Teaching to Grow

Email: cassiescott@earthlink.net

The garden is located in North Richmond, California, an economically distressed community where multiple stressors on community members often lead to violence. Most people do not have access to fresh vegetables, and before the school garden project, some kids didn’t know it was okay to eat food that didn’t come in a plastic wrapper. “Is that real?” a student recently asked when she saw a purple cabbage growing in the garden. There are no grocery stores in North Richmond, only liquor stores.

The inception of the garden occurred in 1995 when Cassie Scott was working as an intern play therapist at Verde Elementary School. She noticed a line of sixteen local women with hoes clear a half acre trash-filled field on the school grounds in three days. They were preparing the ground for a community garden, and Cassie was inspired to develop a children’s garden alongside the family plots. One of those women, Bienveneda Meza, along with the school’s principal and the Even Start Family Literacy Program, worked with Cassie to make the garden a reality. A decade later, the garden has shown an enormous and measurable impact. In the seven years that the Verde Partnership Garden has been funded, Verde Elementary School has increased it’s API (Academic Performance Index) score by 92%, the highest rate of increase among elementary schools in California. Prior to this, Verde Elementary was the lowest ranked school in the state in 1999 and 2000. And it’s not just the students who have benefited. “There is much more of a feeling of cooperation among the staff”, Principal Rosemary Mauldin says. “The garden has become the heart of the school.”

Mission Statement: The Verde Partnership Garden is a school and community garden project committed to growing healthy children along with food and flowers. The garden is an outdoor laboratory that brings classroom learning to life, and is a connective hub and safe haven in the community. Working together with parents, Verde Elementary School teachers and community members provide classes in cooking, nutrition, job readiness, literacy and leadership, as well as fresh vegetables for the community, a student run business, and service-learning opportunities for students to make positive changes in their world.

In this land of perpetual summer, the garden is home to a wide variety of species. The students have planted a healing plants garden, butterfly attracting and native plant sections, fruit trees, flowers of all imaginable colours and shapes, and of course vegetables – from artichoke to zucchini and everything in between. There are beds in the shape of Africa and South America to help remind the young gardeners about their heritage. All aspects of the garden feed into the student’s curriculum.

Education: The focus of the education program is to introduce children to gardening and the life science concepts that go along with it such as natural cycles, habitats, plant and animal communities, ecology, and nutrition. In addition, the program’s focus is to strengthen fundamental education in math, science, reading and nutrition through capitalizing on children’s enthusiasm for the garden. Garden-based activities, such as keeping garden journals, map making and measuring exercises, raising crickets and butterflies, and observing garden plants, insects, habitats and natural cycles, all help to combine academic learning with hands-on experience. Garden staff work closely with teachers to insure that activities tie into classroom study and help address State Academic Standards. The garden has proven to be an excellent place to forge real-life relationships with subject areas that children may initially perceive as abstract and disconnected from their daily lives.

Nutrition: Growing food in the garden teaches children about nutrition and about loving fresh, healthy food. Healthy eating is a habit, one that students practice as they make peanut butter, salsa, carrot juice, salad sandwiches and cooked greens from the garden. Most of the garden groups also include a nutrition education component. Cooking classes and taste tests are an additional aspect of the nutrition program.

Life Skills and Leadership: The life-skills aspect of the program is embedded in all garden activities. Many kinds of relationships thrive in the garden environment. Children and parents gardening together enrich family bonds. People of different cultures working together learn acceptance. School and neighboring businesses have noticed a decrease in vandalism in the area surrounding the garden, and teachers report that previously identified "problem children" demonstrate positive behavioral changes after becoming engaged in garden activities. By forging healthy relationships and seeing their hard work affect their environment, children gain self-esteem and learn that their actions have positive consequences.

Upper grade Garden and Nutrition Leaders teach younger classmates garden concepts and practices. In addition, they help teach basic nutrition to younger students and will be selling Verde-grown flowers, herbs and vegetables and providing taste tests at an upcoming after-school market.

Cassie Scott comes from a long line of Canadian social activists, and sees her current work as aligned with a food-justice movement in which access to fresh, healthy food is being reclaimed by neighborhoods in which this connection has been severed. Her grandfather, Francis Reginald Scott was a poet, a civil libertarian, a political theorist, and one of the founders of the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation which eventually became the New Democratic Party in the early 60s). Her father, Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a poet, writer and researcher whose work has explored the inner workings of the CIA, the Iran-Contra affair, the death of JFK and the impact U.S. covert operations have had on democracy at home and abroad. Her late mother, Maylie Scott, a Zen priest, influenced Cassie’s strong spiritual grounding that guides her actions.

Working with her hands has always been important to Cassie. She put herself through graduate school in creative arts therapy working as a plumber. After studying at the University of Toronto and then UC Santa Cruz, Cassie moved to an organic Buddhist farm called Zen Center Green Gulch Farm, located in Marin County just north of San Francisco. Working the earth is embraced with a meditative quality, and she became proficient in composting, plant propagation, Alan Chadwick’s biodynamic French intensive method and integrated pest management. She is currently collaborating with Urban Tilth to promote ‘5% Richmond’, a plan to bring together gardeners and local food distributors with the goal of producing enough locally and sustainably grown produce to feed five percent of the city of Richmond.

Some years later, Cassie contracted Lyme’s Disease after backpacking in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. “I was very ill”, she recalls, “and I didn’t seem to be able to get any better. What made me finally feel better was working in the garden. The connection between gardening and healing became so clear. I could connect with my own strength, my own resiliency.”

With her background, and this personal healing experience through gardening, Cassie recognized the potential value a garden would have for the academically disenfranchised students of Verde School, so she proposed adding the garden to the curriculum. The students’ response was in line with her instinct. As a community member observes, “It calms their spirits to get their hands in the soil; you can see their anger diffuse in front of your eyes.”

Growing students and growing gardens seems to be what sustains this vital woman with a dynamic approach to living and learning. “Almost every day there is a moment of complete magic. When children garden they cultivate their imaginations and then when they share the food they’ve produced with community members, there is a reweaving of connections and a remembrance of what it truly means to be healthy.”