Garden School Foundation

History

In summer of 2003, the local community and teaching staff at 24th Street Elementary School learned that the school was due to have its playground repaved using money from Proposition BB. Under this plan, the old asphalt was to be removed and new asphalt laid in the same footprint. There were also plans for a new cafeteria and lunch shelter, to be funded by Measure K, and erected after the repaving program. While enthused by the progress, 24th Street School staff, led by 2nd grade teacher Linda Slater and principal Yongpyo Grace Yoon, approached neighbors and local businesses to see if they couldn't come up with more optimistic model for the future than asphalt and chain link on the verge of a freeway.

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP

They found an eager community. Their partners became the 24th Street Block Club, the district council members Martin Ludlow then Herb Wesson, the Neighborhood Council, the Los Angeles Police Department, the LAUSD police, the Hancock Park Garden Club, Pasadena Garden Club and Diggers garden club, the West Adams Heritage Assn. and the local employer, LaBrea Bakery, Inc. In March 2005, 24th Street Block Club sought out Nancy Goslee Power to draw a prototype plan. She consulted the students, teachers, and community while working in concert with LAUSD facilities and the repaving program to produce a plan that met their collective needs.

What started as a repaving program was now a partnership between the community and the teachers to save a failing school. The park-starved community wanted a meeting space, sports facility, potentially a venue for a farmers' market. Teaching staff wanted outdoor classrooms to start innovative programs designed to tackle a hot list of urban challenges:

1) closing the achievement gap

2) promoting English language development

3) improving time-keeping and raising average daily attendance,

4) involving parents and the community

5) fighting obesity and promoting physical fitness

6) buffering freeway pollution and fighting asthma

7) creating council circles for teaching and conflict resolution

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

The project couldn't accomplish everything at once, but it could lay the groundwork for the future. The time to do it was when the main yard was being bulldozed under the BB repaving program. So working with Principal Yoon, the 24th Street Complex Manager and LAUSD Facilities staff, Power created a plan that created spaces for: teaching gardens, game courts, track and field, reading circles, community picnic spaces, and a teaching kitchen.

VISION INTO REALITY

Turning this dream into reality involved tackling a host of practical questions: how to create outdoor classrooms that would succeed where current methods are failing more than half the kids? How to maintain the outdoor classrooms needed for practical learning? How to pay for them? There was no borrowing the answers, so the team began experimenting.

Teachers decided that they needed a test plot. On March 31, 2005, the entire school had a "dig day" converting a grass patch in a courtyard into a trial teaching garden. It was opened with a community day attended by more than 2,000 children, parents, teachers and neighbors and catered by a dozen restaurants brought together by LaBrea Bakery. Windrose Farm donated hundreds of tomato seedlings.

TRIAL LESSONS

Party over, work began. Kindergarten teacher Charity Burton, second grade teacher Linda Slater, third grade teacher Michelle Ereckson and fourth grade teacher Tedd Wakeman led the faculty to use the test garden to take science and math lessons outside to see if their children could learn by doing instead of memorization. Linda Slater began art projects. Michelle Ereckson began nutrition lessons, teaching her third-graders to cook their own healthful snacks.

COMMUNITY-LAUSD PARTNERSHIP

The lessons were successful, but teachers needed help to run the garden, LAUSD Facilities needed help to build it and school custodians needed help to maintain it. So La Brea Bakery opened a stall in Santa Monica Farmers selling bread to fund the program. Teachers then began teaching civics and nutrition by organizing bi-monthly field trips to the market, where the children saw their art on display, how the garden was funded and met farmers who grew the same vegetables that they did. More than 1,100 children have had their first trip to a farmers' market in the first year of the program, and for each class trip, five parents were drawn into the new programs at their school.

ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION

LaBrea Bakery also hired UC Berkeley-trained gardener Nick Tan of the Eagle Rock firm Urban Organics one day a week to help teachers lead the garden lessons. A local gardener, Sergio Fuentes, joined Tan as a teaching assistant and to oversee garden maintenance. Tan took the cooking lessons to neighborhood homes for lack of in-school cooking facilities.

Silverton came to give a succession of lessons, one day to plant wheat and make whole-wheat bread, where she showed the germ in the loaf; another visit for a celebratory cup-cake making day, when she said, "sugar is a spice, not an ingredient."

THE ALCHEMY OF LEARNING

While continuing the four Friday in-school lessons that directly augment the curricula, the Garden School Foundation is now developing the program every day of the week after school in focused clubs. The community sees it as a powerful tool to keep children from straying into gangs and teachers see it as a way to give form and shape to a languishing Urban Classroom Teacher Program (UCTP) in which they are required to spend 2 ½ hours every week directing an after school program.

The clubs will include: the garden club, the cooking club, the math club, the science club, the book club, the school pride club, and the special event club. The teachers will include Michelle Ereckson, Tedd Wakeman, Martha Tocco, James Scott, Mark Saltus, Christopher Paulsen, David Whang, and Charity Burton.

The most ambitious program, to be led by Silverton, LaBrea Bakery and their partners from the cooking community will be developed much like the "Edible Schoolyard" at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. It will have a kitchen garden and teaching kitchen, where children can grow, then prepare their own food. Parents will be enlisted to assist these classes, and are welcome to bring their extended families. School garden projects in Ventura County have shown this to be particularly attractive to immigrants and low-income families, who need little more than a family recipe and a good story to participate in their school. For immigrant parents with agrarian backgrounds, it is often the only way to give back to the schools educating their children.

On weekends, Neighborhood Council member Renee Gunter would like to open the campus to work with the local water districts to teach conversion to drought tolerant, native gardening, using the California woodland garden as setting. Slow Food LA would like to bring a farmers market develop on the campus on the weekends.