‘It’s Not Just About The Plants’: A Hawaii Educator Unearths Life Lessons In A High School Garden 0 A Kaiser High School teacher is educating students through his community garden and an extracurricular environmental club he helped build from the ground up.
Paul Balazs grabbed a shovel and started digging, carefully splitting up a banana tree for propagation in the Peace and Sustainability Garden at Kaiser High School.
He started as an English teacher at the East Honolulu school a decade ago. Now, he’s teaching leadership training and theory of knowledge, and is a student adviser. But to community members and colleagues, Balazs is a “life force,” as neighboring farmer Heather Mohr put it.
In 2016, the initial idea for the garden came to fruition after a group of Balazs’ students in the Wipeout Crew, an extracurricular eco-conscious and service-oriented club that Balazs has been running for the last eight years, came to him wanting to create an outdoor space that reconnected them with nature.
