Juniors Bennett Balok and Rex Albiston started a new club called Tree Club. This new club’s focus is caring for the environment and cleaning up around the Stillwater area. The club’s advisor is environmental biology teacher Peter Stenross, they meet every Wednesday after school in Stenross’s room.
Tree Club is about much more than just trees, they talk and learn how to care for the environment too. Some of their plans for the future include cleaning up and growing fish in Brown’s Creek and even learning how to use the aquaponics table that we have here in the school.
“It’s to basically make our school more sustainable, that’s our initial goal,” Balok said.
“I’ve got six or seven kids interested in using the aquaponics table…where we take fish and use fish waste to grow leafy greens to eat,” Stenross added.
Balok and Stenross have massive plans for the future of Tree Club one of these plans is to go around the school and get recycled paper to reuse for their newest idea. They hope to get this idea started at the next meeting by having students go around the school looking for paper to use.
Stenross described their name for this idea as “Prairie plant paper…where we are going to take all the different colored paper from around the school and put native prairie plant seeds embedded into it so that then students can use sell them as birthday cards” and other things, marketing it as a way to help replant greens in Stillwater.
Tree Club was started around December. it was the mind child of one of its co-founders Balok who soon roped Albiston in to help his idea come to life. he came up with the want of starting a club right around the start of the year and had finally seen it come to life.
“I’ve wanted to start something like this for a long time now, and the environment is something that doesn’t have a lot of representation in clubs, and it is something I really care for so that’s what I chose,” Balok said.
So far Tree Club has only had one official meeting, in that meeting they talked about what Tree Club was really meant to be and they really set the groundwork for how this club will work in the future.
“In our first meeting, we had 20-25 kids show up, so a pretty good turnout for a first meeting we just talked a lot about the future of Tree Club,” Albiston said.
Currently, because of the frigid winter in Minnesota, it’s been hard for Tree Club hasn’t been able to meet as frequently as they would like to. But once it starts to warm up and the ground starts to thaw Tree Club will be in full force meeting inside and outside every week.
“In the spring another project students will be able to work on is the cleaning up and around the browns creek area,” Stenross said.
Tree Club has definitely started off on the right foot coming out as a huge hit. “Any students reading this, Tree Club is one of those clubs where you can start at any time you don’t have to be there from day one, so if you like to care for the environment and you have the time after school Tree Club is definitely the club for you!” Stenross said.