The "Rishi" garden swings open in a hurry as the children of Nancy Carson’s elementary school class retrieve their tools to garden. A boy in a striped blue shirt grabs a wheel barrel for compost, a popular choice for the class. Quinn, Gavin, Dylan and Cosmos get their hands dirty as they rub their little palms over the grate that sifts the dirt.
The Lopez Island School District has found a way to provide organic food for school lunches grown by the students. The program is called Lopez Island Farm Education (LIFE) and is a little more than two years old.
Makena Henrikson, a Western Washington University student, helped form a proposal to present to the Lopez Island School District to start the program. LIFE teaches children farm education by integrating gardening and agriculture into the curriculum. Children also learn hands-on by growing produce and harvesting it for school lunches in the "garden-to-cafeteria" program of LIFE.
Through the garden-to-cafeteria program and working with local farms, the Lopez Island School District is able to provide an estimated 70 percent of organic food for school lunches, Evans said. As often as possible, they try to buy the remaining 30 percent from the local farms on the island.
The Lopez Island School District has 250 students in kindergarten through 12th grade for the 2007-2008 school year, according to Superintendent Bill Evans. The school district is able to maintain the garden-to-cafeteria program through a local farm and garden on the elementary school’s grounds. Each homeroom in the elementary school has a raised garden bed. The homerooms consist of a mix of students from first to fifth grade. Teacher Nancy Carson has her students split into five different groups: watering, composting, weeding, tools and boots, and planting.
"I like weeding because sometimes there are other things you get do after weeding, like plant flowers," said ten-year-old Brianne Swanson. Swanson said she also enjoys harvesting the plants because the students get to weigh them.
The school also has a mobile cooking unit. Evans recalled a time when second graders cooked and ate a turnip in their classroom that they had grown, while they listened to a story about a farmer who grew a turnip that was so large he had to get help to carry it.
Michelle Heller helps fund the project, and her son is a sixth grader at the school. Heller said she invests in the project because she believes food preferences are established in childhood.
"We are finding that our kids are happy to eat vegetables and healthy foods because they grow their own vegetables," Heller said.
Evans said that the community has been extremely helpful in supporting the program and the district even has plans to add 12 fruit trees on the property.
"By teaching [students] healthy eating habits they are growing up and carrying that with them," Evans said. "It’s like throwing a rock in the pond, it creates a ripple effect."
Evans and Heller said they believe other school districts could implement this type of program into their curriculums, even if it is something as simple as growing a plant from a seed in a classroom.
A recent bill passed in Washington State to make it easier for school districts larger than Lopez to provide fresh produce in school lunches. The "Local Farms Healthy Kids" bill was passed by a wide margin in Washington State to facilitate relationships between local farmers and school districts to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables for school lunches. The bill was created in hopes to lower childhood obesity as well as reduce shipping, refrigeration, and storage costs associated with purchasing from a large distributor, according to the Senate Democratic Caucus.
The Bellingham School District has tried to integrate as much local produce as possible into the school breakfasts and lunches said Mark Dalton, the food supervisor manager for the Bellingham School District. He said he is happy the bill passed, but said the school district still struggles to purchase fresh produce in mass quantities. The Bellingham School District serves 5,000 meals per day, but is only allotted $1 to spend per child for each meal. Before the "Local Farm Healthy Kids" bill passed, school districts had to buy food from the lowest bidding farm, which usually meant they couldn’t afford the more expensive local produce, Dalton said. With the new bill, school districts aren’t obligated by law to buy food that isn’t organic or local on account of price.
Lyle Griess, a nutrition specialist, says that children should eat a well-balanced lunch to curb increasing childhood obesity rates. In order to keep kids healthy, Griess said, 75 percent of what is put on a child’s plate should be fresh produce. An example of a well-balanced lunch for a child would be a portion of green beans, broccoli, whole grain bread and a deck-of-cards size portion of chicken or pork, Griess said. Children should stay away from soft drinks.
Eating local fruits and vegetables means less toxins in the body. When produce has to travel long distances, chemicals are sprayed on the produce to keep it from rotting, Griess said.
The "Local Farms Healthy Kids" bill opens channels of communication between schools and local farms and is a great start in the right direction, Dalton said. However, the large Bellingham School District does not have the funds or resources to purchase local produce for every meal.
The district participated in the "eat local" week put on by Sustainable Connections last September, Dalton said. Local produce was served in every lunch for a week, but in the end it cost the district up to three times as much as the regular school lunches. The district has trouble finding a consistent local produce provider for large quantities during the winter, when lunch food is out of season. Once the produce is brought to the school for lunch, the district has to pay to have it processed, Dalton said. Recently, the school district formed a relationship with Hendrickson Farm in Marysville. Hendrickson Farm contracts local farms to grow the produce and then the Hendrickson Farm processes it and ships it to Bellingham, Dalton said.
The Lopez School District’s garden-to-cafeteria program is a great model, Dalton said. The "Rishi" garden on the elementary school grounds on Lopez Island is welcoming with a swinging gate, a pond, and a place to sit. On a sunny day in April the children water the sprouting cabbage and grade the compost; one boy rolls down the grassy hill, laughing. The children are waiting for their garden to grow.