Earth Day

Every year in late April Evergreen hosts an Earth Day event which engages students in a wide array of service and learning opportunities. This day is accompanied by a Plant Sale whose profits benefit our Environmental Education program.

Earth Day is carefully curated by our resident Environmental Education teacher, Joéle Emma, to be a meaningful and exciting event for our students that centers positive, actionable solutions, service, and exciting, creative endeavors. 

Over the years Evergreen has installed several bioswales to aid in directing stormwater, and managing the runoff of flood water and pollutants from our campus to neighboring Haw Creek (and everything downstream). Part of Earth Day each year is making sure that we remain good water stewards by ensuring these rain gardens are healthy and effective.

Students will also learn the importance of caring for our immediate environment by engaging in developmentally appropriate campus maintenance projects that care for and enrich our school environment, like:

  • Scrubbing recycling bins

  • Garden work

  • Trail maintenance

  • Mulching

  • 1st graders are releasing worms into our garden

Students will be learning from guest presenters and leading lessons themselves. Some of our guests include:

  • Joy Neely (former Evergreen teacher) will be teaching the do's and don'ts of living closely with bears

  • Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy will teach about protected lands

  • Warren Wilson - herbalism 

  • TAASC - Wilderness first aid

  • Ecoforesters - the regrowth of a forest

  • Jason Carter from Science House - Who Dirtied the Water, a look at water pollution

  • Fourth graders are leading a bird program

  • WNC Arboretum - how to get involved in the ecoEXPLORE program and the opportunities to contribute to crowd-based science

Joéle is also launching, quite literally, another exciting project this year. With the help of our Technology Teacher, Kevin, we will be utilizing a drone to map our campus’ tree canopy. Over the next few years students will be researching our campus’ canopy to study ‘Crown Shyness’, an interesting phenomena that students will be poised to observe, map, and theorize upon in EE classes in the coming years. You can learn more about Crown Shyness here.

There will also be fun activities like face painting and of course we’ll break out the Smoothie Bike, a middle schooler-powered snack station!

Each year we also host a Plant Sale. Seeds are germinated and nurtured by some of our classrooms, and other planters provided by First Step Farm. We welcome the community to come shop the Plant Sale in support of our school’s environmental mission and a greener planet.

Students will be making nature prints, available to take home for a sliding scale donation starting at $5.

There will be a Worm Composting System up for RAFFLE for all your composting needs.

Thank you to our friends at Asheville Greenworks for providing a tool trailer for the day. Thank you also to the US Fish and Wildlife Service for providing native plants that we will be installing around campus to enrich our campus’ habitat!