MOSS POINT, Miss. (WLOX) – Soon, what is only an empty area of mulch will be a flourishing garden with trees and bushes at Kreole Primary Elementary School.
Principal Jaworski Rankin explains the trees are much needed due to major flooding taking place on campus.
“Whenever we have a huge downpour of rain, our school would be flooded so at times we would have to put an emergency crisis where we would have to transport students and staff to a different location,” explained Rankin. “Now, with this conservation effort, we’re able to reduce that flooding and we can focus on the main thing which is educating our students.”
The project was designed to collect water runoff from the school, hold it, and then disperse it into the municipal system.
Co-owner of Mastodonte, LLC Arien Hall says this natural process will help reduce flooding and support the environment.
“We’ve already seen this system perform during a couple of days when we had some rain,” said Hall. “Not only does it hold a lot of water, but now that we have this bio-retention soil mix in here, it allows it to absorb a lot more of that water too and then the plants going in are sucking up a lot of that water as well.”
This project was funded by an EPA grant and put on by the Department of Marine Resources and Grand Bay Nation Estuarine Research Reserve.
However, it is the students in the Moss Point School District that made all this come to fruition.
Rankin says, “We got a bridge between our elementary kids and our high school kids that’s taking part in this. It’s really going to impact our future and the upcoming.”
This garden is expected to be completed by Sunday.
See a spelling or grammar error in this story? Report it to our team HERE.
Copyright 2025 WLOX. All rights reserved.