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.
In 2014, we noticed that participation in the garden increased past what our Summer of Solutions team had organized. We heard from students that teachers had taken them out to look for insects, and we found a pumpkin-growing experiment set up along the fence! We are thrilled to see this increased investment in the site. As we move into our fourth year of programming, we want to build on this to secure the garden's role as a cornerstone of the Burns School.