Every year, Kids Grow New York is the Mandell School's Kindergarten class community service initiative. Kids Grow New York focuses on how Mandell children and children at other schools around the city can influence their community and their world by caring for trees, planting, and caring for the "green" parts of our neighborhood. This project serves as an example for the children to learn from, so that they can start their own initiatives and projects based on their ideas in their upcoming years at Mandell.

Kids Grow New York 2008-2009: The Street Tree Initiative

The Street Tree Initiative's focus is to care for the trees on the 96th Street block between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues.

Education:

The Mandell School community will educate our 96th Street neighbors about the care of street trees, and in the process educate our students about trees as well as good citizenship. Our students will create brochures explaining proper tree care and how to help keep our neighborhood trees healthy.

Action:

Mandell will have a school wide schedule to maintain our street trees which includes watering, weeding, tree pit care, planting and cleaning. Students will create artwork to decorate our tree guards, to further display the important role the trees play in our community, as well as to discourage tree vandalism.

Outreach:

Our goal for the Mandell School Street Tree Initiative is to not only be a school effort, but ultimately to inspire the 96th Street residents and businesses, so that the trees are cared for by the entire community. Through education and our students leading by example, we want to get our community involved in caring for their own trees as well. We would like to further develop our relationships with the businesses and residences on 96th Street. These relationships will be especially vital as we encourage them to change their old tree guards into more "tree friendly" guards. We also hope to form relationships with the Residence Associations to encourage them to care for their street trees, as well as the many planters they have installed on the block, but are not maintained. We hope to foster and develop care and action on the part of all of the people who live and work on 96th Street.

This initiative is in partnership with Partnerships for Parks, a joint program of



If you would like to get involved and volunteer in other programs in the park please check out: www.itsmypark.org