LITTLE ROCK — Imagine leading schoolchildren out of the classroom and into a garden.

Imagine showing them when to plant fruits and vegetables, how to compost, when to harvest. Imagine offering those kids a taste and teaching them how to cook the foods they’ve helped to grow.

AmeriCorps’ FoodCorps members around the nation do this every day.

FoodCorps is a national service program with 80 members at work in 12 states. Arkansas plays host to four: Two work with the Fayetteville School District and two help the Delta Garden Study. The Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Little Rock is using the Delta Garden Study to seek solutions to childhood obesity.

FoodCorps members get to choose where they will spend their 12-month terms. Among current and past members, Arkansas is a popular destination, because it ranks ninth in childhood food insecurity (which counts children without reliable access to nutritional food) and has one of the highest youth obesity rates in the nation.

Members are charged with maintaining school gardens, teaching children about healthful food and helping establish or expand farm-to-school programs. If that sounds like a lot of fun, they say it’s really a lot of work.

AFTER-SCHOOL GARDENING

Fayetteville’s two FoodCorps members have very different jobs — and that’s by design, says Dana Smith, the school district’s sustainability coordinator. Sophia Gill, 22, a California native, came to Arkansas in August and works primarily at Holt Middle School, where she leads extracurricular garden club meetings, tends the school garden and tries to fit garden-based lessons into the science curriculum.

Gill was attracted to FoodCorps by her love of ... food.

“I’ve always been enamored of food and cooking,” she says. “I think food is an effective tool for bringing people together, and I think it’s important to catch kids when they’re young before their trajectory is set.”

Smith says Gill collaborates with teachers “to help identify ways that they can use the school garden as a teaching tool to reinforce what they’re learning in classes.”

Her presence has allowed the club to expand. In addition to its usual Wednesday afternoons, it now meets on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. She also has added cooking to the menu for before- and after-school club meetings.

She is planning a demonstration of foods for a social studies lesson on early exploration of the Americas. “They’ll get to taste a pizza with ingredients from the New World and one with Old World ingredients,” she says. Pizza will illustrate the different crops available in North America and Europe.

TAKE IT TO THE TRAY

Gill has the added duty of finding foods that can be grown in the school garden and used in the cafeteria salad bar.

“It might be different things like sugar snap peas to add to the salad bar or growing oregano to add to spaghetti sauce,” Smith says. “All in an effort to make the connection between growing and eating healthy foods for students.”

Fayetteville’s other corps member also is trying to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to children’s lunch trays. Allyson Mrachek, 29, is a registered dietitian from Seattle. Mrachek is charged with finding locally grown, whole foods for the cafeteria at Owl Creek School, which is for pre-kindergarten through seventh grade.

“We’re going to start with salad bars at two schools — Owl Creek School and Holt Middle School — and streamline our process before we work to other schools in the district,” she says.

Mrachek is also an extra set of hands of sorts for the Owl Creek after-school garden club, which meets three days a week for nine weeks. Sessions include classroom lessons, handson gardening and a cooking lesson each week. With the help of Mrachek and Sammi Jones, who works for Energy Corps, another national service program, she’s helping children learn to plant, grow and eat seasonally.

“It could be learning about pollinators, and they’d observe pollinators and write about it,” Mrachek says. “Or they could plant some produce that should be planted right now.”

Another day, a chef shows how to cook something they’ve grown. At the end of the nine weeks, students are sent off with a packet of recipes to enhance their gardening experiences.

SECOND HELPING

“You can’t just grow food,” Smith says. “You have to prepare it, eat it and enjoy it.”

And the kids do — just ask Parker Northington, a 9-yearold student at Owl Creek.

“I like going out to the garden,” he says. “It’s like a mystery. You never know what you’re going to find.”

Classmate Sofia Calderon, also 9, agrees. “It’s a lot of fun. We get to garden and cook. We get to learn about vegetables, write and explore the garden,” she says. “I like it when we cook. I like to cook at my house, too.”

Holt and Owl Creek are pilot schools for farm-toschool initiatives and gardenbased education, which Smith says she hopes eventually to expand districtwide.

STUDYING OBESITY

Meanwhile, corps members working at the Delta Garden Study are studying what other benefits can grow in a garden.

The study is administered by the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute’s Childhood Obesity Prevention Research Program and funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.

“We are looking at the impact of school gardens on fruit and vegetable intake and physical activity as well as improving academic achievement and addressing social risk behaviors such as absenteeism and bullying,” says Emily English, intervention programs manager for the study.

Researchers compare data — including grades, obesity rates and benchmark test scores — from intervention schools (that is, schools with a garden) and from certain comparison schools (no gardens).

Garden specialists from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences are assigned to each intervention school to help plant and maintain the school plots along with a FoodCorps member. This year’s study focuses on two intervention schools — Yellville Summit Middle School in Yellville and Cloverdale Aerospace Technology Charter Middle School in Little Rock — and two comparison schools — White Hall Middle School in White Hall and Northwood Middle School in the Pulaski County Special School District.

FoodCorps members, along with the garden specialists, assist teachers in Yellville and at Cloverdale with a garden-based science program developed by study creators for sixth- to eighthgrade students.

Science teachers take their students into the garden for 45 minutes twice a week for the entire school year, English says. From the plants, they learn about asexual and sexual reproduction, composting, decomposition, soil structure and ecological systems.

“The kids taste a lot of produce through classes, and we are also working with the cafeterias and child nutrition directors at each school to try and serve some of that produce in the cafeteria,” English says.

WORMS AND CHICKENS

Each Delta Garden Study program also has chickens, a compost bin, a vermicomposting bin (where worms break down refuse), a rain barrel and a greenhouse.

“That allows us to bring students out for the entire school year,” English says. “It also allows us to extend our season so that we always have something growing that they can see, taste and smell.”

The recipe seems to be working, says Rachel Spencer, 22, who served as a FoodCorps service member for the study last year in Marshall. Spencer is also this year’s FoodCorps Fellow for the state, mentoring current members.

“One boy told me after we made a salad with homemade balsamic vinaigrette that he used to think that Sonic made the best food in town, but, no, it was me,” she says. “I had a class of 40 eighth-grade football players, and one boy told me, ‘I don’t like store-bought broccoli, but I like garden broccoli.’”

“It’s amazing what kids can do if you give them some credit and some space,” she adds. “If they get to help grow something and cook it, they’re going to like it.”

Family, Pages 36 on 10/10/2012