oak varieties.
As to aesthetics, when the trees bloom, the crepe myrtle and Texas red bud will also offer a nice splash of color to the campus.
The LCRA conservation services is behind the donation. Officials have handed over trees to communities, schools and nonprofit organizations across the utility’s service region.
The one rule to follow? The trees must be planted in a place the public can see or walk through.
What a gift these students have given to the community.
The Apache Foundation provides the trees. It is a philanthropic arm of the Apache Corp., an independent gas and oil company. For the last two years, the foundation has provided almost 300,000 trees to be planted in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Wyoming.
The foundation wants to ultimately help plant 1 million trees.
To their credit, the students at the middle school are part of that eco-friendly initiative.
While adults often worry about youngsters spending too much time obsessing over e-mail, texting, MySpace, peer pressure, clothes, dates and makeup, it is reassuring to know there are some pupils who still care about the environment and the world around them.
Credit also goes to the teachers who support the pupils’ work to plant and nurture the trees.
Fifty years from now, when many of the students who planted those trees are old and gray, they can still take comfort in the knowledge they created a legacy that spans decades.
One can only hope the students of the future, sliding through the air on hoverboards to rest under those now-mature trees, might take a moment to recall their forebears and their environmental diligence, which created the shade they now enjoy as they call up their homework on a holographic pad displaying a teaching robot.
When you plant a tree, you plant a seed that helps the future grow.