CFC Awards $39K Grant to UA School Garden Workshop
The Community Finance Corporation awarded a $39,267 grant to the University of Arizona’s School Garden Workshop, which helps Tucson schools develop and manage hands-on gardening instruction.
The grant comes as the Community and School Garden Program is emerging as a national and international leader in the field of K-12 school garden enrichment.
Moses Thompson, director of the program, says school gardens give real world context to classroom instruction, including math, science, climate change and cooperative problem-solving.
“It’s a powerful thing for kids,” Thompson says. “Students can say to themselves, ‘I didn't know how to grow food. And now I know how to grow food. I didn't know how to tend chickens. And now I know how to tend chickens and I can problem solve, persist through challenges, and work with my classmates to produce food.”
The seeds of his involvement in the program were planted when he started as the school counselor at Manzo Elementary in 2005. Thompson, who had no gardening experience, worked with the community to develop a desert plant park on a vacant lot opposite the school. Seeking a different way to communicate with students in crisis who would come to his office, he began taking them to the lot to clean it up and establish native plants.
He noticed he was able to better connect with students and started taking parents over to the lot when they came to pick up their kids so they could see what they had been doing.
“We would walk and then parents would say, ‘This reminds me of my grandparents. This reminds me of the ranch in Mexico. This is such a good thing for the neighborhood. Do you mind if I come off school hours with my kid and water and help take care of it?”
His experience led him to build a garden program at Manzo. In the years since, Manzo’s courtyards and breezeways have bloomed with vegetable gardens and fruit trees. A greenhouse houses a garden complete with tilapia tanks. An experimental agrivoltaic garden grows underneath solar panels with Mexican sweet lime, avocado trees, chiltepin peppers and other plants, with a similar control plot nearby so students—both from the elementary school and the University of Arizona—can study the differences between the shaded and unshaded projects in terms of temperature, water use and other factors.
The kids are taught to care for chickens. Thompson recalls a time when the coop’s door was left open and the birds got loose.
“You've got the whole flock of chickens running around the schoolyard and the kids have to problem solve,” Thompson says. “I could go into a classroom and read a book about group problem-solving. But when you've got a flock of chickens out, it's real. The kids have to do it.”
A tortoise habitat is surrounded by a stone-and-mortar wall, which was built after students received a tutorial from one child’s grandfather, who had done similar stonework on lookouts on Mount Lemmon Highway in his youth.
“We took what he taught us in a day and, in the course of the school year, built that rock wall,” Thompson says. “The kids carried all the stone and mixed the mortar.”
Manzo has seen an extraordinary turnaround over the last decade, when TUSD administrators put it on a list to consider closing. At the time, the school had roughly 140 students and was earning a failing grade under Arizona Department of Education standards. Today, enrollment has more than doubled to 360 students and the school is within reach of an A grade.
Manzo Principal Steven La Turco credits the gardening program for inspiring students to get engaged in their studies. He recalls that when he was serving as principal of Roskruge K-8 School, he saw a group of struggling students find motivation in working on a garden. When they were told they might have to give up the class in order to spend more time on core subjects, they promised to get their grades up—and they did.
“The garden program was a motivator, it was their hook, it was their connection to the school,” La Turco says. “Their investment into their academics was gardening, which led to them having a C's and B's in math and English.”
As Thompson was developing the gardens at Manzo, the University of Arizona was launching the Community and School Garden Program in collaboration with TUSD and the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. The program started with just one undergraduate intern, one high school teacher and a class at the Project More Charter High School. Under the leadership of Sallie Marston, a Regents Professor Emerita in the School of Geography, Development and Environment, the project expanded over the years and, in 2015, hired Thompson to coordinate between the UA and TUSD to find ways to support teachers who were developing school gardens.
The large raised-bed garden at John B. Wright Elementary School is part of a larger project that includes a mini orchard and desert tortoise habitat.
The Community and School Garden Program is now in more than two dozen TUSD elementary, middle and high schools. In addition, it serves as a resource for schools that are not formally in the program and provides training for teachers across the state through the Arizona Department of Education. It’s also making waves outside of Tucson, as Thompson and his team has been presenting seminars on the program at conferences across the country and overseas. The program did an foreign exchange with teachers from the United Kingdom, who came to Tucson while a group of Tucson teachers traveled to the UK to learn about their approach.
CFC’s grant will provide funding to hire Debra Rodriguez as a communications specialist who can develop a marketing plan, plan events, build private sector partnerships, lead social media outreach and pursue grants.
Rodriguez, who worked in marketing and development at the University of Arizona for nearly two decades, says she likes how the program “takes the natural region into consideration, and kids getting their hands in the dirt instead of going to detention. Sure sounds a lot better. And just the philosophy of knowing where your food comes from. I just think it's going to be so much healthier for the kids who are going through this program.”
CFC Board member Ken Abrahams sees multiple benefits from the program, including helping students learn about agriculture and nutrition.
“I think we increasingly become disconnected from that whole process,” Abrahams says. “The children today often think food just grows on shelves. This gives them an opportunity to participate directly in the whole idea of food.”
Abrahams was inspired by the program’s potential for growth.
“They've got the good DNA,” Abrahams says. “They could also be the go-to experts on how to set them up and operate school gardens. I think they could build their reputation and become the expert in the area, which I think would be a huge accomplishment.”
