Junior Tory Gentry Wins $400 Champions of the Environment Award
Grant Will Benefit Lake Conestee Nature Park

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It is literally “around the corner” from the school off Mauldin Road.

It is a place of natural beauty, a wildlife refuge in the middle of Greenville.

And it is a place with a storied history, for in the Reedy River’s polluted waters can be read the story of Greenville’s reckless growth along its banks.

In other words, Lake Conestee Nature Park is an ideal teaching laboratory, and it is no wonder that CCES teachers and students have formed a lasting connection with the local park that benefits both parties.

As President of the school’s Environmental Club, which she helped establish in 2008-09, junior Tory Gentry applied for a Champions of the Environment grant from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC). At biology teacher Paulette Unger’s suggestion, she was following through on a Lake Conestee project that the current junior class had completed when they were all freshmen. Most students had simply “moved on” from that long-ago biology class assignment, but not Gentry. She secured a $400 grant to ensure that the work her class did two years ago will be used to benefit the park and the Greenville community.

Do You Know Your Trees?
The park wanted to educate visitors about its native trees, which dovetailed nicely with the botany curriculum in Unger’s and Reggie Titmas’s biology classes. So the freshman class visited the park, collected samples of leaves, seeds, and bark under marked trees,

then returned to their classrooms to identify the specimens. They worked in groups to assemble that information into a brochure of their own design that would be distributed in the park. It had to be scientifically accurate, but also clear and appealing to the general public. It had to be inexpensive to produce. When the resulting brochures were submitted to Conestee, the park chose one created by Alex Boota, Kirsten Hicks, and Hunter Sieber. Click here to take a look at their brochure.

Now all that remained was for Lake Conestee to reproduce and distribute the brochure in the park.

Wasting Trees to Identify Trees?
But it made little sense to produce the brochures on paper that could wind up littering the trails. Should the park, in effect, sacrifice a few trees to make the paper that would serve to identify some other trees? A more environmentally sound solution might be to install permanent ID flip signs that would identify the trees along the trails. But the project stalled because of a lack of funds.

Gentry’s grant award will enable the Lake Conestee Nature Park to install flip signs based on the CCES students’ brochure. In her grant application, she enumerated the benefits of purchasing the signs. “The short-term benefits include the people of the area being able to enjoy Conestee and identify the trees. In the long run, the environmental benefits include the conservation of natural resources (paper and wood) because we will be installing permanent identification signs. Another long-term benefit is we will be educating the people who visit Conestee about the different types of trees found at Conestee. Information about the education and preservation of plants is important to the community. Lake Conestee Nature Park could become the place to go to learn about plants.”

According to Gentry, in order to fulfill the grant, CCES students in the Environmental Club will be working with the park to figure out the number of needed tree guides and to research the most durable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly signs that can be purchased with the funds. “This project will allow the information from our freshman tree guides to be transferred permanently to Conestee,” she said.

“Really Excited About Community Outreach”
The Conestee project will help the school earn a South Carolina “Green Steps” designation from DHEC.

“I am really excited about this,” said Gentry. “This is a really big step for the Environmental Club to have outreach and impact in the Greenville community.”

The club’s two dozen members have already had a significant impact at the school. By packaging and selling approximately 150 two-dollar “Environmental Grams” to students in the fall, the club raised enough money to purchase four paper and nine bottle recycling bins for the Upper School. They also initiated the Ronald McDonald House drive to collect a million soda bottle tabs.

One Very Busy Young Lady
Between her commitment to band (she has been playing the bassoon since fifth grade) and the IB Diploma program, to her participation in varsity basketball, debate team, and Carolina Youth Symphony, Tory Gentry is one busy young lady. Still, she makes the time to lead a very active Environmental Club—one whose impact will be felt at the school and in the community long after she has graduated.