On Friday March 28, KCD’s Riparian Stewardship team joined forces with 5th-12th grade students from Eastside Preparatory School in Kirkland to restore their campus creek’s riparian area. Over a hundred students and a dozen faculty volunteered to brave the rain and got muddy, planting 430 native trees and shrubs on the site! What’s more impressive was that this was a student led initiative to help beautify and restore their campus’ riparian area.
The president of the school’s Green Club led the project to restore Eastside’s streambank beginning in 2024. The first step of the project required removing a dense thicket of Himalayan blackberry that had invaded the streambank and prevented native plants from growing there. Eastside students and their parents then turned out in October to remove the invasive vegetation’s roots as part of KCD’s Orca Recovery Day. The student responsible for this restoration project got to see out her vision before her graduation this spring. She was among the students last Friday churning soil and laying roots of native plant species.
Eastside Prep’s students not only put in the hard work to restore their stream banks but many expressed a clear understanding of the project’s impacts for their stream’s ecology. Each year, Eastside Prep science students participate in a project in which they raise juvenile salmon in their classroom and release them into the campus creek. Students were excited that, in coming years, future class’s salmon will be released into a cooler, cleaner stream thanks to the riparian forest they planted. Some students expressed the hope that their class salmon may even return to that stream.
We commend Eastside Prep’s students and faculty’s commitment to stewarding the natural resources in their backyard. We can’t wait to see the forest that they planted grow into a fully functioning riparian ecosystem!
