Wednesday, Sept.11, 2024 was a wet and cloudy day on the Mendocino Headlands. Despite the cold weather, the seventh and eighth graders from the Mendocino K-8 school were there for a community service project. Their project was to clean the invasive ice plant from the Headlands that has been eroding the cliffs by not allowing for native plants with deeper stronger roots to grow.

In this act of community service, the middle school students worked with state parks rangers to remove the invasive plants not just to prevent the erosion but also to make more room for local plants to make their homes on our Mendocino Headlands.

Here is some background information about the ice plant itself. The ice plants on the cliffs are a fast growing succulent from South Africa that traveled to the California Coast in the 1900s.

Despite most of the students putting their blood, sweat and tears in clearing the ice plant, not every student was putting in an equal amount of work. Some students were seen standing around or just eating, then taking the long trip to the bathroom, all the while skipping out on working.

Clearing ice plants isn’t the only community service work these middle schoolers were doing; some students were tasked with going into the village of Mendocino where they distributed handmade cards that had pro-voting messages. Though the cards were instructing the viewer to vote they had no specific political bias.

Although the whole project was mainly a smooth success, the pick up was a massive confusion because the students had finished the project early. so we called the buses to come pick us up but some other kids were picking an ice plant in a second location. So when the buses came to us up some of the kids were left behind and the buses had to make a u- turn to pick them up.

The  whole ice plant removal was a massive success and the seventh and eighth grade classes had a massive impact on the local community.