s'Cool Gardens in Santa Barbara County, CA

focus on growing, harvesting and eating healthy food an garden education, in general; effort to integrate garden education into existing curriculum K-5 with lead teachers working closely with garden education managers (GEMS), one per s'Cool Gardens involved school, 10 hour per week (paid stipend for this amount of time from grant funds.)

(stated on web site--don't have this with me at the moment)

s'Cool Gardens is in alignment with my personal philosophical teaching practices--that children need and benefit from outdoor, integrated learning experiences; in the case of school gardens, children gain knowledge and confidence that impacts their healty and hopefully their living habits for the rest of their life. By integrating cross-curricular, garden-based education while also "nurturing naturalists," children develop self-concepts and citizenship roles that impact their future.

Beginning in about 1984 when my family moved a couple blocks away from the school where I'd been teaching since 1968, I found myself incorporating outdoor areas of the Monte Vista Elementary School campus (Hope School District, Santa Barbara, CA), into my teaching practices. Within a few years gardens were developing that kept expanding in size and purpose. By the time I retired in 2005 we had a 30 by 60 veg. garden with composting, two K-yard butterfly gardens, a half-acre native plant nature trail (featuring ethnobotany), and a 3,000 sq. ft. orchard garden. We had also worked on several visually significant landscaping projects to help beautify the school. We introduced an all-school, weekly farmer's market to raise money to begin a salad bar lunch service (about 15 years ago), which was successful as a pilot project, and was taken to a district level, where it has remained. My students and some community involvement from UCSB and the County Solid Waste Disposal, and others, instigated school recycling, which a few years later also included a worm farm that was fed every Thurs. by school food lunch waste.

In 2009 I was invited to be part of a grant application team, put together by the Santa Barbara City College Center for Sustainability. The grant was submitted as one of 4 or so proposals to the Orfalea Foundation's s'Cool Food Initiative grant review group. My SBCC team was selected. During the pilot year we developed ways of building and/or enhanding existing school gardens and integrating curriculum--in four school districts in Santa Barbara County, targeting initially 16 schools.

After the pilot year s'Cool Gardens reconfigured its approach, and the coordinators roles now included overseeing a garden eduation manager that was hired for each of the 16 schools--and that number has increased during this second year of the s'Cool Gardens program. I am no longer a coordinator for s'Cool Gardens, thouogh am affiliate and support the program. For example, I worked very hard the past several months to develop a new docent program for a mission-era food garden at the Santa Barbara Mission. Our first target groups were selected classes/teachers from the s'Cool Gardens involved schools.

Check the web sites for s'Cool Gardens (s'Cool Food), Orfalea Foundation, and also the Santa Barbara Mission, La Huerta project.  I would be pleased to speak with anyone about the programs above and/or my personal involvement in and development of educational approaches to garden-based teaching:  judygardens@gmail.com   805-637-3201    I have photo journals and curriculum that "tell the story" of the various garden projects developed and my integration of gardening into my classroom teaching.  I've applied this background into recent development of several docent programs, most specifically at the mission-era food garden, La Huerta, Old Mission Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA.