Garden Classrooms

Cumming Elementary

Our goal this year is to enhance our gardens to provide food for community food banks and to feed students in our school cafeteria. We plant and harvest vegetables year round; however, we want to increase our offerings by planting a strawberry bed, blueberry, thornless blackberry, and raspberry bushes; and several fruit trees. The Whole Foods grant will be used to fund this portion of our gardens.

Stetson School

We have established three primary goals: - Teach students about sustainable practices and the importance of sustainability and our food system. - Provide staff the opportunity to purchase fresh, organic produce, and to provide our cafeteria and classrooms with the same for free as supplies allow. - To show students that great things can be accomplished through hard work.

Woodland Star Charter School

We hope to enhance our garden with this grant by building a cob bench and oven. The bench will provide protection for the garden and a wonderful place to sit and observe/enjoy it. The oven will create a central gathering place for our many school festivals and a wonderful opportunity for students to cook nutritious foods gathered directly from the garden. To support use of the oven, we plan to grow crops that will be utilized with the oven, including tomatoes, basil, peppers, herbs and a host of vegetables to roast.

Hiawatha Leadership Academy

The goals of our school garden are to give our scholars a sense of where food comes from and how much effort it takes to produce quality food, to inspire a passion for gardening, and create greater sustainability in the urban context. At Hiawatha Academy, we believe in the importance of providing scholars real time and hands-on opportunities to connect their experiences to curriculum in the classroom.

Jane Addams K-8

Our garden goals are primarily to make a garden environment easily accessible to children at our school and to families in the neighborhood. JA K-8 is in an urban setting serving a large immigrant population with English as a second language. We have a high rate of free and reduced lunch and many families are living in apartments withhout access to garden space. The garden has gates that are always open so that it is accessible to any one at anytime. We see it as an important resource to help families feel welcome at the school.

Irvington Community Middle School

While establishing our garden this year as a staff, we set the expectations to work collaboratively to grow vegetables organically, sharing the bounty with staff, students, parents, and the community. We had a successful year in caring for the garden, sharing the responsibilities with the student environmental club (ICE). The shared food with the staff usually came back in a dish that was then shared with the staff. Students were able to bring vegetables home and parents were welcomed to come and pick their own vegetables when picking up their children.

GREEN Charter School

GREEN Charter's gardening goal is to deepen the connection our students have with nature.

Harbor Learning Center

The goal of the garden is to involve students, school staff, families and community members in growing, maintaining and harvesting vegetables and fruits. The garden will educate these groups about gardening techniques, which they can duplicate at home or in community gardens. The garden will introduce these groups to the health benefits of gardening as a source of fresh vegetables and fruit, financial benefits through lower food costs, healthy physical activity and improved nutrition.

Evergreen Country Day School

Our goal is to achieve a sustainable growing space which will serve as both a demonstration of gardening principles as well as a living laboratory to carryout investigations. Another goal would be to harvest food which would make its way to our school lunch salad bar and may be donated to our local food bank. In order to accomplish this goal, we have developed curriculum related to gardening, and have scheduled at least one science class per week, per grade to occur in the greenhouse.

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