Housatonic students break ground on outdoor experiential learning facility

FALLS VILLAGE— Work has begun in earnest to install a “land lab” for the Agricultural Science and Technology Education department at the Housatonic Valley Regional High School, marking first step in realizing the fruition of a plan that has been well over a decade in the making.

On Monday, Sept. 22, droves of HVRHS students in the ASTE program visited the newly acquired, 2-acre plot of open field and grove-like woodland set just a half mile up Warren Turnpike past the school’s entrance. Up to 20 high schoolers at a time, including a number who labored the whole day, visited the property during their ASTE classes to assist in clearing a lightly forested section of a tangle of brush that has overtaken the understory.

The area is planned to be a native forest management area meant to teach students about the health and maintenance of an ecosystem, but the first step was to make it passable.

“It was a terrible mess,” explained Bruce Bennett, chairman of the ASTE advisory board. Just that morning, the area was an impenetrable “wall of vines and shrubs,” he said while gesturing at the now spacious expanse, partially shaded by a smattering of cigar trees, maples, white pines and cedars. Eventually, the property, which is owned by Eversource Energy but signed for use by the school, is planned to also host plots for horticultural learning and practice, landscape construction learning, a flower garden and shop, a farm-to-table garden, and other uses.

“All day the kids have been chipping, moving branches… ignoring us,” said Megan Gawel with a joking smile as she glanced at her son Michael, an HVRHS junior, who was moving roots and shrub debris with an excavator some hundred yards away.

Megan and her husband Mike run M&M Excavating out of Sheffield, Massachusetts, and had donated their time and equipment on Monday — plus an hour of brush mowing on Sunday — to help the project get up and running. In addition to the excavator, they had brought along a skid steer, a mulcher, brush mower, and a dump truck to move wood chips that will eventually surface an interpretive pathway through the educational woodland.

Along with their son, the family had been at it since 8 a.m., but Megan figured Michael wasn’t too upset about the change of curriculum — “he got a field trip today,” she said with a grin.

Both Megan and Mike are graduates of HVRHS and the ASTE program. Megan was an officer of the school’s FFA chapter, which she said taught her valuable skills that apply as much in meeting rooms as they do in the field.

ASTE students load cut vegetation into a wood chipper. The resulting material will be used to surface pathways throughout the natural forest zone of the property. Megan Gawel

Bennett said the land lab concept was designed to promote the type of hands-on learning that solidifies long-lasting and far-reaching knowledge and teaches real-world problem solving. “We’re trying to create a space where students can experience hands on examples of what they learn in the classroom,” he explained.

“They don’t know what it’s like to plant a row of tomatoes and have it get phytophthora disease.”

The agriculture and technology program, which is over 80 years old and one of only 21 curriculums of its kind in Connecticut, already reaches every student in the school when they take the Life Skills course as freshman, explained ASTE educator Sheri Lloyd, who was present at Monday’s inaugural landscaping project.

She said the new facilities will be a valuable asset to the program’s already formidable offerings, which include a farm-to-table kitchen, mechanics shop, animal care centers, greenhouse, and a forest laboratory. Essentially, it will help the program teach students how to be “informed stewards” of the land, Lloyd explained.

Even on the land lab’s unofficial first day in action, the students are already gaining valuable experience. One student in the ASTE department spent the day cutting problematic trees and branches with a chainsaw – certified by the program, of course. He’s already aspiring to be an arborist, which are “much needed” in Connecticut, said Bennett.

The next step for the property is to seed the forest floor that Monday’s undergrowth exorcism had left bare. This process will be handled by Matt Schwaikert, longtime ASTE advisory board member and graduate of the program himself.

He emphasized that the loyalty of ASTE graduates is its strength. “That’s the best part of this community — always available to help.”

HVRHS Principal Ian Strever came to admire the progress as Mike and Michael cleared the last of the woody debris from the forest floor. “It just adds to what is already a beautiful campus,” he observed.

“This would be impossible without the volunteers,” he said, glancing around at the soil-stained laborers.