Students at Ecole Pauline Johnson in West Vancouver are getting ready to celebrate the grand opening of an outdoor learning space and community park this Friday, despite an 11th hour setback from vandals.
The outdoor park area at the school is the culmination of five years of volunteer efforts to create a wetland area, bird sanctuary, community garden and outdoor classroom.
“It’s a huge cornerstone and a coming together place” for the community, said Tara Zielinski, principal at Pauline Johnson.
The outdoor space also ties into new emphasis on environmental stewardship that is part of B.C.’s new education curriculum.
“They’re able to actually live it as well as learning about it through a textbook,” she said.
But in the run-up to the grand opening this Friday, students found themselves on the receiving end of some other difficult lessons after vandals uprooted more than 100 plants from the garden.
Victoria Mendes, one of the volunteer co-ordinators of the project, said she arrived early at the school last Wednesday to tidy up the gardens before a tour with West Vancouver MP Pam Goldsmith-Jones.
She noticed a few plants out of place in the pond. “I thought ‘This is odd,’” she said.
Closer inspection showed “there were plants strewn everywhere,” she said, from native berry species to grasses. In some areas, plants that had been planted just the day before had been dug up and tossed aside.
Mendes said the damage was “very disappointing. It was a significant amount of plants.”
Luckily, most of the plants were salvageable. So school district staff and volunteers set about replanting them in time for Friday’s community celebration.
Const. Jeff Palmer of the West Vancouver Police Department said police don’t have any suspects or likely motives so far. “Mischief offences can tend to spike at this time of year,” with warm weather and longer hours of daylight, he said.
Mendes said parent volunteers are determined the damage won’t slow them down. “When you put together a project of this magnitude you have setbacks. It’s too bad this happened. … The only thing we can do is fix it and get ready for our opening on June 2,” she said. “We want people to take ownership. We want to make sure people take care of it and enjoy it.”
Zielinkski said learning from the land and respect for the land is a key part of the message students receive as part of environmental education. She’s asked students to take that message to heart, as the replanting has continued in the outdoor area over the past week. “We’re all ambassadors and we take great pride in it,” she said. “Even when other people may not be able to demonstrate that.”
The grand opening this Friday will include a traditional Squamish Nation blessing at 2 p.m.
