With the new school year starting, clubs are beginning with a bang. The EnviroDogs, a club that is all about doing their part to conserve and protect the environment, tackled their first big project on Sept 23 at Mitch Park.

“We like to do both active, physical labor which is helping in the community and helping our physical environment. And we like to do social activities, so we’ll do some volunteer activities with The City of Edmond,” the faculty advisor of the EnviroDogs Andrea Sampley said.

They worked with The City of Edmond Forestry Department on removing invasive saplings from the forest and tall grass areas around Mitch Park. 

“They’re hindering the growth and development of the native trees there,” the president of the EnviroDogs club Adam Mohammed said.

The EnviroDogs, along with the Edmond North High School environmental club and other volunteers, went into the tall grass of the Mitch park forest area and chopped the small intruding trees for two hours. 

As well as working with the city, the EnviroDogs also work on keeping up with the campus of Edmond Memorial High School. On Sept. 27 they treated the wetland area (over by the bridge) by fixing the gardening boxes that haven’t been worked on since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ll be doing some developmental projects over the fall season to kind of restore the area, make it nicer. We’ll be planting some trees, receding the flower beds, maybe planting some vegetables too,” Mohammed said.

The EnviroDogs already have almost the rest of 2021 planned out as projects go. With all of the hard work and volunteering that the EnviroDogs do, there’s bound to be a reward in the mix. 

“We actually won volunteer of the year the year of the pandemic, so 2019-2020,” Sampley said. “But we didn’t actually do the celebration.”

The EnviroDogs will be gifted several trees this coming fall in honor of winning volunteer of the year in 2020. Although there is no set planting area yet, these trees will be brand new editions to the Memorial campus this fall.

Contact Macey Thaxton at [email protected]