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Academic credit for lunch with program combining cooking, organic gardening & Students’ hard work creates a lush garden for Stevensville

Berkeley will soon have the first public school children in the nation to get academic credit for eating lunch.

The Berkeley Unified School District on Wednesday signed an agreement with Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation to create a formal curriculum that weaves organic gardening, cooking and eating healthy lunches into the educational experience of the district’s 9,000 students.

Kim Severson, Chronicle Staff Writer

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/07/02/BAGQ67FMC41.DTL

Students might learn math by laying out the garden plots. Biology and earth science lessons can be taught as students prepare soil, gauge the weather and harvest food. Grinding corn can be the basis for a lesson on pre- Columbian civilizations. Recipe writing can become an English lesson. Digging weeds might count as physical education.

And, every day, the students will serve each other and eat a healthy meal together.

"The whole cycle is complete. That’s what is so beautiful about this," said school board President John Selawsky.

The foundation will give the district $3.8 million over the next three years to create the curriculum. The grant should be enough to get the program started in five of Berkeley’s 16 schools and attract other funders to expand it to the entire district, Selawsky said.

The new curriculum is intended to improve students’ health and educate students about environmental issues. Selawsky said that teaching children to grow their own food and eat together as part of the formal school day makes sense when 15 percent of the nation’s children are overweight and the district is dealing with elementary school students who have the kind of diet-induced diabetes previously only seen in adults.

"We’re trying to get this ingrained at an early age so kids realize how important nutrition and food and meals are for a society and culture. There is something really civilized about sitting down and eating food together and not just grabbing fast food and running out the door," he said.

The plan, which will meet state guidelines, goes beyond efforts to ban sodas and junk food in schools or simply improve the nutritional quality of school lunchrooms. "This is a revolutionary way of thinking about food in schools,” Waters said.

Waters has been working toward a formal school lunch curriculum since she helped start the acre of garden called "the edible schoolyard" at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Middle School almost a decade ago. Her foundation, an offspring of her highly touted Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, raises money to fund the program through events, donations and sales of Waters’ cookbooks.

The curriculum will begin at King middle school in 2005. Longfellow and Willard middle schools will follow, and then Le Conte Elementary and another elementary school, to be named later, will be added.

Full incorporation is dependent on attracting more money. Selawsky said the foundation and the Center for Ecoliteracy will be hunting for additional money, and larger organizations such as Children’s Hospital Oakland are involved.

If Waters has her way, every school will teach lunch as an academic subject.

But Selawsky realizes such a radical shift in the approach to eating and education might be a tough sell in districts without a big-name, deep-pocketed supporter.

"It will be tough, because I don’t think the district could do this by itself," he said. "It’s going to take creative partnerships."

E-mail Kim Severson at [email protected].

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Students’ hard work creates a lush garden for their town

By GINNY MERRIAM of the Missoulian

http://missoulian.com/articles/2004/07/02/news/local/news02.txt

Kayla Dufresne has gardened for half her life.

Kayla is 10 now. She started when she was 5, with a pot of sand and some pumpkin seeds in her grandma’s back yard.

"I love to garden," Kayla said Thursday as she worked in the Stevensville Community Garden in her big-white-daisy shoes and coral-colored T-shirt. "It’s fun."

Kayla is the unofficial "junior master gardener" of the garden. She returned to her horticultural roots last fall when she and the other volunteers, many of them kids in the Stevensville Schools’ After-School Program, harvested a bounty of pumpkins at the garden. They took their seeds out, cut them up, cooked the pulp and made 72 pumpkin pies for the community Thanksgiving dinner.

"We had pumpkins coming out our ears," said Patricia Wilson, director of the After-School Program.

"It was a lot of pies," said Kayla.

This year, Kayla and the other kids are part of the garden’s first real whiz-bang season. Andrew Stotz, who’s 10, likes planting seeds. Michael Steber, who’s 9, is good at weeding and loves to be out in the sun. Alex Elam, who’s 12, raked a ton of leaves – maybe literally – last fall that are now enriching the garden’s compost bin.

"We’ve had really good response from the community," Wilson said.

There wasn’t much to get excited about in the fall of 2002 when the garden began in a dried-up, weedy field on the grounds of the kids’ school on Park Street. Kathy Belke, president of the board of Stevensville’s Pantry Partners Food Bank, got the idea of a community garden on a school grounds when she read George McGovern’s book "The Third Freedom," in which he describes such a project.

Belke knew the Stevensville Garden Club had talked about it, too.

"But no one knew where it should be," Belke said. "It was difficult to find a location."

Belke and the Pantry Partners board vice president Arnie Polanchek visited school superintendent Dennis Kimzey. He volunteered the land.

Pantry Partners itself was moving to a house on the school grounds. There was more room, and the location was good – so many households have reason to come to the school anyway. The Food Bank board supported the idea, Belke said, because it hoped people would donate extra produce to the Food Bank.

"The Pantry is able to provide a lot of things," Wilson said. "But perishables are pretty hard."

That very fall, the garden started with four beds, some volunteers and the gardening guidance of master gardener Molly Hackett. They were hauling water from the Pantry building in buckets, more than 100 yards.

"It was very basic, let’s say," Belke said.

"Finally, I decided this would not work. So I went to the hardware store and got many lengths of hose. This was progress."

The next spring, it only made sense to involve kids. That led Belke to Wilson, who oversees 45 to 90 schoolchildren in the program year-round. Wilson writes grants, and she wrote a small one, $1,000, for the garden in the name of Pantry Partners and the Stevensville School District.

There’s a substantial overlap, Wilson and Belke said.

Fifty-two percent of Stevensville school kids qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program because their parents’ incomes meet the definition of poverty. Pantry Partners, which serves as the food bank for northern Ravalli County, serves about 130 families a month. Last year, it fed almost 5,000 individuals and prepared about 1,500 food boxes. Wages are low, Belke said, and the Bitterroot doesn’t have big industry.

This season, volunteers have made a big difference. Bitterroot Restoration Inc. donated pipe for a sprinkler line to the garden, and they’ve helped with a hoop house greenhouse to extend the season and other things. John Meakin, a retired BRI employee, and sixth-grade teacher Harry Miller dug the trench for the line. This fall, it will be extended to each of the 22 small beds and one giant one.

Bigger yields next year should bring donated produce to the food bank.

But best of all, kids are learning about gardening and food and natural science. Sandy Gates, a landscape designer and teacher, has been teaching about gardening at the community garden and at the Teller Wildlife Refuge, where she teaches Art in the Garden, a summer program for kids.

"Kids don’t get outside enough anymore," she said. "They find out it’s OK to slow down, to hear just the sounds of what’s outdoors, no TV, no one talking."

She tells of a little girl thinning carrots recently and being amazed.

"She said, ‘This is a root! When I eat a carrot, I’m eating a root!’ " Gates said. "Kids don’t know that potatoes grow underground."

Reporter Ginny Merriam can be reached at 523-5251 or at [email protected]

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