ABOVE: This rendering shows the pond and prairie that will be outside of the Martin County West school building, which will help serve the Outdoor Classroom and Maverick Prairie Path that just received $10,000 in funding from the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation. Submitted photo

SHERBURN – Martin County West received $10,000 from the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) for their Outdoor Classroom and Maverick Prairie Path initiatives at their new school grounds.

The grant is one of 23 SMIF gave out, overall totaling $200,000. MCW Agriscience Teacher and writer for this grant, Stephanie Wohlhuter, said they already have funding for basic materials from the referendum.

“Now I’ve been working on some of the outdoor spaces, especially this past summer, to see if we can get some additional funding to boost those spaces so they’re more user-friendly to the entire community,” she said.

Centralized to the project is a prairie area maintained by the Fox Lake Conservation League.

“There’ll be a walking path through it, and that’s where the referendum part of the project ends,” Wohlhuter said. “This grant was to get some really good, solid benches that could be out there along the walking path. The goal is that community members can utilize the path or be a place to stop, take a break, maybe enjoy some of the scenery.”

Benches will be purchased separately to go along the walking path.

In addition to this piece, Wohlhuter said the funding will help bring student involvement into this new space.

“The wood shop classes in the Ag department here at the high school will build some picnic tables,” she said. “There’s an outdoor classroom out in the native prairie area but right now, there’s really nothing, just the space provided. This grant is going to help us be able to furnish some picnic tables so a class could go out there, have a place to sit down and work on an assignment.”

While the funding is going to the school district, Wohlhuter said the school has paired with the city of Sherburn to make this a reality for the whole area.

“They see the value in the walking path, the outdoor classroom for the entire community to be able to use,” she said. “That’s been a neat connection as well.”

In the vision for this plan, Wohlhuter said education has become a lot more flexible in terms of place.

“The idea of staying within the four walls of the school building has kind of gone away,” she said. “Taking kids out and having hands-on experiences have become much more valuable over the years. Having a space outside that’s ready to go for kids to go out, whether it’s my wildlife management class or a biology class, to be able to go out and do some things really close within walking distance is very advantageous.”

This outdoor classroom area will also feature two retention ponds, one of which will be dug deeper to serve as a fishing pond for educational opportunities.

“Working with other organizations, through my wildlife management class, [we will] stock fish in the pond and monitor populations of those fish and test water quality,” Wohlhuter said. “It’ll be a place where students and community members can go out and do a little bit of fishing as well.”

The work that went into the grant took Wohlhuter a couple of hours, with assistance from Sherburn city officials, which she said was a pretty standard amount of time and effort. She said it is exciting to see the work of writing a grant come to fruition.

“It’s neat to find all these opportunities,” Wohlhuter said. “To be able to provide some things for our community. There’s a lot of groups that are willing to support. It’s just a matter of finding those opportunities and following through with them.”

As for the project’s timeline, Wohlhuter said the native prairie section is already out there and ready. They will be working on ordering the benches and supplies, and building the picnic tables either this spring or next fall. She said the current plan is to install the walking path next summer or the following summer, depending on weather conditions.