Mr. William McClain, Director of Sustainability and Environmental Science teacher, has worked with seniors Leah Hodgkiss, Julia Spinolo, Taylor Owens, and Juliana Wall to make an organic garden for the Memphis campus complete with its own irrigation system.

The main purpose of this garden is to get students outside and learning about gardening and plants. They have six gardening beds so far and plan to add more down the road.

“We want to teach them about how satisfying eating healthy can be,” Spinolo said. They have planted a wide variety of vegetables and herbs, from peas to rosemary.

The four seniors meet on Tuesday afternoons at the Memphis campus to work on the garden. The students who are in the after-school program come outside to help out and plant different things.

“It’s cool to see it in motion and that it is already involving the kids,” said Spinolo, “the garden is there for them to grow and learn from it.”

“It’s important for people to know where their food comes from,” Mr. McClain said. Last fall, some of the Memphis campus students planted carrot seeds. Now that it is spring, they can go out and harvest their carrots and possibly eat them as a snack for class.

Also, there are a lot of different aspects of the garden that can be tied into the curriculum, like volume measurements and counting how many seeds to plant.

In the future, they plan to have gardens at all three campuses along with gardening clubs made up of students who will maintain the gardens.

“The plan for it is that parents will volunteer to come and take care of it during the summer,” Mr. McClain said.

“A new group will take it over next year,” Hodgkiss said, “and they will take it farther and build more beds.”

“If there are any students that are interested, they should let me know,” Mr. McClain said.