NFCCA

Stories from the NFCCA Newsletter, the “Northwood News”

Northwood News ♦ February 2010

Northwood Students Clean-Up Over Five Tons of Trash

On a Sunday in November, almost 60 volunteers worked three hours to remove trash from 15 acres of Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA) land adjacent to Northwood High School.  The property clean-up was the first step in an eight-month project which includes building a nature interpretive trail — to be called the “Northwood Chesapeake Bay Trail” — to educate students and the community about human impacts on the Bay and actions we all can take to improve its health.

Sorry, folks, this doesn’t count as “woody debris.”  This is trash and, what’s worse, probably dumped by folks in our own neighborhood.

Funding for the project came from a $7,500 Community Outreach and Awareness grant awarded by The Chesapeake Bay Trust to the Technology, Environmental, and Systems Sciences Academy at Northwood High School and the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC).  (NHS has had a partnership with PATC for the past three years; PATC funds an environmental education class in the Academy through grants.)

The clean-up of the property adjacent to Northwood on Sunday, 22 November 2009, removed 10,580 pounds of trash, including such items as lawn mowers, bikes, sinks, broken car windshields, construction debris, and jugs of used automotive oil, among other items.  Seventy-five percent of the volunteers were students from Northwood High School and two feeder middle schools.

The Maryland State Highway Administration bought those 15 acres adjacent to Northwood for constructing Maryland Route 193.  But plans changed and the property was not used.  It stayed mostly unmaintained for years, which enabled people to dump household and automotive items on it.  The property is now considered a valuable wooded corridor for animals and a deciduous ecosystem buffer zone for both Sligo Creek and the Northwest Branch (which are both part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed).  The trashed property has been harming wildlife and polluting the soil and a large vernal pool that directly feeds into Northwest Branch, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay.

Last spring, under pressure from citizens, the SHA set aside the 15 acres for environmental protection.  Eventually, the SHA will relinquish management to the Department of Natural Resources.

Through a memorandum of understanding, PATC and Northwood High School — with help from both the Friends of Sligo Creek and Neighbors of Northwest Branch — will build a nature interpretive trail, connecting it to the Northwest Branch Trail in Northwest Branch Park, and restore a mowed zone into a native plant meadow.  Through these actions, the organizations will educate students and neighbors about their impact on the watershed and actions they can implement to improve the health of the watershed and Bay.

Please feel free to talk with any of the point of contacts for each partner:

   © 2010 NFCCA  [Source: https://nfcca.org/news/nn201002e.html]