Feb. 12, 2022

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — Silver Creek’s Key Club continues to provide for our community through participating in projects like Our City Forests’ biggest feat yet! Planting a total of 42 trees on Feb. 12 in San Jose’s Bagby Elementary School.

Key Club is one of Silver Creek’s most popular clubs and their main goals are to help the environment as well as the people living in it. They do this by offering community service events in their Google Classroom like the one mentioned above. 

To participate in a program, Key Club gives out a quick Google form to fill out appropriate information required such as vaccination status, volunteer waivers and more for safety purposes. Just always make sure to bring along your papers to the event prior to signing in. 

In this project, participants met at the back of Bagby Elementary and ensured their sign in by giving their filled out forms to the coaches who wore bright neon vests. The instructors first started with safety precautions and soon got to work. 

Saplings were placed around the back and front of the elementary school and volunteers were split into units with one coach to teach each group how to properly handle a tree. There were many steps to successfully plant a sapling into the ground, and so each tree took at least two hours to plant.

The work was a bit of a challenge, especially for new members who were unfamiliar with such physical labor (digging, shoveling, drilling and etc.), but in the end a SC student who had endured said, “In the end it was rewarding, even though it was very tiring.” Even while expressing their weariness the student and their friends say they enjoyed the experience because it made them feel like they were doing something important despite it being a small accomplishment.