By Kathleen Acuff
 Vicki Moore, who headed the project, demonstrates the bright blue pump that sends water flowing downhill through the artificial creekbed. |
One of the brightest spots at the renovated Oak Avenue School is the new creative play and educational garden between the rear classrooms and the sports field.
At the school’s grand reopening, held over the weekend, visitors toured new classrooms lit by a combination of automatically controlled natural and electric light, strolled through refreshing outdoor corridors and found the garden waiting in the rear.
The garden contains 29 trees and 400 varieties of other California native plants. Monarch butterflies already visit the milkweed, grasses, shrubs and other plants that will soon cover the hillside. Students returning to school today can play in the large sandpit at the foot of the hill and take turns on the spinner in the adjacent mulch-covered play area.
Plans for the garden include using it to help teach environmental science, math, English-language arts, nutrition, health, gardening and art.
Oak Principal Dave McNulty credits Vicki Moore with convincing the PTA to fund the demanding project. With $17,000 in seed money, so to speak, an additional $14,000 from a fund-raising event, and many donations from local businesses, Moore and her committee of volunteers got down to the manual labor of getting the garden off the ground this summer.
Last week, Moore pointed out that a full class can be seated around the amphitheater, which one day will be entirely hidden by a circle of evergreen trees.
Moore and other volunteers looking for inspiration visited local gardens and came away with the combination of grassland, chaparral, oak woodland and butterfly habitat they spent the summer planting. Oak parent volunteer Judy Schwarz, who interned as a garden designer at Yerba Buena Nursery in Woodside, designed Oak’s garden.
With her hands in the dirt last week, Schwarz said, “It all starts with the right plants - native plants, like bunch grasses, that insects are looking for.”
Moore described the garden as a learning habitat.
“All schools have land, but it’s not utilized to its potential,” she said. “We’ve made a connection to nature right here on the school grounds.”
