An ongoing project to expand
ag science and garden education programs
By Jack Criss, The Bolivar Bullet
Students at Cleveland Central Middle School will find a newly constructed outdoor classroom on their campus when they return to school in a few weeks.
“It’s just part of our ongoing projects at the middle school to create the ag science and garden education programs. The outdoor classroom is just a real pivotal piece to that so the students could come out and have a place to sit and learn right in the garden with shade and some technology so that different things can be pointed out, and they can use the raised beds,” said Dr. Todd Davis, president of the Friends of the Cleveland School District.
“We’ve got 12 small raised-bed garden plots currently that have produced sweet potatoes, strawberries, okra and watermelon, so when the students come back in August, they’ll be able to harvest those things and get to plant new stuff. It was part of our grant funding, and then the school district gave us the other side of the building that used to be the athletic storage, and we’re going to renovate that into an actual kitchen area,” he said.
The ag science program was started by a group of parents that wanted the school district to meet the needs of students. One of the parents who has been helping out during the outdoor classroom’s construction is Brady Pate, whose son, Mabry, an incoming seventh-grader, will be attending the middle school this fall and will be participating in the program.
“I got involved with it because I was out there with Mabry,” said Pate. “I was just doing some of the planning and building on the garden boxes, and Todd asked me to help supervise the building of the outdoor classroom while he was out of town. So, my wife, Anne Marie, and I took over the summer watering while Todd was away, and getting the vegetables off the vines and overseeing the installation of the outdoor classroom.”
The ag science program was much needed at the middle school.
“We have some really good garden programs at Bell Academy and Parks Elementary, but at the middle school, where all the kids end up after elementary school, there wasn’t a garden program at all,” said Davis. “Tammy Marlowe, a science teacher, started a small garden club, but some of the parents who started the nonprofit Friends of the Cleveland School District decided to write a grant and seek funding to help the middle school build a pretty large-scale garden education program,” said Davis. “The funding was given last year, and we’ve built a barn and the classroom, put a sprinkling system in the front lawn of the school so we can grow flowers for science experiments, and we’re also building a greenhouse.”
There has been a lot of interest in the new program, and organizers are excited to find out exactly how many students will be choosing to participate.
“We currently have about 15-30 students in the after-school garden club program who have been coming during the week to do different things but that was before we had this larger-scale outdoor classroom and everything – so we’re curious to see what will happen, and we’re hoping to have more students participating in the program,” said Davis. “We hope to be doing some consulting with different organizations like the Mississippi State Extension Center to help bolster up programming throughout the week. There’s 450 kids at the middle school, and we suspect that a lot of these kids are going to want to do some of this ag science stuff because it’s new and there’s a lot of energy behind it. We’re hopeful that we can get 60-100 kids to participate.”
“This project is definitely going to be good for the kids, teaching them from an agricultural standpoint not only where foods come from and how they’re developed, but also what it takes to take care of the food from growing it from a seed all the way to getting it to the market,” said Pate.