While exploring ideas for her Girl Scout Gold Award project, Corrin Zurbigg noticed an overgrown, unused garden at Barron Collier High School (BCHS). Inspired to make a difference, she envisioned transforming the space into a vibrant garden specifically designed for students in the Exceptional Student Education (ESE) program, creating a space that would offer both learning opportunities and lasting benefits.
“I think it will be good because the ESE kids will be able to learn, and I will be able to see it in action because I am only a junior,” Corrin explained.
Piecing it together
Her first challenge was to secure donations.
“It was rough terrain,” Corrin explained. “We needed rock and stone to go under the AstroTurf. We had to get it all leveled and prepped.” She enlisted Superior Stone Distributors in Naples to donate the rock and then found AstroTurf left over from the resurfacing of the BCHS football field. “We repurposed what they were going to throw away and pieced it together to make it work.”
Corrin decided to design the area with AstroTurf as the surface because some of the students in the ESE program have limited mobility. The garden will be in large raised beds for easy access.
Once the supplies were secured, Corrin recruited volunteers to help her create the garden. On a sunny Saturday morning members of her Girl Scout troop, National Honor Society, student council, the Best Buddies club, and other friends and family laid the astroturf and built the raised gardening bins.
“They are teaching life skills to students in the ESE program, and that is fantastic,” said Corrin’s mother, Shenna Zurbrigg.
Corrin used the knowledge she gained from gardening while a student at Pelican Marsh Elementary School to make 10 lesson plans for the ESE students. “I made lesson plans that go over the basics of gardening; things like how they need water and sunlight,” she said. “In another lesson they will learn about ladybugs and how they help. They will learn about decomposers and about worms.”
The BCHS junior also suggested which vegetables would work well in the garden, such as tomatoes, bush beans, and lettuce, but the ESE students chose a variety of seeds to plant. “We were aiming for them to plant seeds for things that they could eat so when they harvest they can see what they grew.” Corrin said
Making it happen
Shay Rudnicki, an ESE specialist at Barron Collier, says the garden will be a wonderful activity for the 75 students in the ESE program.
“It will help with all kinds of skills,” Rudnicki said. “They work on job skills, vocational skills, working as a team. They can always utilize the materials to help cook and make things. There are endless things they can be doing.”
Rudnicki said she had been trying for more than three years to get a garden put together for the ESE students at the school, but it wasn’t until Corrin volunteered to help that it became a reality.
“Her dedication and motivation and her ability to take an idea and implement it and make it happen has been amazing,” Rudnicki concluded.