IRVINE : Kids Raise Awareness in Bean Field

Britney Ward crouched amid rows of string beans under a hot, late-morning sun Wednesday and pushed aside the dense green leaves to find the remaining vegetables.

“They blend into the plants, but if you lift them up, you can find a whole bunch,” said Britney, 10, as she plucked another eight-inch-long bean and popped it into her plastic grocery bag.

The field that Britney and about 320 of her Irvine classmates scoured for two hours had already been picked by commercial farm workers. But there were plenty of beans left for the young gleaners from Brywood Elementary School, who were getting a lesson in social responsibility.

State educational guidelines require schools to teach the value of giving back to society, Principal Stuart Cunningham said as he kept an eye on students spread throughout the large field. Brywood chose to teach the civics lesson by giving all of its students firsthand experience picking beans for Orange County food programs, Cunningham said.

“The kids are also learning what it’s like to be a stoop laborer,” he said.

The school works with volunteers from the Orange County Harvest program, who glean vegetable fields and fruit groves each Wednesday to collect tons of food for area homeless shelters and food distribution programs. Half of Brywood’s students picked food Wednesday; the other half did their picking last week, Cunningham said.

To teach social responsibility, students have also worked for Irvine Temporary Housing, the Irvine Senior Center and a Long Beach homeless shelter and have helped clean up area parks, Cunningham said.

“The whole idea is that kids make a difference, and they can begin now to develop a sense of responsibility for their community,” he said.

The Brywood students collected about 2,600 pounds of beans Wednesday. The vegetables were sent to the Food Distribution Center in Orange, which supplies food to 215 social-service agencies and to other large food-distribution centers.

Mark Oehlman, 10, a fifth-grader at Brywood, worked in the field with his friend Jason Reed, also 10, picking through the plants and looking for ripe beans without worm holes or other damage. The two filled a plastic laundry basket and nearly refilled it by quitting time at 11 a.m.

“We’re picking beans for people that don’t have much food,” Mark said.

“It’s sort of fun, but it’s sort of tiring,” Jason said.

About 20 parents and 12 teachers from the school were on hand to supervise and pick along with the students.

Jill Specter, the mother of a kindergartner and a third-grader at Brywood who picked beans last week, worked with school officials to create the program.

“I was looking for a program that would raise the social consciousness of the children and for them to find a way they could do something about the problems in the world,” Specter said while picking beans. “It’s hard for the small ones to do something meaningful other than asking mom or dad to write a check.”