Our New Pond a collaboration for Grandview High School

Ponds can be permanent or temporary depending on their maintenance. At Grandview High School we have a courtyard that includes raised garden beds, trees, sculptures, benches and, of course, a pond. When our pond was constructed roughly 20 years ago, the vision of this pond was to have an outdoor learning environment where art classes could come to draw or English classes could come to write. However, our pond wasn’t kept up to its fullest potential.

This is where the Sustainable Living class stepped up to the table in order to renovate our pond to create the space that was intended for students to thrive in the environment around them. In Spring 2022, Robert Lowe of the Kansas City Water Garden Society came to visit our school to evaluate our pond that had fallen into disrepair. He took a look at what our pond needed and how we could perfect it.

At the start of this school year, the Sustainable Living 2 class placed the Courtyard pond as a top priority. On Oct. 3, Linda Harwood and Mr. Lowe came out to evaluate our pond for the second time.

They determined that our pond needed some serious work and decided to come back later that week to lead the rebuilding of our pond. With galoshes and waders on our sustainable living students, along with our teacher, Dana Bedwell, Lowe and Harwood got down into the pond and got to work. We all started pumping water out of the pond to clean out the muck and mire of the water garden.

This consisted of a lot of teamwork. We found out that the odor of stagnant water from our pond wasn’t very pleasant. After scooping out the duckweed and water lettuce by hand, we were able to rescue eight goldfish. Harwood took our fish to a rescue house so they could be reintroduced to our pond when it was cleaned and fixed.

There were a lot of issues surrounding the pond, including that one of the walls was about to collapse. On Oct. 17, we had a visit from Roye Dillion of Prestige One Landscaping and he quickly repaired the wall. Later that week, Lowe and Harwood returned to help us refill our pond and proceeded to release our original fish, with an addition of new koi fish, into our newly renovated pond.

In return for all of their much needed help, our class provided fresh salads from our raised beds to Harwood and Lowe. The salads included fresh lettuce, spinach, kale, beet greens, cilantro, tomatoes, mustard greens and arugula, all from our own garden.

Our pond renovation and harvest party was a collaborative effort from the Kansas City Water Garden Society, Prestige One Landscaping and the Kansas City Community Garden. We experienced a lot of difficulties with our pond earlier in the year, from it smelling very badly to all the duckweed sitting on top of it. With the gracious help of Robert Lowe and Linda Harwood our pond is well on its way to being a focal point in the Grandview High School Courtyard.