A Seventh-day Adventist Boarding Academy Serving Native American Youth Since 1946
A Plot to Call Their Own
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Agriculture Director and Teacher Helps HIS Students Grow Their Own Gardens
tudents at Holbrook Indian School (HIS) are preparing to plant and cultivate crops in their own small plots of ground later this semester. The project is being led by HIS agriculture director and teacher Daniel Nicholls, who has also shared his wealth of farming knowledge with Adventist agricultural industry associates at the annual AdAgra
30 Pacific Union Recorder
Holbrook Indian School
convention. Students will be assigned a portion of one of the beds to plan, plant, and maintain for the rest of the semester. By the end of the school year, students will quite literally see the fruits of their labor. Mr. Nicholls has been using the gardening class at HIS as an opportunity to invest a sense of entrepreneurship and ownership in his students. Students have already been involved in the sale of produce to customers in the local farmers market in Flagstaff. Mr. Nicholls is looking for new ways in which the gardening class can instill students with a certain level of vocational training that builds work habits like perseverance and independence. At the beginning of a typical school year, when students arrive there are many crops already growing in the garden. Students are introduced to the garden and what is grown. They work in helping to harvest and maintain the crops, but they don’t necessarily feel a sense of ownership. “When we have them work in the garden to tend to crops that they did not plant,” Mr. Nicholls explained, “they do not get to appreciate the work it takes to bring a crop to harvest.” At the end of the year, they will have