It isn’t the best day for gardening (overcast, windy, cold and just a few days removed from a hard freeze) but that doesn’t squelch the first graders’ enthusiasm as they stand ankle-deep in dirt, examining broccoli and cabbage leaves.
A student wonders aloud about tiny green bugs swarming the plant, and soon, his instructor leads the class inside, where they take a closer look.
This wasn’t on the day’s lesson, explains Mark Painter, a white-haired, suntanned, bespectacled man whose dirt-filled fingernails tell you his isn’t typically an indoor classroom. “Depending on what they find out when we go outside each day to collect data, the curriculum will change,” he says.
So the students spend the first part of class bent over a microscope studying leaves crawling with aphids, which first-grader Aresemaa Tsegaye describes as “little plant-eating microorganisms.”
“There’s one crawling on the desk,” her classmate Sophie McCauley says.
“These two look like they are dancing,” muses Daniel Riemer, giggling, and you remember that they are first-graders.
After discussing microbes and the bugs that eat them (mostly ladybugs, which aren’t always girls, Daniel tells me), the class moves on to a controlled experiment comparing peppers growing in manmade fertilizer to the same growing in fertilizer made, naturally, from worm poop. (Amazing. Not one child snickers at Painter’s mention of “worm poop”.)
Everything the children learn in the garden and its corresponding class is based on science curriculum. For 15 years or so, the Dallas Independent School District supported the garden classroom and paid Painter to operate it as a science lab for kindergarten through fifth-grade students at Stonewall Jackson Elementary in East Dallas. The principal, teachers, parents and the greater community took pride in the outdoor laboratory where students tend crops, study the ecosystem, and conduct hands-on scientific experiments.
They use math, keep journals, and conduct science in the garden, teacher Barbara Uskovich says, but one of the most important things they learn in the garden is to be comfortable with nature.
“You’ll see these children get nose-to-nose with a honeybee because they are interested. It’s like the Lakota [Native American] saying: ‘To touch the earth is to have harmony with nature.’”
In 2007 the school district, in financial distress, enacted a large reduction in force, which led to the loss of many DISD programs and staff. Included in the so-called “RIF” was the learning garden program. The district offered Painter a job in a classroom where he could replace a newer teacher, but he said “no thanks”, and walked away from his post of more than a decade. “I’m not really an inside person,” he says (though he seems to be OK inside as long as there’s dirt on the desks).
Stonewall parents led the charge to get Painter back. “When the RIF happened in 2007, we lost all sorts of valuable programs and people,” parent and garden volunteer Kate Cromwell says. “Our sign language program, which we were known for, in fact, was cut. Everyone was upset. But of all the things lost, the loudest outcry here was for Mr. Painter and the garden.”
Cromwell organized a group of parents who petitioned the school board, insisting that the garden curriculum leads to better test scores, school recognition and, thus, increased surrounding property values.
“We wrote hundreds of letters in protest, contacted every media outlet, and had a good case, but we got nowhere,” Cromwell says.
DISD just didn’t have the money. So she and fellow parents launched the nonprofit organization Stonewall Gardens, which in just two months, from November 2007 to January 2008, raised $30,000. They used some of that to bring Painter back on board part time, and thanks to a tremendous amount of support from parents and the East Dallas community (Stonewall has a section of public plots, too) the school has been able to maintain the program, for now. They could still use help funding the garden next year and beyond, Cromwell says.
Stonewall has seen so much success with its garden program that other schools in the neighborhood are aiming to emulate it, and some of them have garnered grants to grow the idea. A Fort Worth-based charity called REAL School Gardens is actively supporting learning gardens at three East Dallas elementary schools including Hexter, Robert E. Lee and Sanger. REAL School Gardens gives grants to schools that serve predominately low-income families, spokeswoman Jennifer Fitzgerald says.
“We usually choose schools that have 70 percent of the students on free or reduced meal plans. We can’t support every school, but this helps us determine where the resources are most needed,” Fitzgerald says. “We look for schools with strong leadership, supportive principals and a supportive surrounding community.”
That sort of support foundation will be vital when it comes to maintaining a learning garden, says Painter, who is partnering with REAL School Gardens to advise the grassroots efforts of school communities starting their own gardens.
With help from master gardener Glen Farmer and, naturally, a bit of advice from Painter, Lipscomb Elementary School, though it has yet to receive any significant amount of startup funding, is implementing a garden program, too. A little more than a year ago, Tim and Mandy Allen launched efforts to get the Lipscomb garden growing. The couple, who has a daughter, Madelyn, at Lipscomb and a son, Joe, who will attend Lipscomb next year, felt it would complement the revitalization the school has seen over the past few years. Tim Allen watched his wife, as PTA president, struggle with ways to help the students have a richer experience at Lipscomb, he says.
“I believe the learning garden will help improve education and strengthen the school,” Tim Allen says.
It hasn’t been easy (irrigation problems stalled progress for some time) but soon, Allen says, “The fun part will begin, and we will start to see the fruits of our labors.”
A school learning garden is no doubt a bonus, but the experts concur that in order to be successful, the garden needs to be incorporated into day-to-day curriculum.
In REAL School Gardens-supported programs, teachers are not necessarily doing extra work, Fitzgerald says. “The curriculum is TEKS (Texas education standards) based, and a hands-on way of learning things they are learning already. It is teaching through doing, and scientific concepts come to life in the garden,” she says.
Painter says gardening should be not only a part of the lesson plan, but also a way of life, beginning with the youngest students.
Because it captured the students’ imaginations, Stonewall’s garden has grown from a tiny patch of dirt and beans occupying a clandestine corner of a schoolyard into a 20,000-square-foot outdoor science lab, says Cromwell, who now serves as president of the Stonewall Gardens nonprofit.
And what first captured a few young minds, Painter says, might someday reach a larger population.
“We can change the culture, starting with the kids,” he says.
Watch video of the Stonewall Jackson Elementary students in their garden here.
Read daily gardening journals at stonewallgardens.com.
