Randolph collaborates on project to plant garden at local high school

For the second year in a row, Randolph College students, faculty, and staff have teamed up with local students to install a garden at their school. 

They planted the first seeds of the garden at E.C. Glass High School on April 17 and 18 alongside students and staff at the University of Lynchburg,  Lynchburg City Schools, the City of Lynchburg, and the Virginia Department of Forestry (VDOF).

The VDOF has provided $20,000 of funding, funneled through the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, for the project, which follows a similar one at R.S. Payne Elementary School last year. 

Randolph professor Karin Warren and UofL professor Laura Henry-Stone led the design and implementation process, and Jarad Walker ’27 propagated ground cover herbs and flowers in Randolph’s environmental science lab ahead of the planting day. 

Jarad Walker ’27 propagated ground cover herbs and flowers in Randolph’s environmental science lab ahead of the planting day.

E.C. Glass students’ participation was coordinated by Jessica McIntosh ’16, ’20 MAT. 

These garden projects grew out of the collaborative work of Warren, Henry-Stone, and Lisa Powell, their colleague at Sweet Briar College, on urban heat islands and climate resilience. 

In 2021, they led students in the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges’ (VFIC) Heat Watch Project, surveying temperatures in Lynchburg and identifying neighborhoods that had higher temperatures than others.

Those areas are known as urban heat islands, and R.S. Payne, where the first garden was planted, is in the center of one. 

The garden planted at R.S. Payne is now being used as a model that can be replicated at other schools like E.C. Glass while addressing climate and food resilience issues within the city.