After almost a decade of having no trees other than palms in the campus plaza, Tree San Diego, a nonprofit organization that focuses on improving urban forests, has been enlisted to lead a team of Westview staff and parents to devise a plan to bring trees back to campus.
In early fall, Meha Senthil, Erin Stefanick, Jenell Bukky Lanski, and Dayna Snow, parents of current Westview students, visited campus in search of ways to improve it. When the group looked around, they noticed there was barely any shade.
“Westview is a huge shade desert,” Senthil said. “We visited most of the other high schools in Poway Unified and realized that wherever there are tees or shade is where kids tend to congregate.”
After doing some research, Senthil found out that having more shade at Westview would help in reducing harmful UV exposure, improving student health. Because of this, Senthil and her team decided to pursue solutions with Principal Ernie Remillard and other Westview staff.
“The initial thinking was ‘How do we add some shade structures potentially at the end of the buildings of the plaza to provide shade?’” Remillard said. “[A lot of] students are sitting tightly along the hallways at lunchtime.”
This isn’t the first conversation Remillard’s had about Westview’s limited shade. According to him, one of the biggest concerns within the Poway Unified School District is the lack of outdoor shade on school campuses.
“I am grateful for our staff who open up their doors and allow students to eat in their rooms at lunch,” Remillard said. “I’m also well aware [that lunch is] a duty-free time for our teachers who don’t have to open up their rooms. But they are opening their rooms because we don’t have the number of seats outside at the lunch tables to fit all 2,200 students.”
Remillard said that building new shade structures at Westview would not only be expensive but would also require state approval as it’d be considered a major construction process. Trees, on the other hand, would be more cost-friendly and could be planted without the need for state approval.
Because of this, Senthil and her team started a program called trees@WV that’s dedicated to bringing trees to Westview’s campus. They have partnered with Tree San Diego, a nonprofit organization that focuses on improving San Diego’s urban forests, to bring their vision to life.
According to Senthil, bringing trees to Westview will not only help provide students with more shade but will also improve mental health.
While researching, Senthil found a paper that said that exposure to natural settings could enhance positive moods, as well as reduce psychological and physiological stress (Li, Deal, Zhou, Slavenas, Sullivan (2018)).
“When [students] are fatigued, the places that give you the most relief from your mental fatigue [are] the ones with trees and shrubs,” Senthil said. “There is also research that shows for high-schoolers, not just any kids, being in spaces with trees and shrubs [has] a positive relationship with graduation rates, [and] GPAs increasing.”
Arborist Kurt Peacock and staff member Taylor Vivona from Tree San Diego visited campus, Dec. 4, and determined that rather than using the metal grate planters that are scattered around campus, it would be more healthy for the trees to be planted on the grassy slopes in the quad.
“The biggest issue with planting the trees [in the metal planters] is the lack of irrigation,” Vivona said. “There’d have to be a lot of concrete that was dug up to put an irrigation system in there because ideally, and almost always, we want to have some sort of automatic watering system [because] people can commit to watering things by hand, but sometimes life gets in the way. To give them the best chance at success, we want to have some sort of automatic irrigation system.”
Tree San Diego plans to plant 10-12 trees on campus, relying on the already installed automatic sprinkling systems to water them.
According to Vivona, although the species of trees is yet to be determined, Tree San Diego is aiming to bring in trees that require minimal watering and provide lots of shade. Since young trees tend to require frequent watering, the nonprofit plans on planting slightly more developed trees.
“They’re sturdy enough and they can grow without a nursery stake,” Vivona said. “They’ll still be staked, but they’ll require a little less frequent watering [which] might be more in tune with [Westview’s] watering schedule.”
With all this planning going into planting trees at Westview, Tree San Diego and trees@WV hope that the new trees will become a project that endures.
“One of the things Tree San Diego says [is that] trees should last 50, 60, 70 years– they have a longer lifespan than we do,” Senthil said. “We want to have trees and we want them to thrive. We also want to educate all 2,000 students about trees and their benefits. [Trees] do a lot for us. We want all of the community around Westview to learn about what we’re doing, learn about trees, and, as a side-effect, become tree lovers themselves.”
