| MVHS Student Volunteers Clean Up CCSD Property | |||
| By Vernon Robison Moapa Valley Progress Published August 19, 2009 A small army of local volunteers assembled on Saturday morning near the intersection of Moapa Valley Blvd and Ramos Ranch Road to do a major cleanup on 30 acres of property owned by the Clark County School District. Over 150 students from Moapa Valley High School, along with adult coaches and leaders, began at 6:00 a.m. to clean up trash and debris on the property which has |
 MVHS students gathered on Saturday to clean up trash and debris from a 30 acre property at Moapa Valley Blvd and Ramos Ranch Road owned by Clark County School District. |
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| long been a chronic spot for illegal dumping in the community. By the end of the morning, over 100 tons of trash had been removed from the site.
The clean-up project was coordinated by the local Partners in Conservation (PIC) organization. Elise McAllister, Administrator of PIC, explained that the project originated several months ago when CCSD Trustee Chris Garvey made a trip to the Moapa Valley. At that time, Garvey toured the site with Commissioner Tom Collins and MVHS Agricultural Farm manager Kevin O’Toole. “I think that it was obvious to her that something needed to be done about the mess and that it would cost some money to clean it up,” McAllister said. “Kevin suggested that the high school students could do a lot of the work as a fundraiser for school organizations.” |
 CCSD Trustee Chris Garvey is surrounded by MVHS student volunteers at a cleanup of local school district property held on Saturday morning. |
Garvey, who was also present to help with the project on Saturday, said that she immediately liked the idea. “I felt that it was important to have the community come out and be involved in this,” Garvey said. “To have the kids of the community come out, take pride and ownership in this property and be invested in it may be the best way to assure that it is better cared for in the future.”
Trouble was, there was no precedent for this type of project in the CCSD system. Garvey had to do a lot of pushing and pulling to get the idea off the ground. “It isn’t the way things were normally done in the district,” Garvey said. “So it was a little like re-inventing the wheel.” |
| First of all, to prepare for the major clean up, some of the most hazardous work had to be completed in advance by CCSD crews. Earlier this summer, CCSD Special Projects teams removed several abandoned mobile homes and the associated septic systems from the property.
The crews also started the trash cleanup process. But it quickly became apparent that this was not the best team for that job. “They just started bulldozing all of the trash and dirt together into big piles,” Garvey said. That complicated things because, to do the job in an environmentally sensitive way, those piles eventually had to be spread out again to remove the trash and leave the soil, Garvey said. “It became clear pretty quickly that we needed to get some experts involved,” Garvey said. That is where PIC came in. Noting the past successes that the PIC organization has had in coordinating community volunteer projects, Garvey went to work on partnering with that group in carrying out the cleanup. McAllister and the PIC Board were all too happy to help. The CCSD made a $82,000 grant to PIC of the funds it would have spent to clean up the property. PIC used about 2/3 of those funds to hire special equipment and crews to do the heavy work on the property. The rest of the money was used to coordinate the school volunteer groups to do the trash cleanup. Donations were then given to each school group that were involved in the project. “Over $15,000 is being split between the various school groups that are involved,” McAllister said. Those groups included the MVHS National Honor Society, tennis teams, football teams, FFA, cheerleaders, wrestling team, book club and also a local boy scout troop. PIC also received donations from several local entities. Republic Services agreed to send trash trucks to the site to help in the efforts. Backhoes were also provided by the Moapa Valley Water District and the Muddy Valley Irrigation Company. And the Water District also donated the water used Saturday for dust control. Garvey said that it was Collins who first alerted her to the problem with the CCSD property. “I didn’t know anything about this,” she said. “I didn’t even know that this was our property. The Commissioner shared the concerns that some of the community leaders had about the safety issues on the property.” Collins credited Moapa Valley Town Board member Bill Mildice with “pushing and pulling on this problem until a solution was found.” “Billy (Mildice) is the conscience of this community,” Collins said. “He is the reason that this is getting cleaned up.” Garvey said that she hoped that this project would be the start of a better link of communication between the rural Moapa Valley and the more urban oriented CCSD. “This is truly a unique community where collaborative efforts like this are possible,” Garvey said. “There just needs to be more communication to this area so you don’t have isolation out here and so we better understand the needs of this community.” This week, heavy equipment crews hired by PIC will be working on the site to remove the tamarisk trees and turn them into a fine mulch. An agricultural fence will then be installed around the property. For the present, it is expected to be maintained by the FFA program along with the MVHS Ag Farm. |
