Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Bishop Elementary students take pride in their gardening skills.
Garden yields dirty hands, fertile minds
By Sam Scott
Gardening is a dirty business, especially, when the heavy winter rains turn the soil to soft mud. It's a fact that's not lost on parents of the Bishop Buds, a gardening club at Bishop Elementary School.
"If our parents say anything [about the dirt], we just tell them it's for education," Daniel Rivas, a fifth-grade gardener, says.
With the Bishop garden recently winning $750 of supplies from the National Gardening Association, the opportunities for more grass-stained knees have risen.
As with the rest of his classmates, Rivas helps tend the vegetables and flowers at Bishop. Once a week, Calvin Walker's fifth grade class and Suzanne Ruthnaswamy's special education students meet to weed, plant and water the school's beds. Like a Victory Garden, the beds are strewn about the available space. Radishes and beans grow down the center of an outside hallway. Bright red ranunculus flowers appear from a gap in the bushes.
School officials says they've never had to worry about students vandalizing the easily accessible gardens. The kids respect it too much.
"It's like an outside class," Rivas says, prompting a friend to jibe that it is an outside class. Volunteers teach the students the ideas behind what they do and see in the garden. Students perform experiments at the end of the year.
"If you plant them too close together, they won't grow right," Omar Salazar, a fifth grader says, offering one of the things he has learned in the class. Like most of the students, Salazar says he doesn't have access to a garden at home.
"Some of these kids have never seen vegetables or flowers grow," Nellie Durand, president of the Sunnyvale Gardening Club, says. "They think you just go to Lucky's."
Durand, a lifelong gardener, and the other volunteers from the club have been the engine behind the program, donating time, money, and expertise to their understudies for 10 years.
"They're like the postman," Bishop principal Frances Dampier says. "They come here rain, shine or snow."
Durand thinks teaching gardening teaches kids a way to relax.
"It's really a therapy," Durand says. "You can be all upset, and you go out there and garden, and forget all about your problems."
Knowledge and relaxation aside, the real benefit of the garden might be the groups it brings together--the mainstream students buddy up with kids in the special education class and learn from senior citizen volunteers.
"It institutes a generation bridge we really lack," says Joseph Rudinicki, superintendent of the Sunnyvale Union School District.
Ruthnaswamy says the partnership between the students bridges a gap, forming friendships in the separate groups.
"I think it brings out the best in them," she says. "Even when they're not buddies, [the mainstream students] stop to talk to my kids. I see a lot of caring and sharing."
Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
