When I arrived in Waterville, Maine to start my service term with FoodCorps, I realized quickly that this would be a lonely new world if I did not dive right in. So that’s what I did! Never before had I made so many friends in such a short amount of time, but within the first month I had new roommates, amazing coworkers, and an entire new community to explore and grow with. When I think back on what made this all work, it was not the brilliant ideas, the silly songs, the hilarious games and the thousands of trials and errors, it was the relationships. You see, I set out to transforms kids’ relationships to their food, and in the end, I too was transformed more than I could have guessed.

The Albert S. Hall School where I served for the last two years was already doing so much good work in creating a schoolwide culture of health before I showed up. They had a small garden going and had formed community partnerships to bring in local healthy food for taste tests once a month, knowing that even these small steps were important in improving their students connection to food. All of this was done in one teacher’s “spare” time and they knew they needed a hand if they wanted to transform the whole school food environment, so that’s where I came in.

For the last two years we have worked hard together to transform the school food environment, from the classroom to the cafeteria. During that time we brought gardening into every classroom with seven classrooms growing their own veggies under grow lights, rotating cooking lessons during the year that would tour the school with themes on Maine staple crops like blueberries and potatoes. We spent three months this year focusing on whole grains, eating them every which way and learning every little detail we could down to the scientific level to get the full picture of why they are important for our healthy development.

On top of all this, the garden club, called “Sprout Scouts,” has become the most popular after school club with roughly one-third of our student population participating. All told there are thirteen classrooms in our school and I am happy to say that they are all actively invested in improving our students futures via growing, studying, eating, and playing with healthy food. After just two years, the atmosphere has shifted for the entire school and anyone you ask will tell you FoodCorps has helped launch them into a whole new way of thinking about our food.

For my final big project at the Albert S. Hall School we set out to make the school garden into a beautiful space that the whole community could appreciate. It took months of planning and collaborating with many community members, but in the end it was more than worth all the effort. What started out as a few raised beds on asphalt and a lot of big dreams has now become a community space that attracts bees, butterflies, families, and passersby to stay a while and slow down to appreciate what’s around them. It was a team effort, with over fifty volunteers who helped make the transformation complete, and at the end of the all the work days it was more amazing than we had ever imagined. Now our humble garden says to our community what we inside the school have come to believe: that food is beautiful and vitally central to our kids growing up healthy, happy, and ready to change the world.

In the beginning I arrived to help Waterville transform, and in the end it adopted me as one of its own. I thought I was coming to act as a fork in the road where students would turn down the new path of healthy food relationships and a more vibrant future. Instead I now find myself staying in Waterville and walking down that same path with them, bringing all my best resources to throw in with theirs, knowing that we are in this together.

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Sprout Scouts is a skills-based program developed by FoodCorps and Life Lab that provides FoodCorps service members the resources and activities they need to teach their students about cooking, gardening and nutrition education in a hands-on, fun and engaging way. Similar to Boy and Girl Scouts, Sprout Scouts is built on a series of adventures that develop new and complementary skills.  Through fun, hands-on activities that link to academic standards, Sprout Scouts clubs teach kids how to grow, prepare, and eat healthy food!  My service site, One Cool Earth, was supportive and eager to see Sprout Scouts implemented in the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District (PRJUSD).

During my first week of service, I met with the two after school program directors of PRJUSD to introduce Sprout Scouts.  What I thought would be a hard pitch was actually an enthusiastic nod of approval.  After school program leaders are always looking for new activities and lessons to keep children engaged, and many had expressed interest in using the garden. We agreed that we wanted the club to reach every child enrolled in the afterschool programs at the three elementary schools I serve.  The solution: we set up a rotating system with staff training built in!  I co-teach one lesson per week with an afterschool program leader at a school, for instance Max.  Max then teaches the same weekly lesson to rotating groups of students throughout the week. This way, all 150 children enrolled get to experience Sprout Scouts while equipping staff with outdoor garden education skills to sustain the program.

One of the first Adventures we embarked on was called “Dead Heading” and was a lesson about seed saving.  As we cut down tall sunflower stalks and began picking out the seeds, the kids were curious to eat them.  “These taste different than the ones we get from the grocery store,” one kid said in a voice that insinuated “hey garden lady, I’m not sure if you know what you’re doing here.”  We talked about how sunflower seeds in the store are roasted and these are raw.  “Can we roast all the sunflower seeds next time?” asked one girl.  As my mind was racing to come up with a way to accommodate 30 children in the school kitchen, another child said, “Last year in my 2nd grade class we made our own solar ovens out of pizza boxes!  We could make those again but with you to roast the sunflower seeds!”  Is this not the most ingenious idea?  One of my favorite parts about teaching in the garden is there are so many sparks of wonder that I can empower children to explore.  The next week we did just that, applying engineering practices, math, and cooking into a lesson that resulted in warmed (not quite toasted) sunflower seeds that were still a hit.

A couple of months later the Sprout Scouts were going on a bug hunt in their garden, rolling logs over to see what insects and decomposers they could find and drawing their external structures in their Sprout Scouts journals.  We then planted a beneficial insect garden to create habitat for their favorite insects.  In Winter, we had a tea party with mint from our garden.  We learned about the medicinal properties of mint.  Did you know it helps calm your digestive system if you have a lot of gas?  Kids love that fact.  Students collected sticks and leaves to make centerpieces at their desks and made leaf print cards for their families while enjoying their tea.

The garden grew more beautiful, and I was able to adapt Sprout Scouts lessons to a lunch time recess garden club.  As children were released from lunch, I would watch a herd of 60 kids speed walking across the lawn to the garden.  I also started to get a lot of positive feedback. One girl told the principal, “Mrs. Crawford, Wednesday is my favorite day to come to school because it’s garden club.”

“My daughter is on the autism spectrum and never eats anything out of our home garden.  She came home from garden club yesterday and said ‘Papa, I ate an orange tomato today! I guess I like the orange ones in the school garden with my friends.’”

—Parent and Teacher at Virginia Peterson Elementary School

As support grew, the principal became the biggest advocate for the garden.  She wrote it into the time cards to have paraeducators help supervise garden club; she encouraged every classroom to adopt a garden bed and set up classroom experiments; and she advocated for the district to provide funding to pilot an integrated garden program by One Cool Earth at Virginia Peterson next year.

Just last week was open house night, and at one point there were over 150 kids and parents in the garden releasing ladybugs and exploring.  It was a surreal moment listening to children talk to their parents about edible flowers, six plant part tacos, and composting experiments.  Some even introduced me saying “This is Ms. Mariah.  She helped us start Sprout Scouts!”  I realized that Sprout Scouts was the entry point that led to a flourishing gardening program that every child has access to.

The Sprout Scouts program is made possible through the generous support of Presenting Sponsor Target and Founding Partner the Whole Kids Foundation. 

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