Middle School

In our first year (2011-2012), we started with three 10 square foot raised garden beds to practice managing a sustainable community garden. We did not have an outside water source, so relied on filling 5 gallon buckets to get us through a dry, very hot summer. Since then, we re-established an outside water faucet, enabling us to triple the size of our garden. We now have 9 raised beds, 10 square feet each. Our next goal is to expand our garden, building a greenhouse in an interior courtyard area that can be accessible to students throughout the winter.

The primary goal of this project is to be able to reduce the sodium utilization being offered through the School Lunch Program. Several other goals I have set include learning how to dry and preserve plants, and expose kids to ideas on how salt, fat and sugar can be reduced when cooking foods at home. To achieve these goals, the premise of the project will be to start, develop and sustain a school herb garden.

Our garden goal is for the school and community. We want to make people and students aware of healthy living. There is so much violence in our city. We want to instill the best choices of ways to spend time in our children. Healthy living starts with the thoughts, the air we breathe and taking care of the earth. This can be done with planting your own foods and eventually composting. Also taking care of the garden is taking care of the community. It is a form of empowerment and beautification simultaneously.

Our goal is to connect our garden with in-class curriculum for all grades from Pre-K through Eighth Grade. This will include hands-on reinforcement of our Curriculum Standards and Objectives. Our Lead Teacher is directly integrating garden activities into the curriculum while working with Project Learning Tree.
We currently have an afterschool cooking club which will incorporate harvested produce into its dishes. One of our other staff members is a chef and plans to use vegetables from the garden in cooking demonstrations.