Middle School

Yuba River Charter School

Yuba River Charter School (YRCS) gardens currently serve 30 third graders (3 hrs/week, plus 2 hrs cooking/week) and 60 kindergartners (daily gardening/cooking). The school plans to expand edible programs to serve at least 3 more grades (90 students by Fall '15) as they work with Sierra Harvest to design fully integrated K-8 edible programing for all classes (by Fall '16). Free and reduced lunch rates at YRCS are on the rise--from 31% to 55% since 2010. The challenge to fully integrated edible garden programing at this school is scheduling.

Arthur D. Healey School

Our goal is to expand opportunities for more students to do real hands-on work in the school garden. Using tools, understanding how to plant, care for and harvest produce, and preparing, tasting and sharing their produce can promote independent thinking and problem-solving, shared responsibility for their school, team work, and instill a lifelong interest in learning about and caring for living things and their environment.

A.D. Rundle

A.D. Rundle's garden will grow healthy vegetables, community, curriculum, outdoor experiences, working together, social skills, non-verbal communication, education around nature, and experiences in play not isolated to metal, rubber, and plastic structures. Children have little time for free play anymore, and when children do have free time, it's often spent inside in front of television or computers. School facility playgrounds are often the only outdoor activities that many young children experience, and we hope to improve that by adding more natural space to our school.

Canon Exploratory

Our garden will serve as both a community garden for a nearby low income housing unit, a residential home for adults with special needs and an outdoor classroom for our K-7th grade students. Our students will learn through real world application as they design, plan, cultivate, plant, and tend the garden. We plan to build raised beds that will be filled with vegetables, fruits and edible flowers. Although, the garden will serve as an outdoor learning space for the entire school, the installation of the garden will be a 7th grade project.

Valley Forge Educational Services

Our vegetable garden goals include enabling our students with special needs to reap the benefits from a hands-on outdoor curriculum that teaches them how to connect with the outdoor environment, complete a food garden from seed to harvest, connect with the benefits of healthier lifestyle choices and participate in a positive activity that can help others. Since its installation in the spring of 2014, the garden has been woven into many academic subject areas as well as our enrichment programs.

A J Briesemeister Middle School

The program goals include:Improving overall community wellness by instilling healthy lifestyles in students, providing opportunities for physical activity and the necessary skills and resources to increase their consumption of nutritious foods, particularly fruits and vegetables. Increasing physical activity, fresh fruit and vegetable consumption, and social interaction for community members including seniors. Developing healthier eating habits for all participants by learning to create healthy snacks and meals that include harvested items from their own garden project.

Most Blessed Trinity Academy

This school garden’s mission is to educate children, families and the community about healthy eating, food sourcing, community service, and the joy of growing your own food. Most Blessed Trinity Academy and Youth Conservation Corps consider it important for youth to learn about the importance of what they eat. We have found hands-on learning to be very effective, and kids living in urban areas often have few opportunities to really get their hands dirty. We want to teach them about nutrition while simultaneously showing them that they have the power to grow what they eat.

Burns Latino Studies Academy

Summer of Solutions Hartford is a youth leadership development and food justice program based in Frog Hollow, Hartford. We built a school garden at the Burns Latino Studies Academy, our local community school, in 2012.
Over the past three years, we have worked with teachers and students to care for the garden and harvest the produce. We worked with teachers to write activities in the garden which complemented what their students were learning in the classroom. Each year, we work with 10 classrooms for at least four sessions.

Sugarland Elementary

Sugarland's Inside Out Garden is a powerful educational and environmental tool. Through gardening, our students have an opportunity to develop a greater understanding of the natural world. It provides our impoverished students their first opportunity to dig into dirt and watch plants grow. In addition, the garden provides broader life lessons including contributing to students' knowledge of how to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Because Louisiana is experiencing an epidemic of child obesity and weight-related diseases, the need for prevention education is critical.

Sparkman Junior High

Our goal with this grant for our garden is to plant, care for, harvest and serve fresh wholesome foods for our student's and community. Our student's in each grade k through 8 will adopt an area or planter box in which to plant a selected seed. We as a school are very excited in the opportunity to create and actually eat a food that we have grown. We plan on growing a large enough crop so that our student's can harvest and share part of this crop with their families. This project will be a huge lesson in caring for our community and giving back to them.

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