East High School Nature Club
If you were a student at East High School from the spring of 2022 to spring of 2024 then you probably heard about the East High School Garden Club.
Garden Club was created in the spring of 2022 by East High school science teacher Owen Hernandez and East High school students Hai Htoo, Zoey Reaves, and Elliot Rincon who are all seniors now. The reason for Hernandez wanting to start the club was to bring students together in a non-academic way.
“I like to be outside and getting to hang out with students outside of class to get to know them,” Hernandez said.
Then on Sept. 11, 2023, Hernandez had to step down from running garden club to go on maternity leave and East sign language interpreter Kenneth Padilla took over as the sponsor for garden because he was a part of one at Goodrell Middle School and wanted to start one at East.
“I don’t know how Hernandez found out that I was interested, but I had been looking to do Garden Club anyways,” Padilla said.
Then Garden Club took a little break during the first semester of the 2024-2025 school year because of not having an adult that could watch over the students when they would meet.
“We don’t have Gardening Club because there is no teacher to monitor the participants of the club,” senior Zoey Reaves said.
Then Garden Club came back in second semester with some changes. The main change being a change to the name from gardening club to nature club. The main reason for changing the name is to give the club more activities to do when they meet that fits with the name of the club.
“It should be called Nature Club instead so we could widen our activities,” Hernandez said.
Some of the activities that happen during the meets are making terrariums, planting flowers around the school, and trying to grow fruits and vegetables like tomatoes and watermelon. The thing about trying to grow crops during the school year is that most of the time they meet during the cold months, so they cannot be outside gardening throughout most of the school year.
“I loved Garden Club, but I felt like it was hard to do garden activities because we were meeting most of the time during the winter,” Padilla said.
To help with the problem of it being cold outside, the activities would change so that they can do more activities indoors like making posters, playing games, making paper, and building plant beds being some of the things they did in the past to help build the community even when they could not go outside.
“We built plant beds, played games, planted plants in the courtyards, and tried to add more pollinators to help the environment,” senior Elliot Rincon said.
If you are interested in joining or just visiting to see what nature club is about, they meet every Friday after school in room 3069M. It is a very welcoming community, and you don’t need to do anything to join other then you showing up and participating in the activity that they are doing that week.
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