High School Summer Crew Season Begins Today

Contributing Writer: Priscilla Bocskor, Education Coordinator

Today is the start of our 2011 High School Summer Crew! This is the 10th year of Casey Trees High School Summer Crew where 10 local students age 16 and older work for eight weeks over the summer. Our crew members were selected from many highly qualified students who applied, interviewed and attended our Field Try Out. We were fortunate to have over 100 applicants for the positions and we are really excited about this year's group.

Summer Crew, Class of 2011

The main duty of the summer crew students will be to water, weed and mulch trees Casey Trees has planted in the past three years. Newly planted trees in the stressed urban environment need extra care to become established. These trees need 1.5 inches of rain a week or 25 gallons of water to develop healthy root systems.

Six of the Summer Crew Students will be traveling around D.C. performing maintenance in trucks while four of the students, along with two Casey Trees staffers, will make up the Casey Trees Water-By-Cycle team. The Water-By-Cycle team will bike around D.C. in order to reach their designated maintenance sites.

In addition to this work, the Summer Crew students will have a chance to participate in four Career Development Days. These Career Development Days are rewards for meeting their tree touch goals (every time the students visit a tree to water, weed, or mulch counts as one tree touch). Students will have to work closely and effectively together to reach these goals. The Development Days include planting elm trees at Dangerfield Island, learning to climb trees at the National Arboretum and doing a tree identification scavenger hunt at the National Zoo.

Watering trees next to the Casey Trees office.

The 10 Summer Crew students will each be writing a blog post about their experiences so check back to read all about it. We will also have posts from Casey Trees staff about Summer Crew and Water By-Cycle. Keep a look out - you might just see the Summer Crew hard at work in your neck of the woods this summer!

View more photos of the Summer Crew's first day on Flickr.