Rich Harvest

MICHAEL AMSLER

School-garden projects are blossoming all over

By Paula Harris

IT’S AUGUST and La Tercera Elementary School in Petaluma is closed for summer vacation, but the campus garden is bustling with activity this mellow morning. Several students and parents scurry among the tall golden sunflowers in the butterfly and hummingbird habitat area, intent on their various tasks: deadheading plants, collecting seeds, watering the herbs, and amending the soil.

“I love it here,” says Becky Dunaway, an outgoing 8-year-old with long dark hair and a quick smile, as she digs in the dirt. “We plant seeds and watch the plants grow. If they’re vegetables, we get to eat them. If they’re flowers, we get to take the seeds and plant them and watch them grow all over again.”

These families are “baby-sitting” the school garden, which organizers say has in two years gone from a committee-based concept to an award-winning community project, which is the pride of students and parents alike.

This year, La Tercera was one of 300 schools nationally to win the National Gardening Association Youth Garden Grant. The project is funded by donations from county businesses.

“Our garden is in the lush and blooming shape it’s in right now because 20 families volunteer to come in and care for it during the summer vacation,” says Denise Ward, a parent volunteer who became school garden director when the project began in 1997.

Ward says all the school’s students, grades K-6, help care for the garden and learn valuable lessons from doing so, and she laments the lack of state dollars for such projects. “The state should supply more funding and understand that in nurturing and caring for things, children are less likely to hurt themselves or the world around them,” she says. “Your mind is in a different place when you’re gardening and growing something.”

TINA POLES, school-garden teacher trainer for the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, which helps public and private schools in Sonoma County start and sustain organic gardens, agrees. “The school garden is a kind of a growing place that tends to lend itself to being very respectful of life and our processes, and I think children sense that,” Poles says. “In a well-done program, the garden is a place to just be. Sure, you can do lessons in it, but it’s also a place to just be and do work, move barrels of dirt, and make compost piles, and there’s an end product. It’s very concrete– you do this and things happen.

“Kids really love that–they don’t have a lot of that in their lives.”

Poles has seen transformations in students as they work on the garden projects. “It seems to calm children down who need to be calmed down, and it excites children who are passive,” she says.

In addition, Poles observes, the garden is a healing place for children who may live in a small apartment or who haven’t had much experience with nature and being outside. “[The garden] is an incredibly good antidote to too much television and too many video games,” she says. “You can’t do those things in the school garden, so in some ways you’re saved from all that stuff.”

For the past two years, the OAEC has offered a five-day residential training program for local schoolteachers and parents (of kids from preschool to high school) who are interested in creating and maintaining a school garden. A recent workshop was attended by teachers from a dozen local schools planning to add a school-garden project to their curricula.

To help nurture this growing trend, the OAEC has also established a Sonoma County School Garden Resource Network. “This links people who do horticultural work in Sonoma County with schools,” explains Poles.

The network offers technical assistance, donations of materials, and other support services. Among member organizations are the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, the Sonoma County Office of Education, the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, and Sonoma County Jail Industries.

NEXT SUMMER, the network will host a national school-garden project symposium at Sonoma State University, which will include a variety of speakers on the topic. The OAEC teacher-training program, offered twice yearly, consists of hands-on organic gardening sessions; an examination of curriculum development to see how the garden can fulfill state-mandated curricula at all grade levels (the garden is an outdoor laboratory that can provide a natural setting for integrated curricula); a course in nutrition, including a garden harvest lunch; and a course in teaching art in the garden.

Speakers from Occidental’s Harmony Elementary School, which has maintained a very successful school garden for several years, share their knowledge and ideas with the OAEC trainees. The goal is that the students should be part of the entire design process and feel total ownership of their new garden.

Intertwined throughout the program is information about fundraising for gardens and networking with the community to keep the project alive. School must often rely on grants and donations to keep the garden going. “It’s a constant struggle, but people in community have been very generous,” says Poles.

One such community member is Joan Betts, who last year handed out more than $60,000 worth of plants to local schools. As part of her Master Gardener Project at SSU, Betts operates Cinderella Nursery, a non-commercial facility near Rohnert Park. She works with companies such as Home Depot to provide schools with much-needed greenery. “We get last week’s plants,” she says with a laugh. “The reps pull everything that’s not premium off the shelves because people insist on everything in perfect bloom–so we pick ’em up.”

Betts tends to peaked plants, restores their health, and donates them to school gardens and other youth-garden projects. “Gardening is a necessary tool for learning,” says Betts. “Children need to understand the environment, and they learn through growing things. If they can respect growing things, they can better respect the land and make better environmental decisions in the future.” *

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Edge

Tutoring programs for college-bound teens are catching fire

By Janet Wells

KENT PINGREY didn’t want to spend six weeks of summer vacation and every Saturday hitting the books. What teenager would? But now that the 19-year-old Rohnert Park native is on his way to an engineering degree at San Diego State University, he’s glad he spent his leisure time dissecting pigs and calculating rocket-projectile vectors.

Pingrey is one of almost 1,000 local high school students each year who participate in programs through Sonoma State University that prepare them for an increasingly competitive college-admissions gauntlet.

When Pingrey was in middle school, he was recruited by Sonoma State’s Academic Talent Search, a federally funded program that offers workshops on everything from study habits to self-esteem, the Saturday Academy, tutoring, and field trips.

At Rancho Cotate High School, Pingrey chose to participate in 3-1-3, a joint program with SSU that identifies 30 at-risk ninth graders and enrolls them in rigorous college-preparatory classes. Senior year is a combination of classes at high school and at Sonoma State, which allows most participants to then complete their college degree in three years.

“The program made it so much easier here,” Pingrey says of his first full year at SSU. “I already had a couple of classes under my belt and knew my way around. Some students when they come in, they don’t really even know how to take notes.

“The real benefit is that they make sure you’re on track, that you’re fulfilling the requirements and your grades are good,” adds Pingrey, who has transferred to San Diego State for the fall.

In addition to intensive academic tracking, SSU’s pre-college academic development program has 50 tutors logging more than 12,000 hours helping students at public high schools around the county.

Pingrey, self-assured and motivated, didn’t bother with academic tutors until his senior year, when he was taking calculus at SSU.

“Then I was in there every day,” he says.

THESE DAYS, fulfilling the high school graduation requirements isn’t enough for students who want to go to college. Even good grades and decent SAT scores don’t guarantee admission. To help their chances, students now do summer internships, play sports, and perform community services to show leadership qualities. They take honors courses to boost their grade-point averages. And to show that they can stand up to academic challenge, they participate in pre-college programs like those at SSU.

“It used to be that college was for kids with a lot of brains who could get scholarships or those who could afford it. Historically, it was the rich person’s privilege,” says Gloria Miller, director of pre-college programs at Sonoma State University. “People have recognized that pretty much without a college degree you don’t get a chance at the better-earning jobs. Now people are better off as a whole economically, so college is a possibility for many more people.

“You wouldn’t think with us being in the backwater of Sonoma County we’d be competitive,” Miller adds. “We are.”

Sonoma State, with about 6,000 students, accepts 80 percent of its applicants. More than half of those have a grade-point average of 3.0 or better, according to the National College Board website. San Francisco State University accepts 69 percent of its applicants, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the most competitive state university, takes only 38 percent of those applying. Then there are the really tough schools, like the University of California at Berkeley, which accepts just 31 percent of its applicants, most of whom have 4.0 grade-point averages or better.

By comparison, Stanford University accepts 15 percent of applicants, and Harvard just 13 percent.

KARLA MARROQUIN’S parents hoped that she would go to college, but as recent immigrants from El Salvador, they didn’t speak English and had no idea how to begin to maneuver their 8-year-old daughter through the system. Sonoma State’s academic-talent-search staffers found her in seventh grade and steered her into Upward Bound, a four-year program for low-income high school students who are the first in their family to pursue a college degree.

As part of Upward Bound, Marroquin went to summer school at SSU, enrolled in the Saturday Academy, and attended tutoring sessions every Wednesday after school.

“You grew up in the program. Every Saturday we’d talk, kind of like a support group,” she says. “There was more support than in high school. The [high school guidance] counselor put me in English as a Second Language classes automatically. The Upward Bound staff went around and put me in college prep classes instead.”

Two years ago, Marroquin graduated from Casa Grande High School in Petaluma with a 3.66 GPA, heading in a very different direction from her friends.

“They were going to go to work when out of high school,” says the 19-year-old SSU sophomore, who plans on majoring in economics and going into international relations.

“Most of my friends got pregnant, got married. They have different ambitions than I do now.”

For more information on Sonoma State University’s pre-college programs, call 664-2428.

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

On Course

MICHAEL AMSLER

Sonoma County charter schools are a bold experiment in education

By David Templeton

WHEN THE UNASSUMING double doors of Sonoma Charter School first swung open, back in the fall of 1993, the event was viewed by local bureaucrats and education watchdogs as the start of a worthy, if controversial, experiment. As one of California’s first charter schools–created as an alternative to a public school system that, according to charter-school advocates, has become inefficient, outdated, and unbending–everyone involved knew that this ambitious K-8 school out on Sonoma Highway would be the focus of much public scrutiny.

To an extremely focused and determined core of parents and educators, however–most of whose students would be attending the brand-new school–that first day of classes was more than just Day One of some educational “experiment.”

To them, it was nothing short of a dream come true.

“I’m constantly blown away by the things these parents have accomplished,” enthuses Roger Frost, principal of Sonoma Charter School, now officially the oldest operating charter school in the county. Aside from all the pre-legislation letter-writing and petition signing, Frost mentions fundraising efforts, school-wide painting parties, rotating volunteers for lawn-cutting and landscaping, and daily food service.

Parents even sit in when new teachers are being interviewed.

Though it may have been the passage of the 1992 California Charter Schools Act that made charter schools legally possible, it is the parents and teachers that made it happen to begin with. And it’s those same parents and teachers that continue to make things happen, as California’s charter-school program enters its sixth year. “The big majority of charter schools are founded by families that are seriously seeking a different educational option,” Frost says, “a program they can have some control over. Charter-school parents tend to be very involved.”

Indeed. Seven years after the charter-school bill passed, with nearly 200 such schools now up-and-running in the state (including 10 in Sonoma County alone, with two new ones opening doors this fall), it is clear that a high level of parent-teacher involvement is pretty much typical of the ever-growing charter-school movement.

Not that there is any such thing as a “typical charter school.”

“The whole theory behind charter schools is to generate new and innovative techniques and models of learning,” explains Colin Miller of the California Department of Education. As examples, he cites “back-to-basics” charter schools, arts-based schools that combine academic studies with emphasis on performance and fine art, and bilingual immersion schools. There are charter schools that include religious teachings, schools that take place outdoors or in museums, schools that combine classroom learning with large amounts of homeschooling, and schools that aim to help at-risk children or those with various learning blocks or substance-abuse issues (Marin County’s Sobriety High School, for instance, offers a curriculum involving 12-step meetings and routine urine tests).

“To try and lump all these schools together,” says Miller, “and to say that they are all similar, or that they are all intended to accomplish the same thing, is just impossible.”

AT A CROWDED luncheon in June, Ray Carlson–head of the board of directors for the award-winning, non-profit Kid Street Theater, in Santa Rosa–stood up before a packed room of supporters to announce that the innovative arts-therapy program had won approval for charter-school status. After several years of operating as an after-school and summertime program for at-risk children, the highly successful program has become Sonoma County’s newest charter school.

According to Carlson, it’s not a moment too soon.

“So far, most charter schools have served an upper-middle-class segment of the population,” explains Rose Haynes, Kid Street’s charter-school administrator, pointing out that the new school, which officially opens Aug. 30, will serve a distinctly less advantaged group of children: homeless kids, those in shelters, children who’ve seen severe abuse. “Most of the kids who will be coming to us literally don’t know how to learn,” she says. “The circumstances of their lives have been focused purely on survival, not learning. Our goal at Kid Street Charter School is to create a loving and caring environment so that our students can become learners.”

On the other hand, a charter school can help save existing school programs threatened by changing social and political tides. Ginger Dale is the principal of Cali Calmecac, an award-winning bilingual immersion school, grades K-8, that was a Windsor district public school until last year, when it transformed into a charter school to avoid being shut down by the anti-bilingual Unz initiative. Now that Cali Calmecac has been chartered, Dale has seen a dramatic increase in interest from parents outside the Windsor school district.

“A lot of parents evidently want their kids to be bilingual,” she says. The change, she says, has been a positive one. “Now that we’re a charter school, there’s a sense among the parents and teachers that everyone has more say in school matters–and everyone’s excited by that. We haven’t made any big changes yet, but there’s a sense of great potential, as everyone is looking at what we want from our school in the future.”

But the future of the charter system is uncertain. While parents rave about this newfound sense of participation in their children’s education, politicians concerned with such issues know that there’s more to an effective education than having happy parents. At some point, academic standards have to come into play.

“Charter schools still need to prove themselves as an effective alternative to public schools,” insists Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin, D-Duncans Mills, a former elementary school teacher. “For now, the jury is still out.”

She admits that charter schools are certainly popular–to accommodate this popularity, the state Assembly has just passed legislation that will allow up to 100 new charter schools per year. But she is far from convinced that they are any better, academically, than public schools.

A recent state report, while inconclusive, found no evidence that the charter schools are academically superior to their traditional counterparts. “I basically think charter schools are fine,” continues Strom-Martin. “But I’m concerned that charter schools might be seen as some magical educational panacea. People see charters as the only alternative to problems within the public school system, but we can still do a lot of creative things within the existing structure. Teachers in public schools are not as ‘hamstrung’ as charter-school advocates believe.”

UNFORTUNATELY, the very diversity and academic range of charter schools that make them so appealing also make them difficult to evaluate, and make their performance nearly impossible to compare to that of public schools. Academically, it’s an apples-and-oranges situation. As Miller points out, “Not all charter schools are going for academic excellence. If a school is designed to serve low-performing students, then their tests will show that they are performing below standard–but does that mean the school is unsuccessful? The students might, in fact, be improving. Those types of things are hard to gauge by test results.”

Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni, D-Novato, agrees that some would prefer the charter-school experiment to fail. “I think some charter schools are doing a good job, and some aren’t living up to the expectations their local communities had for them,” she says. “There are people who feel that charters are threatening the existence of public schools. But I’m not one of them. And the majority of the Legislature believes that charter schools are here to stay. What we want to have happen now is for those schools to work.”

Most charter-school fans, however, believe they already are working, and that what they need is to be left alone. The last thing they want is any well-meaning legislative tinkering. “After all,” says Roger Frost, “one small step can ruin something beautiful.”

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Work Daze

Cave dwellers worked a third as much as modern man. And we call this progress?

By Jane Louise Boursaw

AREN’T YOU JUST SICK of working all the time? You put in your 40, 50, 60, or more hours a week at your job, then spend all weekend cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, and doing laundry! Or maybe you’re self-employed, work out of your home, and end up working at your job all the time, day and night.

The average American now spends 47.1 hours per week at a full-time job. That’s up from 43.6 hours per week in 1977, so notes a 1997 nationwide survey of some 3,000 employees by the Families and Work Institute, a New York-based non-profit that addresses work and family issues. Over the course of a year, that’s about four extra weeks spent working.

Do you ever wonder if there is some way to pull our lives back from the work abyss? This era of techno-gadgets–e-mail, cell phones, pagers, faxes, and voice mail–isn’t helping. These things should be making our lives more efficient, freeing up more time for important things like lying on the beach and spending time with our family. Instead, they only make us even more connected to our jobs.

The line between work life and private life is getting fuzzier all the time. For example, the next time a cell phone rings in a restaurant or movie theater, notice how many people automatically reach for theirs “just in case” it might be a business call. In the ’60s and ’70s, stress experts called this kind of thing “multiphasic behavior,” otherwise known as “doing several things at once.”

These days, they call it efficiency.

As a result, we can’t get away from our jobs and are totally stressed out. Our marriages are in trouble, we have no time for our children, and we’re physical and emotional wrecks.

But some companies are trying to help their employees buck the odds by offering stress-relievers, notes an article in the June 7 issue of Newsweek. Companies like AT&T, GTE, and Sprint are letting employees set their own schedules, offering wellness programs like on-site gyms and massages, and providing “get-a-life” coaches– psychologists, gurus, even yoga instructors–to help draw the line between work and personal time. Their job is to help overworked employees maintain some semblance of a personal life in an era where meals are quite often eaten at work and e-mail is returned after the kids are tucked into bed.

Drop-in centers–mini-offices for suburban employees–are another growing trend. Instead of battling traffic through the Bay Area, employees of Sun Microsystems can drive to one of four small branch offices at any hour to plug into the company network. “Sun gets more work out of us, and we get some of our life back,” notes project manager Brent Daniel in the Newsweek article. Daniel gets to skip his hour-long highway commute when he works from the drop-in center near his home.

Then there’s the matter of how much work we should be doing. As human beings, we all must do “some” work for basic survival, but is there a “minimum daily requirement” of work? A number of diverse sources, ranging from primitive culture to modern history, place this figure at about three hours a day.

Marshall Sahlins, author of Stone Age Economics, discovered that prehistoric men hunted from two to two and a half days a week, with an average work week of 15 hours. Women gathered for about the same amount of time each week. In fact, one day’s work supplied a woman’s family with vegetables for the next three days. Throughout the year, both men and women worked for a couple of days, then took a couple off to rest, play games, gossip, plan rituals, and visit.

In From Joblessness to Liberation, Dr. Frithjof Bergmann writes, “For most of human history, people only worked for two or three hours per day. As we moved from agriculture to industrialization, work hours increased, creating standards that labeled a person lazy if he or she didn’t work a 40-hour week. The very notion that everyone should have a job only began [150 years ago] with the Industrial Revolution.”

DURING THE DEPRESSION, free time was equated with unemployment. The New Deal established the 40-hour week, and workers were taught to consider employment, not free time, as their right as citizens.

When it comes to erasing the line between work and private life, baby boomers are partly to blame. They turned their homes into workplaces and started thinking of work in terms of self-fulfillment, contrary to their parents, who were taught by the Depression that any job that pays a good wage was worth keeping. Now our careers begin earlier and end later, reversing a trend that reached its peak after World War II, when child labor virtually disappeared and retirement was a birthright.

According to the Department of Labor, the number of people 55 and older who are still in the labor force has increased by 6 million since 1950. Most of them are women. That number is projected to increase by another 6 million by the year 2006.

A generation ago, economists believed that America was on its way to being an affluent society. More efficient technology was supposed to produce an abundance of wealth that we could enjoy with less and less labor. Things didn’t quite turn out that way, for a variety of reasons, including the Vietnam War and the oil boom of the ’70s, which led to double-digit inflation that sapped the value of wages. A string of recessions, mergers, and downsizing served to crash the economy during the ’80s.

But baby boomers still want to maintain the lifestyle of their parents, which means going deeply into debt. According to an article in the May/June issue of Modern Maturity, about one fourth of the average family’s income now goes to various creditors, more than in any previous generation. These days, in nearly four out of five couples, both partners work outside the home. In 1950, it was one out of five.

Still, the “simple living” trend has been developing steadily over the past decade or so. Some people are just fed up with working all the time and are unwilling to continue sacrificing their family and leisure time for the almighty dollar and expensive toys their neighbors can covet. Many have figured out how to “take back their lives”–like earning less money, buying fewer things, and understanding that “money equals life energy,” a concept embraced in the book Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.

Dominguez and Robin claim that we can take control of our lives and even achieve financial independence by changing the way we think about money. Translated, that means: Is that new pair of $60 shoes really worth six hours of your $10-an-hour job? Wouldn’t you rather spend the six hours playing with your 4-year-old son?

There is, after all, more to life than work.

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.