Island Grown Schools

Island Grown Schools, the Vineyard's farm-to-school program, seeks to help raise a new generation of Vineyarders who are connected to local farms and farmers, empowered to make healthy eating choices, informed about the food system, and engaged in growing food for themselves, their families and community.

Since our program was launched in December of 2007, we have installed and supported school gardens at all seven of our island schools, worked with more than 70 teachers at every school and every grade level to develop curricular connections to food, farms, gardens, and agriculture, led field trips to island family farms, and developed relationships between school cafeterias and local farms. Now all four of our schools with independent cafeterias are sourcing ingredients from local farms and using produce fresh from their school gardens.

We are proud of all we've been able to accomplish with the incredible dedication and support of many island teachers, students, school administrators, farmers, food service staff, families and community volunteers. Our program is unique in its scope (active in every school in the community) and depth (working not just on gardens, farm visits, local food in schools, or curriculum but all four at once). We will continue developing, supporting, and expanding the program in the years to come, and welcome new volunteer energy and ideas.

To get involved, please contact Noli Taylor, Island Grown Schools Coordinator, at 508-645-9557 or noli@islandgrown.org.

Since our program began in December of 2007, we have worked with our school communities to install and support gardens at all seven schools on the island. These gardens are beautiful, vibrant outdoor classrooms that students and teacher use to learn, to interact with their environment, and to produce food to be used in the cafeteria and in school meals, snacks, and special events.

What is a school garden?* A school garden is an innovative teaching tool and strategy that lets educators incorporate hands-on activities in a diversity of interdisciplinary, standards-based lessons.
The garden engages students by providing a dynamic environment in which to observe, discover, experiment, nurture, and learn. It is a living laboratory where lessons are drawn from real-life experiences rather than textbook examples, allowing students to become active participants in the learning process. Through the garden, students gain an understanding of ecosystems, an appreciation for food origins and nutrition, and knowledge of plant and animal life cycles. At the same time, they learn practical horticultural skills that last a lifetime.
The food produced in the garden can be used in the school cafeteria, in classroom taste tests or cooking demonstrations, or can be brought home by students and families.

What does a school garden look like? School gardens come in all shapes and sizes, with a common focus on growing plants. A school garden may be as small as a few pots of herbs growing on a windowsill or as large as a half-acre plot of vegetables in a schoolyard. Gardening programs are flexible enough to fit the needs and resources of every school. At West Tisbury school, the garden is sited in the central courtyard of the school, with one bed for each grade level and another for the YMCA after school program to use, 9 beds in all. At Oak Bluffs school, there are 16 raised beds on a narrow strip of former-lawn that borders the playground.

Why garden with kids? Educational philosophers going back to the 17th century have promoted the use of gardening to achieve learning objectives and support the mental, emotional, and social development of youth. Students enjoy gardening activities, and teachers and parents say that gardening programs:

• Address multiple learning styles;
• Provide opportunities for interdisciplinary lessons;
• Improve environmental attitudes;
• Promote good nutrition and exercise;
• Teach patience and responsibility;
• Instill a positive work ethic;
• Increase students’ self-esteem;
• Build classroom relationships, improve teamwork, and strengthen school spirit.

A school garden is a perfect tool to provide hands-on learning experiences for any academic subject. Many teachers use the garden as a laboratory to introduce students to scientific methods through plant-related experiments. Additionally, a garden provides a place to study weather, insects, soil, and other environmental matters. The garden also provides opportunities to teach mathematics, history-social science, English-language arts, and visual and performing arts. Concepts that seem abstract in the classroom come alive in a garden setting. For instance, students find taking daily measurements of garden bean plants and then charting the growth rate to determine the fastest-growing plant in the garden much more exciting than charting numbers provided by a textbook.

Beyond academics, the garden provides broader life lessons, including contributing to students’ knowledge of how to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Through a gardening program, students gain first-hand experience with fresh fruits and vegetables. They discover that produce does not magically appear on the grocery store shelves, and they learn the important role of agriculture in our society. The pride and curiosity sparked by growing fruits and vegetables along with the knowledge of where they come from motivates students to try eating them, oftentimes leading to more positive attitudes and eating behaviors.

A school garden is also a powerful environmental education tool. Through gardening, students become responsible caretakers. They have an opportunity to engage in agricultural practices on a small scale, learning about the responsibilities and impacts of land cultivation. They explore the web of interactions among living and nonliving components of life. By doing so, they develop a greater understanding of the natural world and can more readily consider conservation issues from a local and global perspective.

The garden can also provide the freshest and most locally-grown food possible for school meals and snacks.

Above all, gardening is fun, and once the skills are acquired it can become a lifelong hobby. Exploring the outdoors, planting in the soil, watching seeds grow, and harvesting the bounty are enjoyable and memorable ways for students to spend their time.

* Thanks to the California School Garden Network for some of this information about school gardens.

One wonderful thing about school gardens and farm field trips is that every subject can be taught through the lens of agriculture. Almost every required framework in the MCAS tests can be tied to a garden- or farm-based lesson, and thankfully many curricular resources have already been developed for teachers to use at every grade level. For a list of our favorite resource books and websites, click here (books, websites, films). Also, Island Grown Schools coordinators are available to work one-on-one with teachers to develop lessons, connect you with existing curricula, and to help with in-class teaching. To meet with a coordinator, please call Noli Taylor at 508-645-9557.

We are also very fortunate to have working farms across the island, many of which are willing to host class field trips. There are two teaching farms on the island, Native Earth Teaching Farm in Chilmark and the FARM Institute in Katama, that focus on community farm education, and a number of other farms that welcome classes to their farm. For a full list of farm field trip opportunities, please call Noli Taylor at 508-645-9557.

Bringing more fresh, locally-grown food to school meals is no easy task. Most school food systems have no budget at all to work with, which means they need to produce meals that meet USDA nutrition guidelines with almost no money. Food service staff work very hard to make this work with commodities that come to the schools from the USDA and other discounted products, but it can be a real challenge for them to make healthy fresh meals with such limited funds.

In addition to the cost issue, there is no established distribution system between farms and schools, and on the Vineyard the agricultural infrastructure to grow food year-round has virtually disappeared. Most farmers focus on growing for the summer market, and because there has been limited off-season demand and labor, they close their operations up in the fall, sometimes plowing food into the ground at the end of the season.

We are lucky to have four island schools with independent kitchens, with meals prepared fresh at school rather than delivered by a corporate food service provider. The Charter School, Tisbury School, Oak Bluffs School, and Edgartown School food service teams have worked with Island Grown Schools to develop and deepen their relationships with neighboring farms, and now all four are using fresh local produce in school meals and snacks on a regular basis. We have helped bring these food service directors and farmers together to review what the farmers can provide to the schools at a price the staff can afford. Some farms are now growing food specifically to sell to the schools, and island farm families are realizing the potential in this substantial new market for their produce. We are already seeing some farms extending their growing season to meet this new demand from our schools.

We also worked with local boards of health to get the produce that comes out of the school gardens officially approved for use in the school cafeteria. Collaboarting with other farm to school practitioners through the National Farm to School Network, we developed a set of guidelines for safe food handling for produce from school gardens which we've used with our local boards of health and which is now being used in schools across the country. School garden produce is a boon to the food service staff, as it comes free to their kitchens and is as fresh as food can get!

Our schools without their own cafeterias are also using garden-fresh produce in school snacks and special events; students harvest what they've grown outdoors and prepare it in taste tests and big salads to share with the rest of their schools and with the community during harvest celebrations. The students seem willing to try just about everything they've participated in growing themselves, and it has been great to watch their connection with the food they eat grow through their work in the school gardens.

Another free local opportunity we discovered: Typically in the fall, some island farms plow food into the ground. This year, we are working with the Sowing Circle, a group of women agriculturalists on the island, to organize groups of volunteer gleaners to go out and harvest the last food of the season to bring to the schools. Food service staff is already excited about this and standing by to incorporate gleaned vegetables into their soups and salad bars.

We also realized that local food can be incorporated into schools in lots of ways, not just through school meals. At the three island schools that contract with corporate food service providers, it made more sense to work to bring farm-fresh food into the schools outside the cafeteria.

Special events is one way. We have now collaborated with the High School Culinary Arts Program on three Local Food Dinners, in which we connect the culinary arts students with a local chef to plan and prepare a meal with as many local ingredients as possible. The funds raised have gone to support the school garden and the use of more local foods in the Culinary program.

Other schools have also done vegetable taste tests, where students go out to the school garden or to a local farm and harvest fresh produce, bring it back to school to prepare it, and share it with other classes. Schools also do cooking demonstrations and special harvest celebrations.

However we're able to bring more island grown produce into our schools, our students benefit. They learn the difference in taste with food that's been grown locally, they come to value and want to support our island farmers, and they get more nutrition from the meals and snacks they're served at school. We also see these changes trickling up into students' families, who start being led by their kids to choose local food over food that comes from far away and who start buying directly from the farms their kids have gotten to know at school.