If you can remember mimeographed handouts and overhead projectors in school, you also know the old “My dog ate my homework” dodge — which has been rendered all but obsolete by the digital domain.
Well, with the exception of North Elementary School, maybe.
There, the homework can be edible, with the two-legged set doing the consuming.
Since 2011, the school on Chestnut Ridge Road has incorporated agriculture into its day-to-day.
That was the year WVU professor and master gardener Jim Rye planted a seed for a grant that led to a plot for a humble vegetable garden. The enterprise took root and never stopped growing.
These days, the garden encompasses about an acre on North’s campus.
Student-grown crops often end up on the lunch menu.
Teachers use the garden to harvest lesson plans on everything from photosynthesis to colonial history.
And nine years ago, a group of students from North traveled to the White House to chop carrots and make turkey wraps with Michelle Obama.
North Principal Natalie Webb, meanwhile, has enjoyed watching the nutritional awareness take root at the school.
“We found out that if our kids grow it, they’ll be more inclined to actually want to eat it,” she said after the Washington, D.C., visit.
This month, the garden at North Elementary has yielded another intellectual crop: AmeriCorps volunteers McKenna Moser and Ryan Aronckes are digging in with the project.
Moser, a WVU elementary education major from McMurray, Pa., is serving as outreach coordinator for North’s agrarian effort. Her responsibilities include grant-writing and fundraising.
In his role as garden manager, Aronckes will tend to crop maintenance, while developing new courses around the agriculture industry’s “garden to classroom” mission. The Pittsburgh native is carrying a double major at WVU: wildlife and fisheries resources and sustainable food and farming.
Moser comes to North by way of “West Virginia’s Promise — the Alliance for Youth” division of AmeriCorps.
Aronckes is working through AmeriCorps’ LifeBridge community outreach program.
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