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A rendering of what the Edible Schoolyard at P.S. 216 is to look like.
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: January 19, 2010
New York Times
THOSE who believe trends start on the West Coast and are perfected on the East Coast might add to their argument a garden planned for an elementary school in Brooklyn.
This summer, supporters will tear up a quarter-acre of asphalt parking lot behind P.S. 216 in the Gravesend neighborhood and start building the first New York affiliate of the Edible Schoolyard program, developed by the restaurateur Alice Waters of Chez Panisse.
It's a $1.6-million architect's dream. A new building, powered by the sun, will hold a kitchen classroom with communal tables where children can share meals they make from food they grow in the garden.
Designers from the Work Architecture Company have incorporated a chicken coop, a composting system, an outdoor pizza oven and a cistern to collect rainwater. A movable greenhouse will be rolled out each fall.
Teachers will use the garden to give students — 460 children from prekindergarten to the fifth grade — lessons in subjects like art, math, history and science. Administrators hope the school will eventually become a center for the study of the environment and agriculture.
The P.S. 216 project will be not only the most expensive of the six Edible Schoolyards but also the only one to operate year round. The original, built 15 years ago at a middle school in Berkeley, Calif., cost about $75,000, Ms. Waters recalled.
She will attend a series of invitation-only events in New York next month to raise money for the garden and for the Chez Panisse Foundation. Ms. Waters, a former Montessori teacher, set up the foundation to improve food and education in public schools.
Leading the fund-raising charge will be John Lyons, a movie producer and foundation board member.
Mr. Lyons, the son of a high school librarian, began volunteering at P.S. 216 five years ago and has made the garden his personal project. Even though private money will pay for construction and the estimated $400,000 a year in staffing costs, some might wonder if a multimillion-dollar garden is what a public elementary school in a large, cash-short district really needs.
The most-recent critic of the Edible Schoolyard program is Caitlin Flanagan, whose lengthy essay "Cultivating Failure," published in The Atlantic, attacks Ms. Waters and garden-based education.
Ms. Flanagan argued that school gardens are a vast pedagogic experiment based on a set of untested assumptions.
"I have yet to find a single study," she wrote, "that suggests classroom gardens help students meet the state standards for English and math" in California, where she lives.
She found it especially distasteful that the children of migrant farmworkers might be sent to the fields in what she regards as an unhealthy mix of public schooling and social engineering.
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