A few dozen students began their morning planting red maple trees in Monterey Trail High School’s frozen athletic field last Saturday. It was the day after finals and the students arrived at eight o’clock sharp to await instructions on how to plant the trees. The crowd first watched a few classmates dig a deep hole in the frosted ground for the first tree. “Why is everybody looking at me?” a digger said. “I didn’t know you were a teacher,” replied Lizz Bippus of the Sacramento Tree Foundation.The nonprofit group guided the students while they planted the trees on a nearly treeless field where the young campus’s baseball and softball fields sit along Calvine Road.

SMUD donated the potted, young trees that are expected to display spectacular colors during autumn.
Students performed the same task last year, except it was in the rain. “Aren’t they great?” Bippus told the Citizen. “I don’t have any complaints from anybody which is pretty wonderful for high school kids.”

Most of the students told the Citizen they were there to fulfill their community service requirement from school. “It’s pretty amazing, considering that we just finished finals yesterday,” teacher Warren Hyde said. “These are the kids who are doing everything.” Bippus, who works as a “NeighborWood” forester in the Elk Grove area, gave the students a quick lesson in properly planting a tree that has more “don’ts” than “do’s.” She detailed ways of spreading the tree’s roots, planting at the right depth in a hole, removing grass leaves that could stunt the plant’s growth, and hitting in large stakes to hold the tree up.

“I don’t know about you guys but if I’m sitting at my house watching TV or playing my (Sony Playstation 2) and I got a 60-foot tree over the top of me, I want a nice root system when the wind comes along,” Bippus told the students. She also noted that every person should plant at least 10 trees in their lifetimes, given that that the oxygen-producing trees compensate for the carbon dioxide emitted by people. “Otherwise, you’re living on somebody else’s tree,” Bippus said. A maple, at best, grows more than a foot a year, she told the Citizen. However, she noted that there is a boron problem in the soil around the area where the natural element can kill trees if watered heavily. “Anything we put out here is an experimental tree just to see how the heck it’s going to go,” Bippus said.

The students split up into small groups to plant each tree. Some named their maples, ranging from Axl and Taag to “The Banana Tree” in hopes that it would somehow produce bananas. “Ten years from now we have to come back and carve our names into it,” student Steven Feick said. His classmate Kim Wiseman noted the lack of shade on campus due to few trees. Students Anna Feick and her classmates held down their tree’s dirt base for them to carefully cut and loosen up its roots.

Asked about what brought them up that cold, January morning, their responses ranged from community service to being “budding environmentalists.” “We’re tree-huggers,” Feick said. “Everyone is calling me that since I’m going to (Humboldt State University).” One of her classmates said that the trees would turn out to be beautiful by the time of their 10-year class reunion. “It just goes along with how our school is growing, the kids are more connected to our school and more appreciative,” Monterey Trail High’s athletic director, Rick Arcuri said about the planting. “They love Monterey Trail, basically.”