Putting Down Roots: How My Students Turned Flood Damage into Climate Action

By Janis Boulbol, Food & Forest Systems Teacher, Woodstock Union Middle High School

Two years ago, I watched our school fields flood way higher than anyone anticipated. The damage was significant, and I kept thinking about that bare strip along our riverbank where nothing was planted. We had this glaring area of need right on our campus, and I knew my Food & Forest Systems students could affect some real change by putting some roots down.

I really like to engage students in place-based community solutions that can actually impact climate change. Too much environmental education gets stuck in the doom and gloom cycle, but these kids needed to see they have capacity and control to make a difference. When we looked at our riparian zone through a systems thinking lens, the solution became obvious: restore what flooding had damaged.

My 14 students, a mixed group from freshmen to juniors, mapped out a 192-foot by 17-foot restoration area. We partnered with ECAP (the Equitable Climate Action Partnership), which provided $1,700 for soil, native plants, and wood chips, plus connected us with expert support. The kids learned to identify individual species, then we actually went to the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park to dig up white oak and choke cherry saplings.

Here's what surprised me: they were completely gung ho about everything, even planting in cold rain and mud. I expected some grumbling, but once they got out there, they were all hands on deck. One student told me she learned "how hardy a lot of these plants are, because this is not a very nice area to grow, but they're growing." Another discovered that "the roots in some of these plants would stop the chemicals from getting in the river."

The systems thinking piece really clicked when students started connecting what they were doing to bigger concepts. One reflected that she learned "how to apply the inner workings of a system to my own personal life." That's when you know the learning is real—when kids can take that thinking and use it somewhere else.

At our Science Symposium, I watched my students explain their work to younger kids, and they had to put it on their level, not in some heady scientific way. Seeing them become teachers and leaders in that moment—that's what this type of learning does. It builds relationships, creates genuine ownership, and gives kids something they can carry with them.

The project takes effort on the teacher's part, no doubt about it. But ECAP's support structure makes it totally doable. Having expert topic champions come into your classroom, access to funding, and a celebration of learning that gives kids a real audience changes everything.

When you do something with your whole physical body, not just your head or hands, it's something you don't leave behind. My students are already talking about coming back in a year or two to see how their work has grown. They know they can replicate this somewhere else if they see the need. That's the kind of learning that actually sticks.

For more information, contact janis.boulbol@mtnviews.org at Woodstock Union Middle High School in Woodstock, VT, or the Equitable Climate Action Project at bit.ly/hopefulstories.