Carolyn Stone and Kate Unger listen and answer questions from the community members gathered to hear a presentation on the possibilities of a new rain garden, bio swale, pocket prairie, or more threes to beautify the area and help with flooding. Photo by David Taylor
By David Taylor / Managing Editor
Following the successful completion of their own rain garden campus project at Channelview High School during the first year of National Wildlife Federation’s (NWF) Resilient Schools and Communities (RiSC) program in Channelview ISD, the Interact Club and CVHS students are now focused on a larger footprint in the community. They are seeking input from their friends, family, neighbors, and business leaders on the type of project they would like to see.
The meeting was hosted by the National Wildlife Federation and the Channelview Health and Improvement Coalition (C.H.I.C.) and attended by students from the original project and other community members.
Kate Unger, resilience in schools coordinator with the National Wildlife Federation, led the meeting.
“I’m not here to decide what goes in the community, I am here to guide you along that journey,” she said.
The project will closely mirror the school year time frame so students can be involved during the actual school year.
“We will come back in January 2025 to host another meeting and decide on the project, in February we will talk budget, the plants and the nitty gritty of the project, and in March or the spring of 2025 we are looking to install a similar project to the high school at a community location,” she explained the timeline.
The project budget is currently set at $5,000, all funds provided by National Wildlife Federation. The RiSC program is generously supported in full by The Powell Foundation, The Duncan Fund, EPA, and NOAA.
“Funds will be used for implementation, maintenance, and any other project related expense.”
Any other groups or individuals can contribute to the non-profit fund to assure future maintenance or expansion of the project.
Unger explained the different options.
“A rain garden, bio swale, pocket prairie, or even tree planting has become very feasible and popular for Houston,” Unger described them.
The project is particularly a green infrastructure project versus a gray infrastructure.
“So gray infrastructure is concrete, roads, sidewalks, that sort of thing. Green Infrastructure is anything that mimics nature, so using plants, trees, type of recreating what was here before Houston was here,” she said.
With the advent of the massive city with lots of non-permeable surfaces that have kind of exacerbated the issues of flooding, extreme heat, those sorts of things, Unger encouraged participants not to consider this as a giant fix for a big problem, but small and scalable solutions that could be implemented across the city and across various communities, all doing their part.
“Think of them as lots of little sponges around the Houston area that help to soak up flooding. One little sponge isn’t going to do much, but y’all are joining a vast community of schools and other areas that have put these in and are doing these little green infrastructure projects in their area,” she explained.
Rain gardens, she said, are the type of project used by the vast majority of schools.
“They use native plants, native I mean as found in Houston, Harris County and adjacent counties. We source our plants from very specific growers, not necessarily Home Depot, Lowe’s, or Walmart,” she explained.
“Rain gardens are often found in areas where water is ponding for a long period of time. A low spot where it’s consistently wet, or like muddy, where water just tends to land,” she said. The whole purpose of the rain garden is to hold and absorb excess water. “Envision an iceberg. They’re real pretty above ground, but the real function is going on below ground.”
Rain gardens can have amended soil, piping, gravel, edging plants, and more. The size of rain garden for the $5,000 budget would require 300 square feet, which seems not very big, but it’s an example of what can be done throughout the community.
“It can also be used by wildlife, butterflies, monarchs, and insects as well,” Unger said.
Another option would be bio swales, something used by Harris County precincts, the Houston Parks and Recreation Department, and other large organizations.
“Think of a rain garden like a pond of any geometric size, kidney bean shape or just amorphous blobs, circles, or triangles,” Unger described it. “A bio swale is used like a channel-to-channel water to a specific point. The intent of the bio swale is to slow the water down so it doesn’t do as much damage to the infrastructure, green or gray.”
A third option is a pocket prairie.
“All the Houston region used to be a very specific type of prairie called a gulf coast prairie that was very good at absorbing water,” Unger said. “It had high spots and low spots where you would see all these different species of plants mixed over three to 400 different species of flowering plants and grasses. These pocket prairies serve to emulate a piece of that ecosystem.”
It supports pollinators and wildlife, just the same as the other garden options, rain garden and a bio swale, but they tend to require a little bit less digging equipment, infrastructure involved.
Lastly, trees would be another good option.
“They cool the area, provide a lot of habitats for pollinators as well as other wildlife. There is a wonderful group called Trees for Houston that is a nonprofit whose sole purpose is to plant trees in the Greater Houston region,” she explained.
The saplings would be free but would require some maintenance until they became stable.
The group will meet again on Tuesday, January 21 at 6:30 inside the fire department on Dell Dale Road and invites the public to come and voice their wants for the community.
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