Dear Pollinators,

Please visit us in the pollinator garden we built for you at our school this year! We provided nectar and host plants, in addition to a supply of water, so you can get what you need to do your important job of pollinating.

Former First Lady Ms. Rosalynn Carter donated funding for our garden. She has this title because she is married to Mr. Jimmy Carter; he is the only U.S. president from Georgia. The Carters still live in our state and continue to do good things like give us a grant for our garden.

We were lucky enough to spend an hour every day this school year studying all about the benefits you pollinators do for us, including the super-important job of helping produce fruit, vegetables and nuts. We also studied the life cycle of a butterfly, called metamorphosis, and learned the importance of native plants. We were sad when we studied about colony collapse disorder for honey bees and the decline in the numbers of migrating monarch butterflies. We are happy, though, because we built this beautiful garden to help out with those two problems, and we promise to always be advocates for you pollinators wherever we go in life.  

We were also lucky this year because Mr. Chris McDowell, a landscape architect with UGA’s College of Environment and Design, helped us with our garden from beginning to end. He merged our garden designs with his to create the blueprint for our pollinator habitat. Next, he helped us with our math as we laid out the garden and marked it with flags.

We had many other helpers, too. Ms. Brendan Nordgren, for example, serves as Coile Middle School’s AmeriCorps VISTA member specializing in school gardens and has been with us for the whole adventure. We had help from many friends at UGA, too. In October, Mr. Josh Podvin from the Office of Service Learning organized a giant garden work day with volunteers from UGA Public Service and Outreach to help us plant our garden. Then, in the spring, Mr. Kevin Kirche from Sustainable UGA organized another big volunteer work day. Also, Mr. Paul Duncan from UGA’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute donated seeds and plants from their ethnobotanical garden.

Experts came to our class, too, to teach us more about you pollinators. We had a visit from a passionate pollinator person, Ms. Anne Shenk, who is the director of education at the State Botanical Gardens in Athens. Plus, we had a visit from Athens-Clarke County’s Ms. Ania Truszczynski, who helped us build a rain barrel for our garden and taught us ways to reduce our storm water runoff. In January, Ms. Stacy Smith with Keep Athens-Clarke County Beautiful visited and helped us prepare our native milkweed seeds through cold stratification to make the seeds ready for spring planting.

News of our garden spread, and we gave tours of our gardens to lots of visitors, including the mayor of Winterville, Mr. Dodd Ferrelle, and Mr. Greg Davis, our school board representative. We also gave a tour to Ms. Susan Meyers from Monarchs Across Georgia and Ms. Deborah Harris with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Last Friday, we hosted a garden celebration and gave tours to Dr. Paul Boumbulian, Ms. Tina Tinsley and Mr. Danny Bivins.

We are thankful that our principal, Mr. Dwight Manzy, allowed us and encouraged us to do this learning journey. We wrote lots about our garden in the form of nonfiction, fiction and poetry. We created art for our garden, and we even created a scary movie called Pollinators in Crisis!

Many of the lessons learned we will never forget, such as the importance of having access to clean water. Our garden is located between our pavilion and our soccer field, far away from a water source. We learned the importance of water conservation since we carried water a long distance many days. We hope to have some water closer to our garden in the future.

Speaking of the future, we hope to see you pollinators soon in our garden. We have everything you need. Plus, we are excited that we get to enjoy our garden for two more years before we move on to high school.

Sincerely,
The Pollinator Squad with Ms. Kelli Bivins
6th Grade ESOL Students
W.R. Coile Middle School