Southern Penobscot Regional Program

Our school is unique in that it is a program serving some of the most challenging students who are still in public school. All of our kids are recognized as special education students and are here working on anger management, conflict resolution, impulse control and cooperation in a life skill setting. Our class is composed of an amazing set of kids from grades 7th to 12th with Autism. We are calling our garden "The Autism Garden: Growing Community Awareness". I will first explain the community needs we hope to serve and then discuss the goals of the garden.

Communities Needs: Our Old Town Maine community has taken a distinct economic hit when the local wood pulp mill shut down. Many folks in this area are struggling to make end meet especially in the wintertime when cost skyrocket due to heating expenses. Less help is available for more folks in need. In addition to this challenge there are those in the area who see our alternative school as a financial burden in this hard time.

Students needs: Our kids with Autism have a unique set of social challenges that can limit their social outreach. We plan for our garden to be an open and welcoming place. Our life skills based curriculum can utilize the experience to see where food comes from, how to prepared it and making community connections to find and fill needs.

Our Master Goal: Our overall goal is to utilize our garden to grow community interaction between the folks in the community and our amazing kids. The garden will help the community with direct food service while given our kids a wonderful opportunity to engage learn and grow.
Specific Goals:
- The Autism Garden will provide 1 fresh organic meal prepared by the students free of charge to a local community organization. The students will seek out and vote on who will get the food monthly.
- The students will produce 1 fresh organic side for student lunches in the building. They will do this every 2 weeks as the garden allows. The idea being that by providing a well rounded meal to the kids free of charge we can help keep our students healthy and help mediate the high expense of free organic foods that falls on parents in this challenging time.
- Any additional food produced but not immediately used will be made available to the local food bank.
- Although The Autism Garden has specific community goal we plan to utilize the process of growing to teach many concepts in a hands-on and tangible manner. I will be more specific in the school based goals section of the application.