Hadlee Horvath is looking for a word.

She knows it begins with the letter “P.”

“Patience” is one of the words she used but it is not THE word.

“Persevere,” a friend supplies.

Horvath nods and smiles.

“It took two years to get it,” Horvath continued.

In an all-school meeting Jan. 6 Horvath and her fellow fifth graders learned the work they did two years before as third grade students at Seven Generations Charter School resulted in a $32,000 grant to eradicate Japanese knotweed, an invasive plant, from areas on the school campus in Emmaus and plant native species, among other improvements.

The students also identified the invasive plant multiflora rose.

“We waited and we waited and we waited,” Barbara Lindtner, who teaches third grade at the school, said during the school-wide assembly as tension mounted. Students, unaware of the status of the grant, seemed to hold their collective breath.

“We got the grant,” Lindtner said and applause and cheers burst from the students.

“Kids make awesome things happen,” Jen Hersh, “Environment as an Integrated Context” curriculum director, said, congratulating the students on their work.

The students identified and studied the Japanese knotweed problem as part of their study of natural systems in third grade, Lindtner said.

Native to Asia, the plant arrived in the United States in the late 19th-century and was used for landscaping and erosion control and sold in nursery catalogs, according to an online fact sheet from Pennsylvania State University. The plant can grow into 10-foot tall shrubs with complex underground stems reaching deep into the soil. Described as an “aggressive species,” Japanese knotweed crowds and chokes out native plants and is a particular threat to water areas where it can impact the food chain for fish.

Similarly multiflora rose was also promoted as a plant for erosion control as well as rootstock for ornamental roses and as a snow barrier.

Students described dense thickets of invasive plants species along a tributary of the Little Lehigh Creek running between the elementary and middle school buildings on the campus along East Minor Street.

In a press announcement from the Lehigh County Conservation District, Caitlin Heffner, a watershed specialist with the LCCD, noted the grant involves LCCD, the school, the Borough of Emmaus, Penn State Cooperative Extension and Wildlands Conservancy and was awarded through the Department of Environmental Protection’s Growing Greener Program.

“The funding will be used to restore a 546 linear foot stream bank and 0.75 acres of adjoining land,” Heffner wrote. The project includes “removing invasive species, streambank stabilization measures and establishing a native riparian buffer.”

Native plant candidates to establish in the cleared area include “box elder, eastern cottonwood, silver maple, river birch, green ash, paw paw, pin oak, smooth alder, buttonbush, red chokeberry, bayberry, black birch, gray dogwood, southern arrowood, spicebush, ironweed, cardinal flower, boneset and marsh-marigold,” according to Heffner. A final choice of plants had not been made as of Jan. 6.

“We plan to install approximately 30 native trees, 30 native shrubs, 30 native perennials, 300 plant plugs and 50 pounds of native wildflower seed in an approximately .75 acre area surrounding the stream banks,” Heffner wrote in an email to The Press.

Lindtner said the project, set to begin in earnest in the spring, links to a current study area in the fifth grade curriculum: bees and bee horticulture.

Student-built hives currently can be found on the school campus.

The grant proposal process also enhanced student understanding of social systems, including local government. Students met with officials from the Borough of Emmaus to talk about their ideas.

In an email to The Press, Lindtner noted class work in third grade included math calculations to determine project costs and how much money to request in the grant, the number of plantings needed and to map and measure the sites to be cleared. Students also created brochures to concisely express the problem and their proposed solutions. The grant paperwork was completed and submitted in 2014, Lindtner said. Word of the award arrived earlier this month.

Also attending the event were representatives from the offices of Sen. Lisa Boscola, D-18th, Rep. Justin Simmons, R-131st, the LCCD, Lehigh County Authority and Penn State Cooperative Extension.

Crews from the Borough of Emmaus recently started work to remove the invasive species along the creek beds.