Courtesy photo Gladstone High School students assist seniors at Lakeview Assisted Living assemble wooden flower boxes.

GLADSTONE — Gladstone High School students visited Lakeview Assisted Living recently to assemble and fill wooden flower boxes with and for residents. The activity, a first for the adult care home, was a success, having “impressive” engagement on all sides, organizers said.

For the last several weeks, 10th, 11th and 12th grade students in Mark Cousineau’s woodshop class had been making parts for the planters once the project had been decided upon.

“A couple months ago, Mrs. Miron approached me about working together on some kind of a project, and we were tossing around ideas, and we came up with these planters made of cedar, something easy to put together,” said Cousineau.

Leah Miron, co-owner and administrator at Lakeview, had coordinated with Gladstone High School Principal Andrew Jacques along with Cousineau and Chenier’s Greenhouse to make the project come together.

After making all the parts, the woodshop students put them together to make sure they fit, then disassembled and numbered the pieces and put them into kits. Each kit, tied together with twine, included four cedar sides and a bottom for each planter, plus a plastic liner.

Along with a couple educators, the group of Gladstone High School students — 11 from woodshop and four from the greenhouse club — arrived at Lakeview Assisted Living around 8 a.m. on May 8. Students set up a tarp to contain any mess along with several folding tables, and they created stations for the multiple points of the process. The roughly 40 residents who came enjoyed various levels of participation.

Following assembly of the wooden planters, at the end of the line, the greenhouse group helped pot geraniums, marigolds, white alyssum and blue lobelia.

“We were told by Mr. Cousineau that he was going to do this, and he asked if we could help plant the flowers in the pots after they made them, and we were more than willing to come help because we thought this would be a great thing to do,” said Gladstone senior Mackenzie Blume.

Staff at Lakeview noted that all the students were great with the residents — patient with those with vision and hearing problems, cooperative and organized.