Building Access for Everyone

New Mexican students engaging directly with their communities

By: Brad Jeffrey

The Service Learning Program (SLP) at Cottonwood Gulch puts students from Albuquerque in the driver’s seat of environmental stewardship projects going on right in their backyard. Students learn from local experts, right at the field site, to learn, explore, collect scientific data, take action through restoration or remediation, and inform the community. It’s a chance to learn and apply interdisciplinary subjects like the Earth sciences, local history and culture, and technical skills like using a wheel barrow. For 9th-graders at Technology Leadership and ACE Leadership high schools, it’s also a chance to get to know classmates, get instant access to large outdoor spaces, have fun, and help build community in their school while strengthening the communities where we live. We meet weekly, hopping to different projects around town, meeting local experts, returning to sites to track progress, and tying it all together into a unified theme of environmental stewardship.

Students are helping to restore an old ranch into riparian forest, or what we call ‘the Bosque’ along the Rio Grande, with the City of Albuquerque (CABQ) Open Space and Rio Grande Return at the Candelaria Nature Preserve. To do this, we are removing invasive plants, planting native vegetation, and building acequias (irrigation ditches) to water the plants. We helped put the finishing landscaping touches for the public opening of Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge, and returned to plant trees with Rio Grande Return and Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps. We met scientists from the Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Program to collect data including leaf-fall, rain, and depth to the water table, to see how restoration projects are informed by science. We harvested and helped maintain the grape, apple, and pecan orchards of the Bachechi Education Center and Gutiérrez Hubbell House with Bernalillo County. At Route 66 Open Space, we are helping to build trail, including erosion control ditches, with CABQ Open Space as part of a proposed project to link Albuquerque to Tijeras with an educational trail along Tijeras Creek. We’re also helping to build the first trail at the Visitor Center at Petroglyph National Monument with former Gulch staff, now Ranger Ben Holt, to help easily connect visitors with thousands of petroglyphs!

It has been an exciting ride, and the feedback and smiles on students’ faces suggest they genuinely appreciate the adventure. We sincerely thank our school and community partners who helped make this program a resounding success!

By: Clara Bewley