Instead of spending the day sleeping in, students, teachers, school faculty members, and even Santa Maria-Bonita School District superintendent Phil Alvarado spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day planting 80 trees at Arellanes Junior High School.
When George Jimenez’s daughter started attending Arellanes, he noticed that there weren’t any trees at the school. That’s when the situation led to Ken Knight applying for a grant to bring trees to the school.
According to the grant application, Knight had intended to “provide a more enriched atmosphere for the students to attend school and learn about the environment around them as well as lower the school’s energy costs by providing shade.”
Goleta Valley Beautiful, an organization offering tree-planting expertise, received $9,000 for the project.
“I did nothing,” Arellanes Junior High School principal Patty Grady said. “I just provided the help.”
Most of the help was from the junior high school students, Grady added. There were also cheerleaders from Santa Maria High School, and some of them were alumni of the junior high school. The cheerleaders were brought in by Martha Chavez, who had also gone throughout Tanglewood neighborhoods with flyers to bring in more volunteers for the tree planting.
“This is hard work,” one of the cheerleaders exclaimed while prepping holes for the trees.
Knight joked back: “If it was easy, we would have some of the elementary kids here.”
Grady hopes that this will be the start of a trend for volunteering at the school on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
This article appears in Jan 20-27, 2011.