Although El Niño significantly reduced the California drought, conserving water still remains an issue across central and southern California. Since 2013, Aragon was asked to cut to back 25 percent from the water consumption of each month prior to the drought. Because of this, Aragon has to compromise between the need to save water, and the need to maintain a functioning school life and a healthy appearance.
Over the summer, Facilities Manager Don Ahuna, along with his staff, enhanced center court by reseeding, weeding, and fertilizing the grass. However, this enhancement does use up more water than it previously did.
“Once we reseeded it we needed to water it more than twice a week,” says Ahuna, “otherwise it wouldn’t have been successful.”
To balance up this extra water uptake, Aragon decreased the water used up in other less popular areas, according to Ahuna.
“I felt this is an important part of the Aragon community,” says Ahuna, “because lunch and brunch and everybody wants to be out here, and it’s a focus point of the school, and sometimes what I’ll do is that I’ll reduce water in some areas, so I can use it in another area”.
Students agree with Ahuna on the importance of the center court grass in their daily experience.
“If the grass wasn’t as nice as it is, it would like, completely change the feeling of school,” says sophomore Beata Gold, “Center court is where all the events take place and like where they all happen, and it’s just like the main point of the school”.
Some students are indifferent about the quality of grass, “I have very little opinion on this,” says senior Pierce Kelaita, “as long as you’re just conserving water, and don’t add to the drought”.
“I think the reallocation makes it okay, the center court does look a lot nicer,” says sophomore Kayla Tai, “but if they use more water, like generally, just to make the center court look nicer, then I don’t think it’s worth it, cause I’m pretty sure a lot of people around this school don’t necessarily pay attention to it, like if it’s somewhat dying, like somewhat green compared to vibrant green”.
The baseball and softball fields are also grass fields like center court, except much larger, so they use more water. The grass areas for the fields are around 70,000 sq.ft and 32,000 sq.ft respectively compared to center court’s 18,000 sq.ft of grass.
“Right now they’re doing maintenance with baseball season,” says Ahuna,” so that’s the conflict with having a drought … we need to keep these places safe for the sports”.
“The best way to reduce water is to come up with alternatives solutions,” he says “like turf … That’s the best way to reduce water in the long run”.
According to the poll conducted by the Aragon Outlook, 69.1 percent of the Aragon Community believes that the best way for Aragon to help conserve water is educating students on water conservation.
Some students actively conserve water outside of school as a means of combating the drought.“We try to save water, with low flow shower heads” says senior George Marshall.
“At home and at school I try not to use as much water as I can,” says Tai, “but I think that’s it’s very important just to save in general … I would like it if people at school would save a little bit more water”.
Although turf is a popular option for conserving water, “We don’t have funding for that right now” explains Ahuna.
Turf costs $8 per square feet, so turfing the baseball field, the softball field, and the center court would cost $560,000, $256,000, and $144,000 respectively, adding up to a grand total of $960,000.
According to Ahuna, making the fields look nice again after letting the grass die would be hard and require a lot of labor because it would allow the weeds would grow back. In addition, letting the field grow back require time, and those periods of reseeding would require more water than usual.
Aside from turfing the fields, Aragon has explored many other ways of conserving water, for example, according to Ahuna, the pool is in a closed-loop system where the water continually gets filtered and reused, and recently, Aragon has installed waterless urinals which would save 1.5 gallons of water with every flush. In addition, Aragon also has many native plants, which does not use as much water.
“Larger native plants and shrubs tend to hold water better and hold together the soil better,” explaians AP Environmental Science teacher Megan Thaler. She adds, “Grass is definitely, you know, it has shallower roots and thinner roots, it’s much harder to maintain and it takes more water overall”.
Ahuna concludes, “Moving forward we’d like to plant more drought-resistant and native plants so that you know, they can drive on the natural environment.”
