Students excited about flexibility of being sustainable

• Garden encourages youth to eat what they produce
By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

HOMER TRIBUNE/Naomi Klouda - Homer Flex High School teacher Jeff Szarzi shows the green "hoop" house he and students built for a school gardening projects. With him are left to right Vanessa Lind, Benson Eldon and David Koen. The students will raise their own food to incorporate into school lunches.

Before the Alaska governor signed a new bill that allows for local produce to be purchased and incorporated into school menus, Homer’s Flex High School was already a step ahead.
Teacher Jeff Szarzi and the school’s 32 students started their planting in March, using a $500 specialty foods grant to purchase materials to construct a “hoop” house, soil and seeds. Already, the delicate seedlings of beets, spinach, kale, onions, tomatoes and basil are starting to grow.
“I am doing this as a way to teach them to garden and show them that they can eat what they produce,” Szarzi said. “We wanted to start a school garden, and take that into the future so that we could grow produce to use in the school lunches.”
Students are so enthused about the project, several volunteered to spend the summer weeding or tending the garden.
It was student Vanessa Lind’s task to test the soil; she found it lacking nitrogen. David Koen and Benson Eldon helped build the greenhouse. As a class project, they looked up instructions and a design on the Internet. Students are completing papers on gardening, construction and nutrition. And just the other day, the class “did the math” on plotting the soon-to-be-planted raised garden.
Flex teachers said they are finding the lessons informative across the curricula.
Alaska-grown kids tend to not know as much about gardening as their Lower 48 counterparts — generally because of the short growing season here. Szarzi said he brought in a fresh celery plant from the garden to show the students what one looks like.
“They didn’t immediately know which all parts are edible,” he said.
And while the general consensus at school is that summer is when you grow things and winter is when school is in session, Szarzi pointed out that a greenhouse will continue to yield crops into November.
“We will get the rewards in the fall,” he explained. “With the number of students we have, it would supply just a few meals unless it gets bigger. Right now, the most important part is getting the kids to know they can grow a garden and it can be raised to the point they have a food item.”
All 32 students in the school participate in some form. Szarzi teaches math, science, technology and woodworking at the school, and finds all those topics apply in one way or another to the gardening project.
Just last week, Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell signed a bill into law ordering state agencies study and recommend ways to get local agriculture into the diets of public school children. The Farm-to-School Program is estimated to cost $181,000 annually to cover one full-time and one-part time position, travel and curriculum coordination. The law takes effect in August and expires July 2014.
Kyra Wagner, Director of Sustainable Homer, is enthusiastic about the possibilities this opens for local growers and fishermen. Why not add locally caught halibut to the school menu? Or salmon and cod, she suggested.
And if local produce is frozen for winter use, it could supply year-round vegetables.
“It could be beautiful. We could be growing the potatoes that are cut into french fries,” Wagner said. “It would be much better to let them have locally grown broccoli that was frozen, than to have what was grown in Kansas and shipped here.”
Nancy Hillstrand has offered to let local growers use freezer space that goes unused in the winter months at her Coal Point Trading Post. She said she is also interested in working with Flex students.
“I have a steamer, so we can blanch, vacuum-pack and freeze, so they can start supplying year-round vegetables,” Hillstrand said. “You won’t have the freight costs, and you would have the best quality vegetables.”
She added that involving the school in these food-preservation steps would be an important part of their education.

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