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While our culture becomes increasingly based on abstractions – the stock market, the Internet and its myriad accompanying gadgets come readily to mind – Golden Hill Alternative Learning Center in Rochester is teaching academics and life skills, while building community, by getting back to basics.

Walking in the door, a visitor can tell this is not your typical high school setting.

“How many schools have pitchforks in the office?” asked Principal Gordy Ziebart, pointing to some new tools resting up against the entrance.

The approximately 300 students that learn at Golden Hill year-round often come there because mainstream education was not working for them, whether for personal or family reasons. The garden gives students and staff something tangible to start building a community and learning environment that works for them.

“Our students usually have different backgrounds, family or otherwise, that makes being successful in school difficult,” said Ziebart. “To see it, to touch it, makes a whole lot of difference in our students’ learning.”

That hand- on approach serves Golden Hill students well. Contrasting a single science class spent with chickens with what could be accomplished through book learning leaves no comparison for Ziebart.

“What the kids learned in 45 minutes outside talking about the chickens is probably more than they would have learned in a whole quarter if they were learning out of a book.”

Planting the seed

In 2009, Ziebart was inspired by Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based organization founded and run by former NBA player Will Allen that promotes urban agriculture as a mode of community engagement and sustainability. Several members of Golden Hill’s staff have attended Growing Power Seminars and the school began to build the garden program on a shoestring budget.

Science teacher John Rud tilled up a patch of ground that summer in what used to be an elementary school playground; an area no longer used as extensively by the high school students. Since then, the garden has expanded to a half acre and has become more fully integrated into the school’s curriculum. Staff and students began connecting with the larger community selling produce at the Wednesday farmer’s market.

Golden Hill students and staff have begun raising chickens and tending beehives this year. After expanding the garden, they are beginning to contemplate how to grow into the future with an onsite greenhouse, apple orchard, and outdoor classroom.

Building Community

Think of what your high school atmosphere was like. Was there a football team that played on Friday nights? If so, this activity involved the football players, coaches, cheerleaders, the school band, and hundreds of spectators. Most likely there were football games and a number of other extracurricular events that brought hundreds of students and community members together in unified goal, celebrating the accomplishments of the young adults. This community might have always been there, so you didn’t need to think a lot about it.

As with many things, the importance of this aspect of culture becomes much more pronounced when it is absent. As an alternative high school, Golden Hill does not have such large scale extracurricular events, which can lead to students who did not receive life in a standard educational system well feeling further alienated. Through the garden and other efforts, Golden Hill is creating a culture that students can point to and be proud of.

Not all students participate in gardening, but the theme permeates class work. Students blog about the garden in English classes, art students paint pumpkins and pictures of beehives, and industrial arts students make structures to support the garden.

Home economics teacher Shelley DeYoung prepares menus incorporating crops harvested in the fall and involves her students in making those meals which are sometimes served during lunchtime. Ziebart hopes that eventually the garden will become more integrated in the school’s lunch program.

Physical education teacher Amy Petersilie, who recently won the County’s Dr. Lyle Weed Living for Others award for her work to create unique opportunities for students and identity for Golden Hill school, has assembled dodge ball teams that compete against other schools and leads yoga classes, a skill that students can take with them into adulthood.

Golden Hill is looking to continue making a name for itself and interacting with the community through its presence at the farmer’s market and working with other institutions, as they presently do by growing plants for Hawthorne adult education center.

“We’re hoping to become an educational-slash-production garden,” said Ziebart. “We’ve grown to be capable of producing some larger quantities but we haven’t crossed that threshold. Teaching that entrepreneurial part of it, the growing and selling to get more tools and supplies is something we’d like to expand more into.”

Growing life skills

Garden project manager David Kotsonas and students start seedlings inside a greenhouse that had lain vacant for years near the entrance of John Marshall high school. By April, there were hundreds of thriving plants filling the building.

Golden Hill student Johnny Veng works in the greenhouse four days a week as part of an employment program arranged through the Minnesota Workforce Center. Three more students will work in the greenhouse and in the garden 12 hours per week through this program.

Veng has learned gardening skills from his family and enjoys working with plants. He is glad for the opportunity to work on the project.

“This is helping me to learn self-discipline, that’s a good thing, and it’s good to be helping out with the garden,” Veng said. “I’m creating more opportunities for myself.”

Kotsonas noted that a student working through the employment program improved greatly improved his school attendance when working in the greenhouse in the afternoon was made contingent upon his attending classes that day.

“It’s been great working with the kids, just knowing that the little time I do spend with them goes a lot further,” Kotsonas said. “For me, it’s not as much about the plants as the lessons these kids are taking with them.”

Rud works the garden into all of his classes. His classroom is half filled with seedlings and students are learning plant biology by transplanting them, and caring for the plants throughout the growing season. Students in his class will map out the plant placement of the garden depending upon the needs of various plants. Students in Rud’s physics class help to plan out the most successful rainwater collection system.

The staff members are often learning right alongside the students. This is the first time Kotsonas has grown on this scale. He gets a lot of advice from experienced growers in his role as manager of the Rochester Downtown Farmers Market and incorporates that into his work in the garden.

Rud says that a benefit of the garden project is experiencing new, healthy foods.

“I’d never heard of kohlrabi before we grew it last year,” he said. “It was good. A lot of students coming in don’t know about the vegetables we grow. Some haven’t put their hands in dirt before and it’s a totally new experience. We just tell them ‘it’s alright; you can wash your hands off when you’re done.’”

Golden Hill student Spencer Stevenson says that helping struggling families of fellow students is a main motivation for his work in the garden.

“It’s good to give back,” he said. “A lot of our families are low-income so it’s nice to be able to help out by getting them some food.”

“When the kids put in the wrk to tend the plants and then get to take home food for their families, they really start to get it,” said Kotsonas. “They start to take ownership of their work and that’s pretty cool to see.”

Getting a boost from the community

The garden got a hefty dose of fertilizer when it was chosen by the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Greater Rochester as the project for the 2012 class. The group, which Ziebart has referred to as “a PTA on steroids” set a goal of raising $58,000 for the garden and has engaged the community to take great strides toward that end. Last month, a fundraiser was held at the Ramada which raised more than $16,000. Business and individual donations have poured in, but the goal has not yet been reached.

Jamie Johnson is a member of LGR and works in Rochester high schools, including Golden Hill, as an RCTC college transitions advisor. She says the group saw great promise in the project and is happy to lend support to help the project realize its potential.

“All the great things that Golden Hill has stuck out,” she said. “The curriculum they have in the garden is something that is unique and inspiring.”

Leadership Greater Rochester helped to connect the Golden Hill garden project with businesses in the community to help it realize its potential. The architecture fim, Widseth, Smith, and Nolting, consulted with Golden Hill staff to design a site plan to guide the garden into the future. Whiting’s nursery donated 20 apple trees to give the program an orchard component. Home Depot will work with staff to construct an outdoor classroom over unused blacktop as well as ongoing maintenance of structures.

Perhaps one of the most important connections that has been made through the program has been connecting youth of an underserved population to leaders in the business community to work toward a common goal; creating understanding between people who would otherwise rarely overlap.

“It makes us proud to be members of the community,” said Johnson.