Volunteers are teaching elementary children to grow and eat vegetables, reports the San Francisco Bay Guardian. But garden coordinators have to spend as much time fund-raising as mulching.
The list of touted benefits is lengthy: students reap fresh air and physical exercise, hands-on participation, awareness of the natural environment, so called “school bonding,” and an unprecedented taste for raw spinach. For school faculty, there are welcome breaks in the classroom regimen, an engaging outlet for unruly pupils, and a bridge to involvement with volunteers in the community. And parents get to share skills and experience, from farm expertise to carpentry, that once felt irrelevant to an academic setting.
At the Edible Schoolyard, a restaurant owner’s project at a Berkeley middle school, graduating eighth graders ceremonially plant corn for the new sixth graders to harvest in the fall, the Guardian reports.
In Hayward, garden teacher Rachel Harris says she saw a student at a school barbecue trade a Butterfinger for a second helping of grilled zucchini.
I grew a lima bean in kindergarten. But I didn’t eat it. It was family by then.
$10,000 plus per year per kid and they have to go begging for seed money?
We put in our garden at home for a few bucks. How expensive can it be at a school?
Rose
http://learningathome.freedomblogging.com
Because MA is supposed to have a superior educational system, no doubt many in CA also need remedial work.
When there is more emphasis on growing vegetables than reading and math, what do you expect?
Growing a few seeds and measuring growth etc. is appropriate for a biology class, but this is Sociology - Soviet Style.
Frank-
No one ever said school was a Democracy… I personally prefer to consider it a feudal dictatorship.
As for the plantings, from the sounds of it, the garden instructors are not directly employed by the school and do not get a slice of the school budget.
Agreed - the program should fall under the science program at the school since it teaches plant development and environmental concepts.