Bever     Henson     Losee     Poles     Vellutini   

Analy High School     Valley Vista Teaching Garden     Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods

Nominee: Danny Bever, Sonoma Mountain High School Native Plant Habitat Top
By January of 2000, we obtained permission from the district to use the area. At that time, Dr. Carl Wong was the superintendent of our school district. We received a grant from the Petaluma Educational Foundation to build a tool shed and buy tools and we started to design the garden. To be a true habitat for wildlife, we needed a water source. Another grant from PEF in 2001 allowed us to build and landscape a pond with a dry streambed to accent the landscape and to use the ton of rocks that were embedded in the site. We started planting native grasses and shrubs while we made plans for a path and bridge over the streambed. By 2003 we had a bridge, built by a student as a senior project, connecting a path through the garden. By then, the various chaparral plants such as coyote bush, manzanita, and ceonothus that were planted along the fence to act as a windbreak were reaching maturity.

At the beginning of 2004, we decide to stabilize the mound of earth by the path, and thanks to sizeable donations from local landscape companies we were able to build a forty-foot block retaining wall. As
his senior project, another student built the wall. Near the pond, another student built a bench as a senior project. Along with the landscaping, plants were added with contributions from PEF again, as
well as from Kendall-Jackson, the Petaluma Valley Rotary, and local businesses. Even the school student body has donated some of its hard-earned money to help fund senior projects. Although the school was
always prepared to use funds from the school budget as needed, so far the habitat has grown and survived completely on the generosity of the community.

Besides the physical labor of building a garden from a bare piece of ground, students have benefited from the garden experience in other ways. Some of the classroom curriculum is designed around the habitat.
While most of the initial plantings were bought from local nurseries, many of the plants are mature enough to provide seed for future plantings. Students are learning how and when to collect seed or take
cuttings, how to grow the seed or root the cuttings, and how to transplant the growing plants. All the students have a personal nature journal. They regularly spend time in the habitat, making observations,
recording and sketching those observations in their journals. Once we had to travel ten miles to be able to observe native plants and wildlife, now we only need to travel ten yards. Our students know the value of preserving the native habitat. They see nature as a collection of individual plants -- not just lumps of green--that supply specific needs for a variety of wildlife they once barely knew existed.

The habitat is also giving students, whose previous environmental awareness may have been limited to reluctantly putting old newspapers in the recycle bin on garbage pick up day, new opportunities to become
more sensitive to, and knowledgeable about, their own environment. This includes learning that not all plants need to be heavily watered all summer long like the lawns at their homes do; and that those old
newspapers can actually make a good weed barrier and mulch base. The habitat provides a meaningful context for additional rich discussion about how we can become better stewards of the natural world in which we live.

The habitat continues to be a work in progress. About a third of the area is still undeveloped to allow future classes to be a part of the project. With our emphasis now on observation, we are starting the
process of compiling lists of the variety of wildlife that is being attracted to the habitat. One would expect frogs and dragonflies around the pond, but we have been surprised to find a western pond turtle
sunning itself on a rock and mallard ducks floating there on occasion. Such observations lead to subjects for research papers and descriptive writing in the English class.

While the habitat has enriched our learning opportunities in almost every subject area, I believe that the habitat is fulfilling my initial vision. That vision is the creation of an accessible place where students have a chance to spend quality time in a natural setting that they have had a hand in creating, from what might otherwise still be an unsightly and uninviting weed patch.

Wendy Losee, co-originator of the SEC Watershed Education Program, has been an ecologist and environmental educator with five years experience in the field. Project management includes a community-based Stream Stewards project, water temperature monitoring project, and a Benthic Macroinvertebrate study of the Sonoma Creek watershed. The Stream Stewards project fostered teaching experience by leading informational workshops to train community members about monitoring techniques as well as conducting bi-monthly training sessions. Additional experience includes event coordination, volunteer and internship coordination, and community outreach duties for the Sonoma Ecology Center.

As project manager of the K-12 Watershed Education Program and the Nathanson Creek Student Restoration Project, Ms. Losee has developed extensive elementary and middle school curriculum utilizing established environmental education techniques, curriculum, and state science curriculum standards. Wendy has delivered watershed education to over 2,500 Sonoma Valley students within the last four years. As the manager of the program, Ms. Losee supports development and funding, community outreach and is a liaison to teachers and administrators in the schools.

Ms. Losee holds a degree with distinction from Sonoma State University in Environmental Studies and a minor in Biology. She has also participated in Save the Bay's Teacher Training Institute and other related professional development activities.

Tina Poles has a BA in Biology from UC Santa Cruz, a certification in Biological Horticulture from the Farm and Garden Program at Santa Cruz, and is a Sonoma County Master Gardner. She will complete a four year Waldorf Teacher Training Program in May.

Before becoming the Director of the School Garden Program at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center seven years ago, she worked in Aids and Breast Cancer research labs in New York.

Other influences was working as a science teacher for Life Lab project in the early 1980's, working on an organic farm, as a teenager, in Massachusetts and starting a garden while working for Marin Abused Woman's Services and seeing the healing force of gardens and nutritional foods for woman and children recovering from domestic abuse.

She is a founding member of Cotati Co-housing Project, a project that took five years and 10.8 million dollars, from conception to completion. She worked on the landscape design of the project, to incorporate water catchment and water table recharge elements, as well as native plantings. The co housing community won the best environmental development award in 2003 for it's attention to water use, tree plantings and bike path.

While the Director of the School Garden Project Tina was invited by  Delaine Eastin, the former state superintendent of California schools, to work with a team of educators on a project linking state education standards to school gardens. The results of this work was published under the title " A Child's Garden of Standards", published by the California Department of Education Press.

Tina, along with OAEC, started  a school garden program for low income schools (defined as 50% of students on free and reduced lunches) in San Francisco to bring gardens and nutritional food to urban low income students.

Tina has served on a number of boards that are concerned with Environmental Education such as The School Garden Network, which raises money to pay school garden coordinators in Sonoma County, the Green School Board, San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance and Food Matters.

She represents Sonoma County in a Statewide Alliance of educators in the State Department of Natural and Agricultural Resources. (DNAR) which is working on curriculum for middle grade students in school gardens.

Longer version of previous statement...

Dave Henson is perhaps the single most effective activist working for environmentally sustainable agriculture in Sonoma County. His work has dramatically transformed local agricultural and land use practices. As an organizer and leader in numerous local groups, Dave has forged crucial strategic alliances between farmers and environmentalists, and as a teacher, he has significantly deepened the understanding and effectiveness of our local environmental movement. Dave has educated, trained, mentored, and inspired hundreds of Sonoma County activists, (many of them young), through his teaching at New College and OAEC, his work in numerous local campaigns and grassroots groups, and his personal example of highly effective organizing and dynamic, empowering leadership. Participants in his workshops often praise his clarity, insight, and contagious passion, and the extent to which Dave helps them develop a more systemic "big picture" understanding and deeper analysis of existing power structures and social change methods.

Dave has also built strategic new alliances between the local environmental and agricultural communities. In 2000 Dave was a co-convener of an extensive dialogue between grape growers, local farmers of other crops, environmental groups, no-spray advocates, and Sonoma County and state officials around the problem of the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter (GWSS) insect in Sonoma County. His visionary leadership and mediation skills played a key role in the resulting agreement - a Sonoma County and CDFA approved alternative GWSS Work Plan for Sonoma County to use least-toxic methods to insure a GWSS-free county. This breakthrough agreement laid the groundwork for future cooperation, and serves as an important model for other agricultural communities.

Most recently, Dave organized and led the largest grassroots campaign for a local environmental initiative in county history: Measure M, which would have created a ten-year moratorium on genetically engineered crops. In authoring and promoting the measure, Dave worked closely with many dozens of local farmers, educating them to the risks and building new alliances. Though Measure M did not pass, under his leadership the campaign mobilized thousands of residents (many of them with no prior activist experience) and educated tens of thousands of voters on this issue, building the groundwork for future environmental campaigns. Dave's organizing and leadership is a remarkable example of linking the local and the global. He continues to play a key role in both local and national / international organizations challenging the genetic engineering of seeds and crops (serving on the steering committees of Californians for GE-Free Agriculture, Genetic Engineering Action Network, and Wild Farm Alliance), and corporate globalization and corporate personhood (Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy). By teaching and organizing at the local level on these global issues, he has brought seemingly "out-of-reach" problems down to the community scale, empowering local activists to take them on in more thoughtful and effective ways.

Dave is a founder and the Executive Director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, an education and training institute set on 80 acres of organic gardens, orchards and wildlands in western Sonoma County. Dave's responsibilities at OAEC include coordination of OAEC's 25 staff, program development and fundraising, and directing OAEC's Ecological Agriculture Program. Under Dave's leadership, OAEC is making many significant contributions to Sonoma County's environmental quality and restoration. Their Horticultural Biodiversity Program curates a living seed collection of some 3000 varieties of food and medicinal crops; their School Garden Program has trained teachers for and helped establish 85 school gardens and accompanying curriculum in public schools; their Water Institute has trained local community members for and helped establish 25 watershed restoration groups throughout Northern California; and their Permaculture program has trained and certified over 400 permaculture students. Dave has worked as a project director for several national environmental and social justice organizations over the past 27 years, including the Environmental Project on Central America, the Highlander Center, the National Toxics Campaign, and Greenpeace. Dave has led over 400 training programs for community organizations, and spoken to community, government and university audiences in more than 40 U.S. states and 20 countries. He is the author of numerous articles and reports. Dave studied sociology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and law at New College of California, School of Law.

Nominee: Carol Vellutini, Sierra Club Outings Chair Top
Though very honored, Carol declined the nomination. 

From the National Sierra Club web site:

Santa Rosa Resident Receives National Sierra Club Award

SAN FRANCISCO – Sept. 23, 2000 – Santa Rosa resident Carol Vellutini was among those receiving national awards from the Sierra Club this year.

Vellutini received the Oliver Kehrlein Award, which honors service to the Sierra Club’s outings program.

Vellutini has been involved with outings programs in Sonoma County for nearly 20 years. In 1981, she joined with 15 people to do the first California Beach Clean-up in Sonoma County. She served as county coordinator for the annual beach clean-up for 16 years, and also initiated a year-round Adopt-A-Beach program in the county.

Vellutini has served as Outings Chair for the Sonoma Group of the Sierra Club since 1984 and as Outings Chair for the Redwood Chapter of the Sierra Club since 1985. In 1986, she worked to reopen Hood Mountain Regional Park, which had been closed to the public for four years after a storm wiped out its only access road. In 1987, she formed Friends of Hood Mountain Park. Vellutini also was a coordinator on construction of the Kortum Trail, a 2.5 mile footpath from Blind Beach to Wright’s Beach in Sonoma Coast State Park.

For the past 13 years, Vellutini has led a series of walks during the week after work called "Evening Walks With Friends," which have become very popular in the county. She also joined with other conservation groups and the City of Santa Rosa to create Journey Sonoma, a coalition dedicated to hiking, biking and riding through Sonoma County.

Most recently, Vellutini has become involved with efforts to eradicate a noxious weed, called arundo donax, from Sonoma County, integrating that effort with local outings.

"Carol exemplifies an active and involved citizen environmentalist," said state Assemblymember Patricia Wiggins, who has been on Sierra Club outings with Vellutini.

A schoolteacher for 27 years, Vellutini also initiated a summer school program with an emphasis on the outdoors and began a yearly campout for the students and their parents that was a success.

"Carol has provided youth and adults in our community with valuable educational experiences through her leadership on hikes, walks, county trails and promotion and protection of regional and state parks programs," said Fifth District Supervisor Mike Reilly. "Her efforts to protect the beauty and environmental treasures which we hold so dear in Sonoma County have truly enriched all of our lives."

"Carol knows that environmental protection sometimes requires hard work, but also that that hard work changes people’s values," said Peter Aschroft of the Sonoma Group of the Sierra Club. " People who have spent a day picking up garbage on a beach will treat that beach with more respect in the future. As a teacher, trip leader and a project organizer, Carol has instilled love of the natural word in those with whom she has worked."

Nominee: The Student Commute: Realities and Solutions for Analy High School, Analy High School AP Statistics Class and Cool Schools / Climate Protection Campaign, Sebastopol Top

The Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics class at Analy High School has been working on a year long transportation project. Instead of using arbitrary statistics from a textbook the class uses data that it obtained from a survey of students at school.

With the help of the Sonoma County Climate Protection campaign, the class learned about the effects that pollutants and emissions have on the environment. Certain gases that trap heat in the atmosphere are called greenhouse gases, or GHGs. Automobiles emit a great deal of GHGs. And with the number of people attending Analy High School exceeding 1400, the emissions generated by the school community are excessive, contributing negatively to global warming.

The Statistics class decided to determine exactly how many tons of GHGs are emitted by students and then establish a reduction target to achieve by the end of the year. They sampled 250 students at school, asking them how many single passenger car trips they take to get to and from school in one week, where they live, and what type of car they drive. They then created a database of the results and desegregated the data by year in school or distance from school. They calculated the averages for these groups and converted those averages into year-long totals.

The next task was to inform the community of their findings. With the help of community members they presented their preliminary finding to the school board and city council. A more extensive presentation was held in the Analy High School Auditorium, with an audience that include traffic engineers, city council members, police department members, and bike coalition groups.

The event was well publicized, with articles in the local and county paper. Because of this, there has been extended community support to help work on the project. The next steps for the class are to meet with the groups involved and set out a plan to reduce the traffic commute. They are going to create incentive programs and positive image campaigns in order to increase the number of people who walk, bike or carpool to school. After the program is in place, the students are going to re-survey the students and see if their work was successful.

Based on their work, school officials will create a plan to involve parents and students at the start of the 2006-2007 school year, hoping to reduce the GHGs and traffic by 20% below this year's totals. Next year's AP class will continue to follow up on the work of the transportation project, with their hope of reducing the emissions even more.

TEENS DRIVE POINT HOME WITH COMMUTING STUDY:

Analy Class Finds Students, Parents Travel 42,000 Miles Weekly To, From Campus
Byline: Kerry Benefield, February 2, 2006, © 2006- The Press Democrat

Programs promoting car pooling may be largely aimed at adult commuters, but a study by Analy High School students suggests that solo driving is a habit that becomes ingrained almost as soon as teens are handed a set of keys.

A study conducted by the school's advanced placement statistics class found that about 40 percent of Analy students who live within one mile of the Sebastopol campus drive alone to school.

``It's ridiculous,'' said Julie Wesler-Buck, an Analy senior who worked on the study. ``It was shocking to me how many people drove alone. They probably don't even realize what they are putting into the environment, how much gas they are using and that it makes the roads more congested.''

Solo driving is not an issue isolated to Analy, according to school officials from around Sonoma County.

``I think parents are much more willing to hand cars to their kids; it's a kind of right of passage,'' said Mike Rea, executive director of the West County Transportation Agency, which provides bus service for a declining number of students in the west county. ``There is just this expectation that that is supposed to happen.''

Analy instructor David Casey and the 30 students in his class quantified the impacts of student commute patterns, hoping to persuade them to change their driving habits.

The class found that parents and students are driving 42,000 miles a week to and from campus and pumping 50,000 pounds of greenhouse gases into the air. And they are using 2,500 gallons of gasoline a week just for trips to and from school.

``That just blows my mind,'' Casey said.

The students will present their findings at a community forum on campus tonight.

``I think they (students) are so unaware of the environmental impacts of driving because it is so part of their culture,'' Casey said. ``They need some work in what they can do as an individual, so my work is really just beginning.''

Paradoxically, a new state law intended to promote driver safety makes it harder for students to double-up in their cars.

As of Jan. 1, for the first year they have their licenses, 16- and 17-year-olds are barred from transporting passengers younger than 20.

But those are just the drivers that environmental groups are targeting in car pool promotions.

``If you can change the high school culture -- these are the people who are really close to becoming commuters,'' said Joan Marx, a founding member of Gunn Organization for Alternative, Safe Transportation (GOFAST).

The GOFAST program in Palo Alto has increased bike riding to campus by 31 percent and tripled the number of students who car pool.

Marx will be the keynote speaker at tonight's community forum.

Although the study's findings may be surprising, even some of those involved in the project concede the realities of modern life make it a challenge to get around in a way that is environmentally sensitive.

``I take a class at the JC, I play sports, I do all these other things that require me to go somewhere else right after class,'' said Wesler-Buck. ``Unfortunately, there are a lot of situations where it's hard to car pool.''

You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kbenefield@pressdemocrat.com.

Nominee: Valley Vista School Teaching Garden, Petaluma Top

The Valley Vista Teaching Garden is a magical place where our K-6^th grade students are learning to take better care of themselves and their environment. Just four years after the first earth was turned, the Teaching Garden has become a regional resource to other schools seeking to foster nutritious eating habits through gardening with children. Our goals for the program are that as a result of hands-on weekly activity in the garden, every student will:

   Learn to grow and harvest fruits, vegetables, herbs, and cut flowers, and understand how commercially produced food reaches their tables.

   Make wise, well-informed nutritional choices as they experience the connection between nutrition, health, and their performance in school.

   Experience the joy of sharing a bountiful harvest with their schoolmates as they cook and eat together in their outdoor kitchen and during their weekly lunchtime salad bar.

   Excel academically and strengthen cooperative living skills in a project based outdoor learning environment that supports a variety of learning styles.

   Embrace their role as caretakers of our natural resources as they learn that the well-being of their environment depends upon their actions.

Each of the 375 K-6th grade students at Valley Vista Elementary in Petaluma has enjoyed nearly four years of regular, hands-on lessons in the garden. Our garden coordinator delivers a broad curriculum covering all academic areas with an emphasis on nutrition, science, math, and language arts. Students regularly prepare and eat a variety of produce from their garden during class time and at the weekly salad bar. Our students have become more compassionate toward their environment and each other as they have worked and eaten together in the garden.

Recent accomplishments include:

We doubled the production of greens, prepared entrees for our salad bar, and shared our abundant harvest with the Petaluma Kitchen, an organization that prepares nutritious meals for those in need from community donations. Twenty five percent of our students qualify for the free and reduced price lunch program, and many of them have benefited from the Petaluma Kitchen themselves. This gives all of our students the satisfying experience of sharing our bountiful garden with others in need and raises awareness of world hunger. We introduced students to new tastes through membership in a nearby Laguna Farms Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and purchases from local “Let Us Farm”. This allowed us to expose children to a variety of seasonal flavors, textures, presentations and preparation methods. Hot entrees prepared by our 4^th and 5^th grade students have become a standard feature in our weekly salad bar. Other students often prepare fresh produce in the outdoor kitchen during their garden class. Our greenhouse and production beds enabled us to maintain steady salad green production through the winter and grow seedlings for our spring plant sales.

We are continually expanding our curriculum integration. We have created a team approach with teacher-coordinator planning sessions that have significantly increased teacher participation in outdoor classroom instruction. A curriculum chart has been developed to ensure that necessary topics aligned with State Standards are covered. Our teachers have embraced the Teaching Garden to a new level this year, requesting additional garden time. Our teachers are actively talking to staff at other schools about the value of the program and circulating literature among their peers on the relationship between student nutrition, behavior, and school performance.  

We are a hub of expertise for school gardens throughout the North Bay Region. Teachers from as far away as Chico, California have visited the Teaching Garden to seek inspiration and advice. Our Garden Coordinator is active with the Sonoma County School Garden Network that includes 22 schools. Monthly meetings leverage their collective enthusiasm and expertise as they develop school garden and nutrition strategies and plan joint fundraising events. Sixteen of these schools recently adapted our plant sale/Garden Party model to May Day events at their schools armed with our templates for promotional materials, plant signage, and event checklists. Our Principal, Maureen Vieth is a member of the Petaluma City School District Wellness Advisory Council. This important cross-disciplinary group also includes members from the state Health Department and the University of California. They developed a revised Food and Activity Policy document to guide the district in achieving nutrition education, physically active students, and helping Food Services’ overhaul of the school breakfast and lunch programs during the next several years. Teaching Garden Steering Committee members are also active in the media and public forums for nutrition and health. They have appeared in newspaper articles, as guests on radio shows, presented in regional workshops and addressed students in the Teacher Credential Program at Sonoma State University.

We have a broad base of support beyond our immediate school neighborhood. Petaluma area businesses, educators, farmers, and parents view the Garden as an influential, successful, and well-managed program capable of sustaining itself through the extraordinary commitment of parents, teachers, the community and partners. We advertise our fundraisers to the entire community, not just Valley Vista parents and they turned out to participate in the fun. Restaurateur and farmer Bernadette Burrell, co-owner of Dempsey’s Restaurant and Brewery in Petaluma provides support in the community. Her specialty is incorporating fresh seasonal produce grown on her Red Rooster farm into the daily menu so the Teaching Garden’s objectives resonated with her. In just over a year, her support and participation has left a considerable mark. Barbara’s Bakery provided our initial start up funding and, along with Spectrum Naturals, and County Line Farms donate products to support our program. Our budding relationship with the agriculture students at nearby Petaluma High School holds much promise as our purpose and activities become more interconnected. The Sonoma County Farm Trails organization recently added a link to our School Garden Network website. It will consider adding individual school gardens to its printed Farm Trails map next spring to further raise community awareness and encourage support of neighborhood school gardens through its annual distribution of 100,000 printed maps each year. The Sonoma County Jail Industries program provides nursery material for our frequent plant sales.

­­We made modest improvements in our school kitchen. Constructive dialogue has resulted in district approval to create a more child-friendly kitchen workspace. We are raising funds and writing grants to further this process by adding a commercial dishwasher, larger water heater, additional refrigeration space and several low, rolling steel tables.

Having created a sustainable program at our site, we are now focused on expanding our success through achieving our final goal:

   The Teaching Garden will be a source of inspiration and a hub of hands-on learning for other schools and organizations interested in improving students’ nutritional choices through gardening.

For the last two years we have funded additional hours for our garden coordinator to advise other schools, sit on the District Wellness Advisory Council, and help develop The School Garden Network to provide network support for school gardens in Sonoma County. A central, district-wide coordinator is necessary to continue this support and to help other schools develop their own unique programs.

We have several objectives for the next three years. We will:

·         Further establish garden based education by providing a district resource to help other schools create and / or expand their gardens by increasing the outreach service of our Garden Coordinator by 20 hours per week

·        Develop a minimum of two new formal lesson plan kits per month for docents and teachers to use in the outdoor classroom with a particular emphasis on nutrition

Further establish garden based education by providing a district resource to help other schools create and / or expand their gardens by increasing the outreach service of our Garden Coordinator by 20 hours per week. 

The Petaluma City School District serves 1,952 elementary children (K-6) with 31 percent of those at or below the poverty level and approximately 30 percent English Language Learners.

Support and/or develop programs at each site:  Out of seven schools serving elementary students, two have established garden programs that serve all students, one has a newly created garden serving all students, two have gardens serving one or two classrooms, and two have no program at all. Due to variations in parent support, demographics and physical space, the programs at each site will be unique. The District Coordinator will assist in designing and implementing a sustainable garden site and program to address the needs of each.

Coordinate district communication, curriculum and lesson sharing: Valley Vista’s Garden Coordinator and committee members have already developed a strong base of lessons and materials that are available to all. The District Coordinator will work to expand this base, address any needs from other sites, and establish efficient means of disseminating the information. To further communications, they will also lead and facilitate leadership meetings with representation from all sites and function as a liaison to the School Garden Network for training and information.

Develop strategies for recruiting docent volunteers and provide docent training:  Class size in a garden setting is targeted to meet an 8:1 ratio of students to adults. To support this, parent and community docents volunteer to work in the ‘classroom’ with students. Outreach to master gardeners, garden clubs and other community organizations would broaden the base of available volunteers and further educate the community on our programs. Volunteer docents come to the garden with a variety of skills and knowledge. To feel comfortable and successful, it is necessary to give them a broad view of garden based learning and the skills / lessons that we hope the children will come away with. In addition, we have found it beneficial to provide tips on discipline, garden rules, learning styles and basic gardening.

Coordinate grant writing and funding sources:  This effort will be necessary to sustain site gardens and the District Coordinator’s position. Some of the funding sources to be explored are the development of retail products, integration of propagation for plant sales between schools, and food based fundraisers. Valley Vista is modeling this by working to market their salad dressing, running artisan bread sales, and growing their own vegetable starts which account for approximately half of their plant sale profits. 

Participate in district food policy committees:  The Petaluma City School district is actively working on improving the health of their students. SHAKE (Support Healthy Active Kids in Education) is working to develop funding for PE specialists and, supporting their nutrition component, the Wellness Advisory Council is in the process of establishing a revised food and nutrition policy which they will then help implement. The District Garden Coordinator will represent garden based learning from all sites, bringing nutrition expertise and site knowledge to the group.

Develop a minimum of two new formal lesson kits per month for docents and teachers to use in the outdoor classroom with a particular emphasis on nutrition:

These kits increase teacher and docent confidence in the Outdoor Classroom and ensure that all garden classes support curriculum standards. We will add at least two packaged lesson plan and materials kits per month to our library leveraging high quality materials such as “A Child’s Garden of Standards: Linking School Gardens to California Education Standards” by the California Department of Education. The Sonoma State University Teacher Credential Program approved a proposal for candidates to receive credit toward their internships for hours spent in school gardens. We look forward to including them in the development of curriculum.

Our curriculum will put an even greater emphasis on nutrition. The staggering statistics in the news each week about childhood obesity and its long-term health effects are alarming. Since children form food preferences during their elementary years through positive or negative experiences with different foods, we have an opportunity to shape their tastes as they prepare and eat fruits and vegetables from their garden and local farms as often as possible. Almost without fail, students will eat what they have helped prepare. We are teaching them to read labels and understand the taste and nutritional differences between fresh, canned, frozen, and other processed foods as well as the environmental impact of various processing methods. The role modeling of parents and teachers has increased dramatically this year. Nearly all our school staff and parent volunteers enjoy the salad bar each week. We are encouraged by the requests for recipes from families that want to recreate dishes prepared in the Outdoor Kitchen at home and make them part of their daily nutritional choices.

We hope that someday our community will value a garden teacher with an outdoor classroom enough to help fund them. The visibility of our model program and the leadership of our Garden Coordinator and steering committee will work together to develop the base of district financial support necessary to sustain each individual program. With years of experience and curriculum development in hand, a District Coordinator, site leaders, and docents working in partnership with teachers will make a garden in every school a sustainable reality for our district.

The Valley Vista community continues to be excited about a garden that not only teaches our children where their food comes from, but also encourages them to make healthy eating a part of their lifestyle. We dream of a time when all students in the district are able to benefit from this connection. Guided by the skills and knowledge acquired in this setting, our children will emerge as healthy, responsible, informed, and caring citizens… for a lifetime.