Berkshire Hills Regional School District — On May 14, 60 kindergarteners and their teachers got out of the classroom and played Farmer For A Day. They turned compost and looked for worms, noting the breakdown of newspaper and veggie scraps, the different-sized chunks of soil, the process of biodegradation as it played out at April Hill Farm in Egremont.
Their experience, along many others’, was made possible thanks to a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm to School grant, through which hundreds of Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) students have benefitted from a wide range of educational experiences associated with agriculture over the past two years. The good news is that all the funds were in the bank before the program was abruptly eliminated on March 24 of this year. The bad news is that, with the federal funding now erased, the future funding streams for the collaborative programs that Berkshire Hills educators and local farmers had put into place are now in doubt.
Gordon Soule, longtime Monument Mountain social studies teacher, is the district’s coordinator for BHRSD’s $100,000 USDA grant, which has three threads. First, the district partners with local farmers to bring healthy food into schools. In the fall, BHRSD purchased apples for every student in Berkshire Hills from Riiska Brook Orchard in Sandisfield and the school’s neighbor Windy Hill Farm.
The second thread of the grant work is to provide exposure to higher education opportunities for high schoolers, so this year 25 Monument Mountain Regional High School students visited the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts. Students got a taste of both higher education and a career path, touring “the premier Agricultural school in the country,” says Soule. “Some kids were interested in food science, some in the chemistry part, some in landscape design, and others in sustainable farming.”
This part of the grant also offsets the cost of college applications for seniors interested in farm-related fields, and to pay for trips to local farms.
Finally, the Farm to School grant has funded a Farmers-in-Residence initiative. This spring the first grade is working on planting a “3 Sisters” garden in the district’s Project Sprout gardens, and, says teacher Shannon Foster, they will shortly be going out in three phases to plant corn, beans, and pumpkins. In preparation for the planting, Monument Mountain Regional High School early education teacher Jack Curletti has been maintaining the field “so that the crows do not steal all of the corn!” says Foster.
Farmers-in-Residence Jen Salinetti of Woven Roots and Sarah Monteiro of April Hill provide professional development for teachers to incorporate agricultural skills across the curriculum. They also visited each kindergarten class in early April as preparation for the May field trip, to lead students in seed sorting, learning how to distinguish flower seeds from bean seeds. According to kindergarten teacher Amy Salinetti (Jen’s sister-in-law), the students built “a beautiful myriad of seeds in all shapes, colors, and sizes.”
A highlight of the May 14 April Hill visit was transplanting lettuce plants that had miraculously gone from seed to food, though at first some students were skeptical that the green thing attached to the dirt might be edible. “You can’t eat plants!” they exclaimed. But as they thought more about it, their teacher observed, they saw that lettuce was both a plant they had planted and a thing that belongs on a dinner plate. They brought their lettuce plants home with them, with a few kids nibbling on their plant food on the way. One boy said he intended to plant his lettuce so that it would grow so big it could feed his whole family.
Since 2013, the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant Program has been supporting these and similar efforts in schools, non-profits, Indian Tribal Organizations (ITOs), state agencies, producers, and other organizations around the United States. Barring the reinstatement of the federal funds that were cut off in March, the momentum of the past two years will require state and local philanthropic support to continue. Says teacher Salinetti of the local grant opportunities, “There are plenty of arts grants but not so many science grants. We have worked with Mass Audubon, and we will again. But this was unique.”
