Students To Rebuild Vandalized Finley Junior High Greenhouse
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WAXAHACHIE (CBSDFW.COM) - "It was literally just a dump," Waxahachie ISD science teacher Brandi Domkowski said as she recalled the bricked in, open-air enclave behind Finley Junior High School.
But an idea took root in that dump. Domkowski's students decided to reclaim the space and an abandoned greenhouse in the middle of it for their science class.
"They gutted the floor, they took out the old wood they brought in the new wood," Domkowski said. "They brought in the gravel by the bucket loads themselves because we couldn't get a truck in here."
Student Sadie Lee and her classmates spent years on the project.
"My whole seventh grade year and my whole eighth grade year," Lee said of the work, which they often did on their own time.
"Two years of my babies coming out here and killing themselves," Domkowski said. "We're out here in the rain. We're out here in the heat we're out here in the cold. I mean their blood, sweat and tears literally in this place."
But just as the plants had begun to bloom and their project was bearing fruit, vandals uprooted everything.
"Someone came in and busted all the windows and tore up the fan," Lee said.
And with windows open and minus a fan, the heat withered and killed all the plants. It was so hot the boards they'd built into shelves the hold the plants warped. What flower pots and hand-made paper pots remain have unidentifiable, dried remains in them.
"There was a lot of green in here," Domkowski recalled. "A lot of green. We had several hundred paper pots, we had the tomatoes, we had the squash we had the lilies."
"These were daisy flowers and they were like a pretty orange color," Lee said as she gingerly touched the brown, withered stems and leaves in a pot.
"It was devastating," a crestfallen Domkowski said.
"Someone would just come in here and destroy it that was kind of -- I'm just asking why?" Lee asked in frustration. "Why would they do that? It just doesn't make sense."
A greenhouse restored to teach science is now teaching the students about obstacles in life. Many students are planning on returning to restore the greenhouse one more time.
"Even though something bad did happen to it's a good thing because somethings we can make better and that's what we want to do,
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