Students Learn, Grow Food, Eat By Fern Gavelek
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KeOlaMagazine.com | March - April 2022
tʻs all about “connecting the dots to textbooks while making learning delicious.” That’s how Patti Cook, community development director of Waimea Middle Public Conversion Charter School, describes the
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in Hawai‘i and all are members of the larger Hawai‘i Farm to School Hui that provides political advocacy and resources. It Takes a Village to Start a School Garden Māla‘ai became a model garden through the dedicated efforts of school garden visionary Amanda Rieux and a group of community stakeholders. Initiating the garden’s formation was Waimea physician Michelle Suber, who was concerned with diet-based illness among her patients. Dr. Suber invited Amanda, a school garden educator at Alice Waters’s Edible School Yard at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, California to come to Waimea and join a workshop with interested community members.
Mountain View Elementary School Fourth Grade Honors students working as a team to pull kalo for harvesting and replanting. photo courtesy of Jaime Lewis Māla‘ai Culinary Garden. Started in 2003 through a community effort, the Waimea school garden is the poster child for the Hawai‘i Island School Garden Network (HISGN) and their Kū ‘Āina Pā School Garden Teacher Training. At more than 60 schools across Hawai‘i Island, school gardens are engaging students in learning math, science, health, reading, writing, and teamwork with guidance from the Hawai‘i School Garden Curriculum Map (HSGCM). Kū ‘Āina Pā has graduated more than 200 K–8 educators who have pioneered garden-based learning in Hawai‘iʻs statewide schools. Thatʻs right—the success of Māla‘ai helped inspire schools across the state to implement culinary gardens into their curriculums. There are five island-level school garden networks
Hawaii Academy of Arts and Sciences Garden to Grinds students examine soil horizons in a freshly cleared bed. photo courtesy of Wendy Baker This enthusiastic group worked with Waimea Middle School on the garden’s possibilities. A board of directors and nonprofit formed, and Amanda became the school’s garden leader in 2005, subsequently laying the foundation for Māla‘ai. The way Māla‘ai works is somewhat modeled after Edible