Starting With River Hill, Rain Gardens at Howard County High Schools to Help Clean Up Chesapeake Bay Watershed

Anytime it snows or rains, the mud gets tracked through an entrance at River Hill High School in Clarksville, creating not only a mess but contributing to a problem of water runoff. With the help of a non-profit group, architects and landscapers, a group of student volunteers is determined to clean it up.

The project at the blue ribbon school involves the development of a “rain garden” and could serve as a model for other schools in the area.

In late February, teenagers from Howard County met with professional architects and engineers from the Green Building Institute (GBI), based in Jessup, and drew up plans for the rain garden at River Hill that will soak up the water and filter it naturally, before it enters the ground water table and eventually the Chesapeake Bay.

The program is called Youth ECo – short for Youth Environmental Coalition – and it’s part of an initiative to keep kids and young adults interested in biology and the ecosystems in Howard County and Maryland.

“We’re forming a template,” said Heather Szymanski, executive director of GBI, “so we can plug this into [other] schools and help them.”

Ecologists describe rain gardens as bioretention areas — manmade plots that use natural plantings and drainage to collect excess rainwater that builds up from poor drainage around buildings, roofs and parking lots. The gardens serve as natural filters and keep the run-off from polluting waterways and causing erosion.

Wild celery, redhead grass and Maryland’s Black-eyed Susan are just a few of the plants that might go into the rain garden at River Hill.  At their next meeting, March 30, students will choose the final project from three designs they drafted in February.

With a grant from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, as well as materials and manpower from Capitol Greenroofs, the rain garden will be installed around Earth Day, April 22.

Stan Sersen, president of GBI and founder of Youth ECo, said the group’s plan is to one day have a rain garden at every school within the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

“After the first rain garden is installed, we'll duplicate the paperwork and the process and begin working on other high schools,” said Michelle Chang, a senior at Centennial High School in Ellicott City, and the student representative at GBI for Youth ECo.

Chang says the group plans to expand its work to Wilde Lake and Centennial when the work at River Hill is complete.

According to the Chesapeake Bay Program, more than 16.6 million people live in the bay’s watershed, which reaches parts of six states –Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York and Washington, D.C.

Szymanski says students are growing up with environmental awareness engrained in their day-to-day lives and groups like Youth ECo give them an opportunity to show what they know and get their hands dirty.

“The kids are starting to get it,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘Hey we can actually help capture this stuff.’

“Particularly, in places like schools, where you have a lot of flat top areas, you’ll get stormwater runoff and silt [eventually] going into the bay and killing all of the crabs…  and they’re part of our identity here in Maryland.”

Mary Jane Sasser is a research teacher in the gifted-and-talented program at River Hill, and she has worked with students in Youth ECo since 2009. “This is a unique opportunity because of the expertise of the professionals at the Green Building Institute,” she said.

“The kids will love it because the location of the rain garden will solve a muddy track that they walk through,” she added. “It’s an amazing gift and an example of what the possibilities are for all of us.”