If you visit Orchard View Elementary School at lunchtime, you’ll likely take note of the many students who press their faces against the glass cafeteria window, gazing into the bed of soil and greenery below.

They’re hoping to catch a glimpse of Pokey, the Russian tortoise who now calls the school home. He eats his greens, sunbathes under his UVB light and, on occasion, retreats to the Pokey-sized house that sits atop his habitat.

He’s a simple creature, though the journey to bring him to Orchard View was anything but.

It all started at the beginning of Kynlee Sikora’s fourth-grade year, when she approached Principal Rachel Rinker with an idea: Orchard View Elementary School, she thought, should have a school pet.

“I’ve always wanted another pet than just my dog and my rabbit,” said Kynlee, now a 10-year-old fifth grader. “And my mom was like, ‘Why don’t you get one for the school?’”

Rinker gave the OK, but told Kynlee she’d have to put in the work to make it happen.

“I did a lot of research and stayed after school. And that was what I did for a long time, just research, research, research,” Kynlee said.

Originally, she was learning about red-eared slider turtles with the hope of bringing one to Orchard View. Then she had to change her plan — and her project’s entire trajectory.

“I did all the research for it, and then realized that a turtle is much more maintenance than a tortoise,” Kynlee said. “So I redid my research, and we ended up with a tortoise.”

Kynlee’s mom, Kristy Sikora, who is also Orchard View’s librarian, said she thinks that experience helped teach her daughter about flexibility.

“I think that’s a hard skill for kids, but it’s an important one to learn,” Kristy said. “We can pivot and I think honestly, this has been a better fit ... because we can get him out and bring him in here, and a turtle would have just been stuck in his aquarium.”

Kynlee settled on a Russian tortoise. And as fate would have it, fifth-grade teacher Connor Kingdom overheard her talking about the pet one day and said that his aunt happened to be rehoming one.

“So we ended up getting the tortoise for free,” Kynlee said.

This helped her out, as Rinker also told her she’d have to work with a budget in order to bring the pet to Orchard View.

“So she had to really put all the pieces together to figure out how much it was gonna cost,” Kristy said. “... She wanted to buy everything. She was on Amazon like ‘click, click, click.’ I was like, ‘OK, let’s be a little more practical.’”

Pokey also came with his own habitat, which helped with Kynlee’s budget process. For the rest of Pokey’s needs, she raised a little bit of money by letting her fellow Orchard View students vote on his name. She set up some containers at the school’s main entrance where students could drop coins to vote for their favorite name.

And thus, the tortoise formerly known as Billy became Pokey. The estimated 10-year-old Russian tortoise officially began calling Orchard View home last December, spending weekends and holiday breaks at home with Kynlee and her mom.

In his short time at Orchard View, Pokey has become both a hit with the kids and a valuable educational tool for immersive classroom lessons. Kristy said she often walks across the hall and incorporates Pokey into her library classes, sometimes offering the chance to brush his shell — which is like a little massage for him — as a reward to her students for good behavior.

“Kindergarten and second grade have done lessons with him, like the difference between a turtle and a tortoise,” she said. “We read one of our Virginia Reader’s Choice books, which happened to be about a tortoise, which was great. And then we’ve read some nonfiction books, and they’ve done note taking about tortoises to write down the most important facts, but they’re learning a lot about him along the way.”

Some students also help out with the daily misting so that Pokey’s soil stays moist enough, among other necessary caretaking. Going forward, Kristy said the hope is that Orchard View’s students can also learn to grow Pokey’s food, which is mainly different greens and wildflowers, on campus.

“That’s our goal is to be able to have as much of it grown here as possible,” Kristy said. “... We’re really trying to get the kids hands on and engaged as much as possible, and looking for opportunities where they can take the things they’re learning in the classroom and see it in action.”

As for Kynlee, her next endeavor will be training a group of fourth graders on how to tend to Pokey on a daily basis, since next year she’ll leave Orchard View and head to middle school.

Pokey could live to be 75, meaning Kynlee is leaving behind a lasting legacy for many generations of Orchard View students to come. Kristy said she’s very proud of her daughter for pushing forward, especially when her project had to veer toward a different pet than Kynlee initially had in mind.

For Kynlee, though, it seems this project was well worth the hours of research, budgeting and planning. Pokey’s arrival at Orchard View, she said, was an immensely exciting day, with all her hard work finally coming to fruition.

“I actually had library that day,” she said. “So I didn’t get much work done in library because I was so excited. It was just awesome.”