Harp Elementary School

The mission of our garden project is to encourage students and community members to work together using new techniques to achieve a healthy thriving community garden. A successful garden is the first step to healthy independent students; it provides students access to fresh food. Our cooking classes are the second step, providing students the knowledge to prepare it. For many of our students the lunch they receive at school is only meal they will receive for the day. Over 70% are on free or reduced lunches. Cooking classes help us to educate students so that they can make good choices at mealtime, as well as grow and cook their own food at home. Over 70% of our school’s population is Hispanic/Marshallese. We have a large English as Second Language population; it is proven that hands-on service learning helps ESL students connect with new languages and concepts. Service-learning will help teachers to reach a larger variety of learning styles as well. Our program allows students to learn to grow and cook on a budget in this economically challenging time. On almost any day you can see students participating in a rainbow scavenger hunt in our garden, identifying seeds, studying MyPlate, singing songs about dirt with sign language or feeding chickens. With the ISEP Grant we hope to fund our 2014-2015 cooking classes/ school cookbook to battle obesity. In 2009 over 42% of our 640 students were considered obese. That is almost double the county average. We require that each student spend at least ten hours in our garden/ nutrition program, almost seven hours over the national standard. We have the time and dedication, but we need help purchasing ingredients (other than those from our garden) for this large scale cooking project. With this project everyone wins because the money goes directly towards feeding food insecure students, but also helps to promote positive lifestyles and the development of life skills.