A Child’s Garden of Lessons
School gardens, a simple idea that dates at least to the last turn of the century, are enjoying a rebirth and transformation, sprouting anew from the blacktop playgrounds of Los Angeles city schools and fertile patches of dirt at suburban schools like this one.
“This is a way to get children outside and have them experience the real world. Too often they think that what they see on TV is the real world,” said Jan French, a veteran third-grade teacher at Cameron Ranch Elementary School in this town just east of Sacramento, who started her school’s garden five years ago.
Pushed along by a large and diverse group of supporters ranging from the state superintendent of public instruction to the mayor of Los Angeles to the California Farm Bureau Federation, there are now about 1,600 school gardens in California’s 8,000 public schools. Most were started in the last few years.
The Legislature has jumped in too, passing a bill signed by the governor that this year creates the voluntary Instructional School Gardens program for public schools. Lawmakers approved another bill requiring the state Department of Education to create a comprehensive agricultural education curriculum for public schools that stresses the importance of agriculture to California and its economy.
“This is not just about cows and plows anymore,” said George Gomes, Farm Bureau Federation administrator. Modern agriculture’s complexities require better informed students, he said.
As the biggest agricultural state in the union, with production valued at $27 billion a year, agriculture today has many dimensions. It has strong connections to science and technology, environmental quality, human health, urbanization, changing demographics and, of course, to the basic need to feed a hungry and growing populace.
“I’m on a mission to have a garden in every school in California,” said Delaine Eastin, the state superintendent of public instruction, one of the leading forces behind the new movement. “There are lots of academic connections that can be made to science and other wonderful spinoffs.
“A lot of kids think food comes from the store,” she said. “If we can go back and show them the history [of agriculture and culture] . . . it will make the world more meaningful to them.”
For 8-year-old Varvara Seliutina, a third-grader at Cameron Ranch elementary and an ardent gardener, the lessons learned from growing broccoli, sunflowers, radishes, sugar peas, onions, flowers and cotton are much more basic.
“I learned that some plants in winter, they die,” Varvara said after carefully considering the question while standing in her school’s garden on a recent sunny day. “And if you put leaves in the ground in the winter and wait until spring, it makes the soil good.”
The simple idea of school gardens has taught generations of children, especially those in the city, where food comes from and has engendered respect for the land and the rhythms of life, educators say.
Kay Sain was a third-grade teacher at Tahoe Elementary School in south Sacramento when she started a garden a few years ago on wagons that she and her students would roll in and out of classrooms. Many of her students were minorities from low-income families. Many lived in apartments and most had never been on a farm.
Sain, a 27-year veteran teacher, and her students talked about how plants grow, their need for water and sunlight and their contributions to good nutrition. But it was the unexpected lessons that surprised Sain and convinced her the garden was more than just simply plants and soil.
It was difficult, she said, to get her students’ parents, particularly parents of bilingual children, involved in the school. “A lot of parents were unable to help with the academics,” she said. But when the garden was proposed, many of the same parents enthusiastically participated, helping to choose plants, preparing the ground and offering various green thumb tips.
“This brought them into our school and we, as teachers, began looking at the total family. It was something we didn’t expect,” said Sain. There also was another surprising benefit. Misbehaving students were some of the most dedicated and responsible gardeners.
Nonnie Korten works at the Monlux Mathematics-Science Technology magnet school in North Hollywood and is part of a new group called the Partnership for Agriculture and Science in Education. The group is working with the Los Angeles Unified School District to develop school gardens and a broader awareness of agriculture.
There are now about 200 city schools with gardens. Some dug up blacktop playgrounds to find room to plant; others have used barrels or school roofs. “We just try to make it happen however we can,” Korten said.
The gardens, she has found, help students comprehend abstract math and science concepts in an understandable way.
“There’s a feeling among educators that kids have difficulty with what they read in a textbook . . . if they haven’t had life experiences in the subject,” Korten said. “You might have trouble understanding a certain concept, for example, if you haven’t dug in the dirt and seen worms or dealt with an insect invasion.”
School gardens also are a big hit at City Hall. Mayor Richard Riordan included $100,000 in the city budget for a pilot project called Gardens for Kids L.A. that will kick off in February.
“We think this is a wonderful hands-on way for kids to learn about a wide variety of subjects, like science and the environment, culture and history, and good nutrition,” said Lillian Kawasaki, general manager of the city’s Environmental Affairs Department.
The school garden program approved by the Legislature will receive $175,000 from the California Integrated Waste Management Board to promote composting and recycling, as well as private donations. The program to create an agricultural education curriculum program will be funded by $300,000 from the state budget.
