On Monday, Jan. 27, Rebecca Boone Elementary put its new greenhouse to use for the first time.
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Late last year, the Warren County MU Extension office received close to $20,000 in grant funding for gardening programs and put it to use purchasing three greenhouses for local schools.
On Monday, Jan. 27, Rebecca Boone Elementary put theirs to use for the first time.
Fifth grade students at the elementary school got started on their greenhouse project planting marigolds and depositing them in the greenhouse. The lesson was a part of Care Day at Rebecca Boone.
The greenhouses were purchased for roughly $5,000 apiece and were donated to Rebecca Boone and Alpha Academy in Warrenton along with St. Ignatius Catholic School in Concord Hill.
Maureen Michel at the extension center said they are also using some of the grant funds to administer gardening programs at local retirement homes and they hope to continue expanding their services.
The Warren County R-III School District operates on a four-day week and Care Days provide an opportunity for further learning on Mondays when students are able to attend.
“Care Day is a place for students to come on Mondays if parents are needing to work or kids are just needing a place to go,” said Dr. Janelle Stanek, program director. “We focus on STEM programming, and we spend a lot of time working with our community partners like the MU Extension Center.”
The school has already been using resources from the extension center to build their own gardening program and has both an indoor hydroponics garden and an outdoor garden.
“We try to, at Care Day, give the students many different varieties of all kinds of different aspects of learning. One of them, we partnered with the University Extension Center doing nutrition lessons and also gardening lessons,” said Stanek.
Michel said the garden grant was provided by the Missouri Department of Social Services and the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Michel the gardening programs provide an opportunity for the kids to become more well-rounded and learn healthy habits.
“It’s teaching kids life skills,” said Michel. “But the nutrition part of it, they’re learning healthy eating habits now, because part of what I do like, say with the gardening program, we actually take them outside and they learn to cultivate and harvest.”
For Stanek, the greenhouse means they will be able to expand their gardening program and offer classes year-round.
“We’ve had outdoor gardens where we’ve grown tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and pumpkins, and then this year we were able to get the greenhouse through the extension center and we’re very excited about starting to have our plants outdoors year round,” said Stanek.
Fifth grade student Scarlett Johnston said she was excited to “(grow) some more plants and (learn) about plants and how they grow and how the root system works.”
The program also helps students to learn about and understand the food system and how products like salsa are made and sold, according to Michel
“A lot of kids don't realize, say you give them a can of tomatoes or a jar of salsa, they don't understand where that salsa comes from. So it's kind of like a backward learning lesson to say, Okay, this is how your salsa starts. It starts as a tomato, and this is what you do to it,” said Michel.
Stanek said in the future they hope to use the produce grown in the greenhouse and produced through the program to help the community.
She said it was a part of the Care Day philosophy to focus on volunteering and service projects and hoped they would be able to donate some of the produce grown through their gardening programs to local nursing homes or Meals on Wheels, the meal delivery service run by the Warren County Council on Aging.
More than anything Stanek was glad the school would continue to provide a broad education that students could expand upon in the future.
“It’s life skill lessons, not just straight out of the book lessons, but life skills learning,” said Stanek. “What, and how, they’re going to succeed in the future.