San Marcos High School students work to beautify campus

A group of San Marcos High School students are working to beautify the campus.

Students from the high school’s Phoenix Program — an ancillary program that serves students who need non-traditional instruction in order to achieve success — spent Thursday morning gardening. The students placed plants in front of the school in coordination with the San Marcos Discovery Center to help the city become a Monarch Butterfly Champion City.

“We’ve been volunteering with the San Marcos Discovery Center — this is our sixth year — and we usually do projects away from campus but this year we decided to do a beautification here,” said Emily Madeley, a teacher at the high school. “Because the Discovery Center got a mini grant for all the plants all these plants are donated by the Discovery Center. (San Marcos is) trying to be a champion city, which means champion city for monarch butterflies, and there’s only two cities in the country, which is San Antonio and McAllen. So we have to do certain things like make monarch gardens usually in public places.”

San Marcos High School students work on the garden in front of the high school. 

San Marcos High School senior Daniel Luna said working in the monarch garden has been a good way to help the school community.

“I feel like it’s healing also,” Luna said. “Plants are living creatures so it’s like you’re planting your own child.”

San Marcos High School Students work on the monarch garden in front of the campus. The school is working in partnership with the San Marcos Discovery Center to help the city become a Monarch Butterfly Champion City.

Madeley said previous projects the Phoenix Program has worked on includes helping with the Aquatic Resource Center and helping create a monarch garden at San Marcos Consolidated ISD’s Lamar campus.

“We started volunteering at the Aquatic Resource Center, and when we did that a few years ago we did a lot of the planting in the riparian zone — it’s the banks of the river,” Madeley said. “We went to the San Marcos River and establish all those beds to help build up the soil … We did the monarch garden at Lamar campus. And we were going to do one at the San Marcos library, but they were doing renovations so we’re waiting on that one that’ll be next probably.”

San Marcos High School teacher Emily Madeley helps her students garden on Thursday.

Luna said it’ll be nice to see the garden when it’s finished.

“It’s going to be great,” Luna said. “It’s going to be great to see all our hard work, and then it’s going to be good for the future students that are going to come here.”