Praxis makes perfect: Successes and Failures in the Development of Locally Sustainable School Neighborhood Garden Markets in Tucson

Contrary to what was possible at the preschool, the project did not find much success at the K-6 Montessori school. Without getting into the specific details, the school consists of two campuses, and despite much preparation and investment from the teacher who would be supporting the project, the rug was abruptly pulled out from under the project when the small handful of administrators who run the school decided to move all teachers and half of the students from the campus I was working with to the other campus. This cut off all oxygen from the project and meant it could not be run at that school during that semester. 

What then, in a nutshell, led to the failure of this project at the Montessori school? 

Instead of looking at individual decision-making and specific contexts, I think it is important to highlight the role of the broader forces at play here – particularly, institutional support and structure. Whereas the decision-making process at the preschool was very non-hierarchical and ground-up, the decision-making process at the Montessori school was very hierarchical and top-down. The preschool is private but it is a parent-cooperative and offers various scholarships from state and federal grants. This means the school is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, and because it is a co-op, it is able to offer lower tuition in exchange for families being directly involved with the running of the school. In other words, a diverse, strong community is baked into the foundation of this school, and so a project like mine fits naturally into what they do. The preschool’s organizational philosophy is centered on the idea that it is a community-led school where parents and other members of the community are central to all decision-making. Although there are elements of community engagement in the Montessori school, the decision-making is nonetheless concentrated among a small handful of administrators with little-to-no input from parents, let alone the broader community. As such, the process of building my proposed project into the ongoings of the preschool was fairly seamless, whereas at the Montessori school, despite building a plan with one of the teachers, all efforts were ultimately undercut by decision-making by detached administrators who had little connection (or even awareness) of the project. 

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The importance of institutional support to school gardens is not unknown. Hoover et al. (2021) surveyed almost 700 school teachers and administrators across 109 schools in Austin, Texas to try to identify the biggest barriers to a thriving school garden and found that the top barrier was inadequate administration and district support, followed by “(2) low student usage, (3) lack of specific teacher garden training, (4) lack of access to the garden-based curriculum, (5) nonexistent garden committees, (6) inadequate funding, and (7) and lack of community partner use” (p. 595). Many of the details of my project sought to explicitly address these other factors, but what I learned was just how critical institutional support is even when many of the other factors are addressed. 

During the Fall semester, I was also in GEOG397F, the School Garden Workshop, in which students work at school gardens across various Tucson public schools through a partnership between the University of Arizona and Tucson Unified School District (TUSD). In my experience, this program is having tremendous success in fostering school gardens that build community and autonomy in local neighborhoods. I learned invaluable skills and had priceless experiences as part of this workshop. And now given my experiences with my own project, I see that a significant reason for its success is likely the institutional support provided by the UA-TUSD partnership. Aside from funding, the SGW also makes it so that the gardens and program activities are tended for and administered in a very ground-up manner by collaboration between UA faculty, staff and students and the school children themselves. Ultimately, the SGW is grounded in the support of local neighborhoods and communities more so than anything. 

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My experiences with my project in conjunction with what I learned from the School Garden Workshop highlight the importance of institutional structure, of empowering people to build and support such a project from the ground up, and of schools being strongly rooted in their local neighborhood and community. This last point brings me to one other point I think is important to make, and that is that I think the failures of the project at the Montessori school also highlight problems with the Arizona education system. 

Arizona’s education system defunds traditional public schools in order to prioritize private and charter schools and “school choice.” The education offered at the Montessori school, which is less tied to the admittedly rigid standards of traditional public schools and allows for greater experimentation in learning, may at first seem more amenable to projects like mine than traditional public schools. However, the school is segregated from the public realm. Despite being a charter school, it is not open to everyone as a traditional public school would be and is not attached to the immediate neighborhood and community. It is not where the people in the neighborhood all send their kids. Seats are limited and the school must remain “marketable” – i.e., “in-demand” among Tucson families. Part of its success comes from its exclusivity. As such, the school makes decisions that prioritize some students over others in order to remain financially viable. This is a feature of the Arizona education system, which has sought to “free market-ize” our school system by allocating funding based on school desirability rather than community need and even overtly siphoning money from traditional public schools to private schools. One harmful consequence of this (among many) is that many schools are unconnected from the neighborhoods and communities they exist within and so in terms of organizational structure, they remain very top-down and hierarchical. 

The specific hurdles I faced at the Montessori school were somewhat happenstance but they reflect the broader problem that true equity and community-building is unlikely in a system that incentivizes (if not requires) schools to “sell themselves” and use exclusivity to remain marketable. In other words, this particular project failed in this case because of unique circumstances of this school, but as long as schools compete with one another for students as they do so intensely in Arizona’s education system, the project’s goals of tying the school to the local community may never be achievable. 

I see the project as successful overall, partly because of its successes and partly because of its failures, which shed light on some of the practical barriers to this sort of work. There is a reason locally sustainable food systems remain elusive. As much of the research on these topics has shown, the roots of the neoliberal tree run far and deep. I saw, in this case, that the barriers to food sovereignty and local sustainability stem in part from the same foundation as the barriers to equitable public education. Yet even in this system, I found some room for optimism as well. By finding pockets where institutional support is possible, the preschool case suggests some hints of success and local sustainability may be possible, at least on a small scale. 

I would like to thank the Food Studies Program and the Center for Regional Food Studies for supporting this project, and GEOG397F (School Garden Workshop) for teaching me additional skills and knowledge related to fostering inclusive, sustainable, and sovereign garden programs at Tucson’s schools. 

References

Hoover, A., Vandyousefi, S., Martin, B., Nikah, K., Cooper, M. H., Muller, A., ... & Davis, J. N. (2021). Barriers, strategies, and resources to thriving school gardens. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 53(7), 591-601.