It’s hard to escape the desert sun behind Marion Earl Elementary School, where the playground and basketball courts swelter in the heat. But one secluded corner acts as an unintended refuge, with a garden marked by wooden benches, hand-painted rocks, ripening flowers and fruit, and precious shade from lemon and pear trees.
As first-grade teacher Madeline Kelly walks through the garden at the Las Vegas elementary school, she gushes over the growing tomatoes and artichokes, the apple tree and the many bright blooms of yellow and purple.
“I just really want to do a lot here at our school to show the kids that there’s so many jobs that you can have or opportunities just from being outside, being in the garden or just random things that we do with plants,” said Kelly, the garden’s primary supervisor at the school. “Not everyone really thinks about plants, so I like to give them that chance to.”
The outdoor garden is one of two at Marion Earl, which also has an indoor, hydroponic garden that gives students even more opportunity to plant seeds, watch the life cycle of a plant and eventually even harvest produce like parsley or cilantro, without worrying about the harsh climate outdoors.
Both gardens are sponsored by local nonprofit Green Our Planet, which provides schools with similar opportunities for hands-on learning.
The 10-year-old organization has established 200 outdoor school gardens in Clark County, and recently received a $50,000 grant from Credit One Bank to continue its work at the intersection of education and the environment. The grant specifically supports the Giant Student Farmers Market and other programs that promote financial literacy.
“If we can get them excited about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) through gardens, which is what we do—we get them excited about being outside, with butterflies and bees and hummingbirds—then we get them excited about the hydroponic system,” said Ciara Byrne, CEO of Green Our Planet. “And then next thing you know, they’re learning STEM.”
It’s important to get kids engaged in STEM at a young age, Byrne said, because studies show that most children make critical decisions—like whether to pursue a career in science or liberal arts—by age 7 or 8.
“We see ourselves as part of … the school garden movement across the United States, and we’re an important player because we’re the only nonprofit that has a K-12, STEM hydroponics curriculum,” Byrne said, noting the importance of hydroponics in the Southwest, because the indoor gardening system uses up to 90% less water than traditional gardens.
Green Our Planet’s farmers market allows hundreds of children to sell the fruits and vegetables from their school gardens, as well as items they may have created from or based on those items, like pieces of artwork.
Kids who participate in the market write out a personal business plan for their gardens, learn about profit and loss, carry out a marketing campaign and more, Byrne said, effectively earning them the title “farmpreneuer.”
“When you see fifth-graders out running their market and managing their money, and figuring out how to reinvest the money they make back into their garden—that’s very powerful,” she said.
The grant from Credit One Bank shows that it recognizes how Green Our Planet’s programs like the farmers market support not just environmental progress, Byrne said, but entrepreneurship as well.
“We’re empowering them to understand that the green movement is not just about conservation and protecting the planet,” she said. “You can run a successful business and still be green … so that’s really at the root of what we’re trying to do.”
The organization provides a teaching curriculum, as well, and has created more than 300 videos to go along with the hands-on gardening programs, Byrne said. A school farmer from Green Our Planet also visits regularly to teach lessons and check up on the gardens.
“The kids that we’re teaching today are going to solve the climate crisis that we’re in,” she said. “So it’s extraordinarily important, the work that we do, and we take it very seriously.”
At Marion Earl, Kelly said students benefit not only from watching Green Our Planet educational videos but also from going out into the garden and seeing how a plant grows from a seed into a vegetable—which they’re eventually able to pick, wash and eat in the classroom.
Many students have taken to the garden, she said, if only to observe the number of insects and critters that perch on the plants. Several of the kids live in apartments without any kind of yard, she said, so it’s a unique opportunity for them to spend time in the garden.
Kelly said her favorite part of the school garden is seeing how excited students get when something they planted grows to fruition. They genuinely enjoy what they’re learning, she said.
“They definitely remember like, ‘Oh, I planted the daisy or that was my broccoli,’ and it’s really sweet,” she said. “I don’t always think that they’re going to remember it, and they do. And they have that personal connection to something. So they’re a part of it.”
Click HERE to subscribe for free to Vegas Inc’s BizClick newsletter. Stay up to date with the latest business news in Las Vegas sent directly to your inbox each Monday.