Dana Elementary School

Our school is set in a rural North Carolina community with a significant number (80%) of students on free and reduced lunches. We built raised gardens on campus for classrooms to use for growing vegetables and flowers. The gardens were being used but not effectively. This year our School Improvement Team approved a STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) specials rotation for our Kindergarten-5th grade students. We are using our campus gardens for our students' investigations. The outdoor learning areas promote communication because students will be interacting with each other as they investigating, monitoring, and harvesting their plants. All of our students will be involved with the gardens. We would also like to provide cooking experiences for our students using our garden crops but we need to purchase equipment. We want students to learn how to dehydrate our herbs for the community to purchase which will help our school have a sustainable garden.