Pioneer Elementary School

Program Type: 
Garden Classrooms
Grade Level/Age Group: 
Kindergarten, Lower Elementary
Number of Individuals Program Serves: 
1,000
Year Founded: 
2014
About the Program: 

Our goal is to build a raised-bed vegetable garden so Pioneer students can have consistent access to hands-on outdoor environmental education experiences over the course of their elementary school career. Over the last ten years, environmental education (in the form of Outdoor School and field trips) has been eliminated from our district curriculum. We want to create a school garden to provide teachers with an accessible, engaging way to integrate environmental education into their curriculum. Students will have the opportunity to learn, first-hand, about invaluable concepts such as organic gardening, composting, decomposition, beneficial insects, soil enrichment and depletion, erosion, ecosystems, and plant and animal life cycles.

Our vegetable garden will also create an environmental educational opportunity that reaches beyond our student body. The development and maintenance of our school garden will have a tremendous impact on our entire school community: students, teachers, staff, parents, and community members will all be invited to collaborate in the development and maintenance of our school garden.