beautifytounify

This year, the United Jr/Sr High School's Volunteer Service Club was recognized as a State Farm Good Neighbor Service-Learning Award winner. The 'Beautify to Unify' project involves improving the landscapes of the median strip in the school parking lot, and a couple of local parks. As a service-learning project, this will involve the creativity of students in Adult Living Environments class, who will develop the landscape designs for the project.

United community members, as well as area community leaders and local, state and national political leaders are invited to attend the Dedication Ceremony, which will be held on Sunday April 23, 2006 at 1:00 p.m. in conjunction with National and Global Youth Service Day. A big note of 'thanks' goes out to State Farm, and Youth Service of America for coordinating these grants.

A journal of the activities are listed below.

March 13-28:

Students learn about basic landscaping concepts in class with Mrs. Bingman. They use a computer software program to landscape the area around a house of their choosing.

March 29:

Mr. Bingman meets with the Living Environments class. Students in the class measure the median in the high school parking lot. Mr. Bingman makes suggestions as to how they can design the landscape.

The "Before" picture of the median.	Inspecting the median.
Measuring the median	Mr. Bingman teaching outside ...
and inside the classroom.

March 30:

Mrs. Bingman meets with Mr. Lucas, the Industrial Arts teacher at Yorkwood High School, to dicuss having his students build a pergola for the landscape. Since Yorkwood is making plans to join the United District in 2007, this is a great way to start bringing the two districts together.

April 2:

Mr. and Mrs. Bingman purchase the lumber needed to build the pergola.

April 3:

Student groups in Mrs. Bingman's class begin making landscape designs. Items chosen are based on a price sheet given to them by Mrs. Bingman. Discussion of climate zone, amount of sun, etc. has been discussed in last months classes. Dimensions for pergola are marked off and staked in the median.

April 4:

Mr. Lucas and Yorkwood students in the Industrial Arts program came over to the high school to begin building the pergola.

Mr. Lucas and students discuss plans for construction.	Once they get all of the details, the crew is ready to begin.
The ground is measured...	...and work begins
The posts are put in place...	...and are secured with a little help from concrete.

April 4

Living Environments students begin constructing their landscape designs.

April 5-12:

Living Environments students continue working on their landscape designs. The finished designs will be judged by the Volunteer Service Club members after Easter break.

April 12:

Mr. Lucas and the Industrial Arts students return to put the finishing touches on the pergola. It sure looks great!

April 18:

Volunteer Service Club members meet to choose a landscape design. They realize that there are certain features of each of the designs that they like. It is decided that the final landscape design will incorporate some features from each sketch.