Showing and Growing Pollard Pride
April 7, 2025
• Local middle schoolers will replace temporary, plastic structures with colorful, more permanent ones at the front entrance of Pollard this spring.
Outside of Pollard Middle School, students enter and exit around two square plots of landscaping, complimented by a large scale wall mural, plantings done by their peers and plastic blue bollards.
The bollards prevent middle schoolers from walking through the plots and damaging the plants — something administrators didn’t necessarily account for after the project’s completion, Principal Tamatha Bibbo said. They intended to replace the barriers with a more long-term structure, but two years have passed without a replacement.
But after April break, Pollard students will return to school to find painted wooden poles where the bollards once stood. The new structures, designed and painted by middle schoolers, will ensure new plantings can grow and flowers can bloom, Bibbo said.
“It’s this idea of having ownership over their school and their space,” Bibbo said. “Now, the students who are working so hard on keeping the inside garden so beautiful, and will be doing all the plants over and cleaning it, will now feel some joy in the fact that it’s protected.”
Over the course of three workshops, about 30 students gathered in the Pollard art room to transform eight four-foot poles. Local artist Tova Speter led the effort, thanks to funding from the Needham Community Action Network and a $1,440 grant from the Needham Council for Arts and Culture.
Speter, who works with scrap wood and specializes in youth engagement, sees public art as “a tool for connection, for self-expression [and] for community building.” She previously partnered with Charly Nanda, of NCAN, for a mosaic project off of Chestnut Street last year.
At Pollard, their goal was similar: empower young people to directly contribute to their environment.
“There’s an interest in this. There’s a thirst for this,” Speter said. “The kids are excited. I think it has such a benefit to the community.”
When installed, the poles will be joined by multi-colored paracord. During the workshops, students and high school volunteers stretched the cords through the hallway, braiding the long strands while classmates walked by.
During the second workshop in March, eighth graders Elise Pavlik, Grace Sarris and Emma Rizzo mapped out the pattern for their garden post. They planned to paint polka dots and flowers in blue and pink.
By taking part in the project, they’re leaving their mark on their future alma mater.
“It’s cool. It’ll be fun to be able to take people back here, if I visit my old school, and say, ‘Oh my god, look, I made that,’” Pavlik said.
Most of the poles contain a nature-related theme. Eighth graders Zak and Peter divided their project into four quarters, using different colors and shapes for each section. Another pair of students, Dalia and Ava, painted a special character at the bottom of their pole.
Rhys Taylor and Molly Kenneally, both seventh graders, used a honeycomb stencil for their design, painting bees around their orange and blue pole.
“We’re going to do more little beehives with some bees down here and some flowers around,” Taylor said.
NCAN, which primarily works with local youth, reached out to Pollard officials looking for potential arts and culture projects that could beautify the campus.
The front entrance was once all concrete, until about seven years ago, when the school worked with a local landscaper to add the plots, Bibbo said. Another wooden structure didn’t last through the winter, she added.
While the plastic bollards preserve the plants, prevent trash disposal and keep the landscaping intact during snow plow season, “they’re not very pretty,” Bibbo said. Nanda concurred.
“I don’t think it was ever a permanent solution,” Nanda said of the barriers. “So finally, I said, ‘We need to do this project.’”
Mark Yetman, a Pollard guidance counselor, is also thankful for the project. Yetman has led the Pollard Garden Club for more than 20 years, the last 10 of which have focused on providing community service hours for eighth graders to fulfill their required volunteering.
Donations help supply perennials, trees, large planters, bushes and more, Yetman wrote in an email, and he has his eye on this spring, when the garden poles will be installed.
“This year, we hope to add more perennials and flowering bushes to the front entrance gardens,” Yetman wrote. “The newly installed posts will protect these new plants.”
A potential Pollard renovation, however, is imminent, which could put the garden poles in jeopardy. Bibbo said she’s confident they can work with the architects to create a plan that preserves the poles, as well as other historic features, such as their auditorium mural and the glass bridge connecting seventh and eighth graders.
Though the future is perhaps uncertain, Speter said what matters is creating a welcoming, artistic space for current students to enjoy.
“Everyone’s excited about the expansion and what it will look like, but that doesn’t mean that, in the years between now and then, the space can’t look nice,” Speter said. “I guess they’re somewhat temporary in that way.”
Should the poles not survive the construction, Speter said she’d hope to create another community art project driven by students.
That emphasis on the arts will persist in the years to come, Bibbo said.
“We might be an older building, but really it’s student-centered, it’s clean, it’s bright, it’s whimsical, it’s got art everywhere, and I think students appreciate that,” Bibbo said. “I think it’s something that we know [in] the new building, that spirit will carry on there as well.”
