Rachel Brown - Outdoor Classroom Project and Real School Gardens Grant

In 2019, our campus really needed a beautification effort. Build in an old grocery store, our school had a "cage" for the kids to have recess, as well as a playground which had been vandalized many times. After building cinder block gardens as a campus-wide Engineering project, I was ready to take on a larger project. I applied for a grant with Real School Gardens (now Out-Teach) after gathering over thirty letters of recommendation from parents and staff to showcase why our campus should be selected. I became the Out Teach (and Harmony Science Academy) Garden Coordinator, scheduling volunteers for the event, assembling a Garden Committee to help teachers learn to use the outdoor space, and eventually bringing tens of thousands of dollars of donations to our campus. This labor of love helped our students learn through movement and in the sunshine. It converted our "concrete jungle" into a beautiful teaching space where thousands of students have been able to learn in a manner more conducive to the ways children learn best: moving, engaged, and through play. Here's a slideshow from our 2019 Build Day: Real School Gardens Build Day

This project was a massive undertaking, and it involved a lot of preliminary work. Destination ImagiNation Service Learning students partnered with TCU classes and a professor who led classes on Food Justice, specifically focusing on access to healthy, affordable foods for citizens in every income group. To gain community participation at all levels, this project became tied into the other beautification efforts I was undertaking at the campus level, including the Health and Wellness events, campus garden, and community service projects. Here's a summary of the work we had done which we presented to OutTeach as part of our application for the grant. Presentation on Outdoor Learning and Campus Beautification Efforts

Note: All students and adult volunteers who participated in the campus-wide "Build Day" project had to sign media release forms to participate. All photos featured in these slides have media release forms from participants.

As part of our design suggestion process, I worked with students in the Gifted and Talented program to design prototypes to present to OutTeach staff, the project manager, and the landscape architect as they were creating the designs for our space. Students with top designs were presented with awards from OutTeach, and they were able to present their ideas to the entire committee. The PTO president and PTO members attended committee meetings to share feedback from parents' perspectives.

To incentivize all students to participate on Build Day, students could buy team shirts as a fundraising effort, signup to volunteer for inside jobs, and help paint additional cinder blocks. Involving students in every way that utilized their skills and appealed to their particular interests help to ensure more students were able to participate in the project, which helped contribute to a shared sense of community.

Coordinating volunteers so we had enough people on Build Day required a lot of preparation. Every volunteer had to complete a background check and they were assigned specific jobs. As the OutTeach Garden Coordinator, I attended meetings to learn how to help support teachers as they learned how to teach in the outdoor classrooms.

To ensure students had a beautiful, educational learning space, I worked with the OutTeach Planning team to help to customize a design that met our unique campus needs. The building needed to be painted, so painting a beautiful mural on it was a good use of space. Additionally, having a pond and running water was something that I wanted so that students had a calming place to learn outside. Though this added to the cost of the project, it made the final product a lot more inviting. Students wanted to immediately use the space.

During the year that OutTeach was planning parts of the project, I involved classes in the process as much as possible. It was important to me to help the students see that they were involved in steps of this process, as they had helped with design prototypes, the cinder block gardens, and they had studied sustainable engineering and food science in their Engineering classes. This helped generate excitement about the project for all students, and it helped to foster a sense of community at our campus.