Front cover and above: The garden’s flourishing second season on the Restoration & Wellness campus in the Ferguson-Florissant School School District. 2024-25 will be our third consecutive year embedded in this school.
Student-Centered
Multidisciplinary
Hands-on
Community Reponsive
With a focus on well-being, curiosity, and creativity, we design and implement project-based curriculum in public schools.
Dear Friends of Project Lab St. Louis,
Although the temperature soared into the triple digits last week, a new school year has begun and I’m thrilled to share that we’ve expanded our garden-based program to a second campus. In addition to our work in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, we’ve launched a program in Koch Elementary School in the Riverview Gardens School District. Here’s a brief overview of what happened since you last heard from me!
After two amazing years as lead gardener and school liaison at Restoration & Wellness, Valaree Logan has moved on to a new position in a hospital-based department of behavior health. Although it was hard to face the reality that her time with our program had come to an end, I feel a profound joy in knowing that Val is following her light, building her family and her professional career.
The relationships Val established and nurtured among the teachers, students, and administrators at Restoration grew directly out of the care and expertise she brought to the regenerative garden we established on that campus. In addition to coordinating the seemingly unending weeding, watering, and overwintering the garden required, Val continued, all through her second year, to weave together adademic learning and social-emotional development. Her student-centered approach and unwavering dedication to our shared vision and values created a
personal legacy.
Val created a culture of affection and connection, a place for learning about plants, growing plants, and harvesting plants – putting a leaf of chard in a sandwich; taking greens home for an ailing grandma; snipping zinnias for a vase. Thanks to Val’s leadership and the example she set, this is just the kind of thing students and teachers do.
Val’s legacy lives on thanks to Ms. Rhonda Holmes (see page 5) and the support of the administration. Building on the momentum of these lat two years, Ms. Holmes has launched Garden Fridays. In these first weeks, students have been making tea from the lemon balm and bouquets with the black-eyed
beginning our first year in what was then the Normandy School District. Much happened in the last decade, and through it all we stayed conected. Today, Dr. Blackwell is the principal of Koch Elementary School in the Riverview Gardens School District. Lo and behold, the moment has come for us to work together again. We’ve begun with radishes. Please see page 3 for details.
You provide financial support that transforms the experience of school at the sensory level.
Susans; exploring what’s growing; and coming to understand how and why caring for the plants can support their social-emotional well-being and their academic learning.
In 2013, Amy Blackwell and I were
With respect to mission, Project Lab St. Louis is where we are always striving to be: in public schools, developing, implementing, and supporting hands-on, project-based curriculum with a literacy focus. We represent the best of what a public/private partnership can be. This fact will help us lean deeper into our relationship with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and with Custom Foodscaping, LLC. I wrote this last year, but it’s always and ever true: Thanks to you, our work can continue. Thanks to you, the curriculum we develop and implement remains relevant, rigorous, and engaging. Thanks to you, I remain grateful for the past, joyful in the present, and hopeful about the future.
Warmly, Inda
Getting our program up and running at Koch Elementary was a matter of minutes. A few days before the first day of school, I stopped by Koch to visit my friend, Dr. Amy Blackwell, the school principal. It was her first year at the school, which is located a few blocks from the memorialized site on Canfield Drive where Mike Brown had been killed by Officer Darren Wilson almost exactly ten years ago. For the last few years, Dr. Blackwell and I have been been trying to sync up our work. As we walked the building, looked over the enormous expanse of available lawn, and met the classroom teachers busy setting up their rooms, we realized that this is the year to make it happen. We decided to begin with readings and radishes.
Why radishes? First, radishes can grow from seed to snack in 30 days. Second, radishes are edible roots, and we always look for ways to celebrate our roots. Third, the very word radish has deep roots, dating back 2,000 years to its origins in Latin. The words radish, eradicate, and radical all share a root meaning, which is root. Very meta! I immediately drafted a reading passage and guide to planting radish seeds. I ordered 18 copies of “Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table,” enough for each of the classroom teachers plus three extras.
That Friday, the last weekday before 290 students would be welcomed into their classrooms, I returned to Koch with paper cups, potting soil, radish seeds, spray bottles, and printouts of the radish passage. Dr. Blackwell and I wanted every single child in the school to start the year by planting their own seed.
And so begins another happy collaboration. Since that week, we’ve solicited feedback from teachers through a Google form, planned where the outdoor garden bed might go, coordinated with the district’s operations department, and sketched out a plan for participating in a regional opportunity to create sustainable schools offered by the Missouri Gateway Green Building Council.
In the intake form I addressed teachers and staff directly: “I know it’s only been a week or so, but based on your own observations and expertise this year and from years past, what feels most urgent in terms of what your students need to be learning this year? Say as much or as little as you like relating to academic skills and understandings, social-emotional development, and specific background knowledge.” In addition to literacy and numeracy, nearly half of the teachers who responded wrote about social-emotional development and wellbeing. From the reading specialist:
Making sure they continue to grow and develop their reading skills. People always say talking to plants helps them grow, what about reading to them? A lot of students struggle with socialemotional issues and could possibly use gardening as a positive outlet.
Project Lab St. Louis asks, listens, and responds.
We actively seek & recognize teaching & learning opportunities
by Rhonda Holmes
I have worked in various areas of education for more than 20 years. Throughout my years of teaching, I have observed the need for students to be emotionally and socially well in order to reach their fullest potential. As a result, I began a personal mission to learn about dysregulated behaviors and emotions, as well as effective strategies that assist with regulating behaviors and emotions. I have to be transparent and state that this work began with me.
After acquiring the degrees, certifications and experience, I had confidence that I could impart my knowledge and experience to others. During my brief period of retirement from special education, I made the decision to earn a certification in yoga and social emotional learning.
I strongly feel that when we teach our young people self-awareness and selfmanagement, along with responsible decision making, relationship skill building, and social awareness, they will flourish.
I have been employed as the Social Emotional Coach & Teacher at The Restoration & Wellness Center in FergusonFlorissant School District for the past two and half years now. This year my position has evolved into more than I could have ever imagined. I reach out to every student by providing them with as many coping strategies as possible to meet their social emotional and behavioral needs. I’ve incorporated all aspects of gardening into what
is now becoming a Social Emotional Program for the entire campus. Fridays in the Garden will be a major part of every student’s weekly schedule – whether we work in the garden, harvest, or just sit amongst the flourishing plants and pollinators and talk about issues that students are concerned with.
Given that our school has a PBIS incentive program, I’ve added “Relaxing in the Garden and doing classwork, while drinking tea made from herbs in the garden” as something students will earn after acquiring 250 points. When the weather changes, I plan to teach students about plant germination and the importance of caring for a living thing. They will be required to care for their own plants in the classroom. We will discuss, read, and write. Some students will draw the entire process. Students will take their plants home once the plants have grown to maturity.
In my opinion, gardening isn’t optional when it comes to social and emotional wellbeing. It is an all-inclusive experience and should be an integral part of everyone’s journey to becoming well. My motto is; Wellness is a process, so trust the process. Just like the growth process of plants, wellness takes time. Sometimes it doesn’t happen immediately but trust that wellness will yield a good harvest, if we do not give up.
Our finances are sound. As I wrote last year, we’re sound because of the generosity of our core donors who’ve continued, throughout the ups and downs of the last few years, to support our program. The landscape of public education can be volatile. When leadership changes, personnel and programming often change too. We continue to be intentional about what we do and where we do it. Thanks to the teachers and building administrators at our two sites in Ferguson-Florissant School District and Riverview Gardens School District, our work is a true publc/private partnership. Our prudent approach to expansion has made it possible to invest our surplus cash in a risk-free interest-bearing investment account. On June 30, 2024 this account was valued at $134,807. In addition to this investment, as of June 30, 2024 we had $166,009 in cash on hand to support our ongoing work. Below is our Profit and Loss Statement for 2022-23.
Working hand in hand with the social-emotional learning teacher at Restoration & Wellness, we’re figuring out how best to integrate the garden into her curriculum. In addition to creating and curating a custom-designed collection of reading passages, we’re in a position to offer supplies, books, journals, seeds, tools, field trips, guest speakers, and so much more. Anything and everything to nourish the foundations of student learning! We’ve also launched a collaboration with an elementary school in a second distrct. Now this school, too, will be building and nurturing a school garden, creating a second site for gathering data as part of the Permaculture Project of Metropolitan St. Louis. As always, we make sure that our expenditures align with our values. Additional funds will also allow us to pay former Project Lab students as interns and program facilitators, extend our collaboration with Custom Foodscaping LLC, and deepen our partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
More than 99% of our 2023-24 expenses went to studentcentered programming: teachers, books, garden supplies, and garden infrastructure, including worms for vermicomposting.
Please consider what’s at stake, and give as generously as you can. Contributions come in many sizes – we are grateful for every single one.
www.projectlabstlouis.org/donate
We’re so grateful to everyone who supported our work during the 2023-24 school year.
For financial support we thank . . .
Karen Benson
Charlie Dee
Kirk Johnson
Amy McIntosh & Jeffrey Toobin
Laurence Meltzer
Susan Rudin
For in-kind support we thank . . .
Dr. Joseph Davis
David Dean
Michael Dee
Carla Easter
Myko Hammond-Vaughn
Eric Handley
Eric Harris
Brittany Kelleher
Matt Lebon
Ralph Ruffin
Tim Merritt
Alexander Meyer
Volunteeer Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts
Project Lab St. Louis www.projectlabstlouis.org 314-605-61204
Learning is making connections. Learning is active. Learning is social. Learning is transformative. Please continue to support project-based learning.