Historically, public gardens have partnered with traditional rather than community schools. The community school model is not widely known, and as a result has not fully penetrated the field of public horticulture. Through my research, however, I have found numerous advantages to public gardens forging partnerships with community schools. Below, I have organized my argument into three key areas, which I support with relevant literature and insights from my field research:

  1. Shared Mission/Vision

  2. Improved Communication

  3. Expanded Network

    I conclude with a summary of the features of community schools and public gardens that contribute to program success, and assess the potential impact on students.

Shared Mission/Vision

Both public gardens and community schools prioritize creating experiential learning opportunities for students beyond the classroom. In The Community Schools Playbook, its authors note that “at high-quality community schools, educators collaborate with community partners to provide well-structured learning activities during out-of-school time and summer, using school facilities and other community spaces” (p. 39). Virtually all public gardens have an educational component of their mission, and they generally seek to broaden the reach and deepen the impact of their educational programs. Partnering with a community school is the perfect way for public gardens to connect more young people with nature in a profound way.

For community schools and public gardens, these goals can extend beyond the creation of new programming. Public gardens have a vested interest in contributing to the proliferation of green space in their communities, as demonstrated by Brooklyn Botanic Garden's diverse array of Community Greening initiatives, including the iconic Greenest Block in Brooklyn competition. Community schools, in aiming to use their physical space as a dedicated community asset, share this greening goal. We see this in practice through William Cramp Community School's effort, carried out by the Trust for Public Land, to turn its asphalt parking lot into a beautiful green schoolyard. This undertaking was then followed up by Lots-to-Learn, a project carried out by Interpret Green to "[transform] the newly landscaped areas into an amazing 'learning landscape' that integrates thriving wildlife habitats with interactive science, education & art."

Public gardens are also very well-suited to serve as a community learning space, as their highly curated grounds provide rich opportunities for experiential learning. It is in their direct interest to improve science education, as the “the decline in the quality of science education and in the number of trained plant scientists” represents an existential threat (Rakow, Gough, Lee, Kindle location 886). Public gardens are growing increasingly aware of the dearth of resources available for interactive science instruction, and that in “urban school districts those problems are further compounded by the fact that a higher proportion of their students also suffer from the negative impacts of poverty” (Rakow, Gough, Lee, Kindle location 859).

Further, community schools make expanded learning, including project-based and experiential learning, a priority. Part and parcel of the community school model is bringing together “teachers and community partners…to plan and provide access to a broader curriculum,” giving students “the opportunity to pursue non-tested content and deeper learning pedagogies, such as project-based and experiential learning, both during and beyond the conventional school day” (Partnership for the Future of Learning, p. 40).

Strategies to make these opportunities possible include allocating enough additional time for expanded programming; “support[ing] partnerships with community organizations, public agencies, and employers who provide additional staffing and augment programming” by “expanding the spaces in which students learn, as well as increasing the number of adults with whom they are learning and the content of what is being learned;” “remov[ing] unnecessary barriers to facilities-sharing between the school system and community-based organizations;” and “ensuring sufficient and sustained funding for program stability” (Partnership for the Future of Learning, p. 42). For public gardens, this means that there is a far greater likelihood of follow-through from a partner school when scheduling site visits or workshops for a student program.

This alignment of mission and vision between public gardens and community schools makes them ripe for partnership, and ensures that both institutions will benefit.

Improved Communication

A recurring motif throughout my interviews with public gardens and other scientific/cultural organizations has been the challenge of inconsistent communication from schools. Teachers already face incredibly complex and difficult jobs, and adding program coordination on top of everything else can exceed their capacity. Speaking about the Colorado Ballet's involvement with the Growing Scientists program, Cassie Wilson shared that it was often hard to get teachers to reply to messages, to fill out forms, to stay consistent about plans and logistics, and to stick to a set timeline. Sherry Nickolaus, the Education Director at Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, echoed this sentiment. She found that some teachers fail to schedule their visits, or have to move their dates around because they neglected to schedule buses.

Community schools solve this issue through two main facets of their infrastructure: the presence of a site coordinator, and regularly scheduled partner meetings. At William Cramp Community School in Philadelphia, PA, William Reed serves as the Community School Coordinator, and at Enrico Fermi School No. 17 in Rochester, NY, the Site Coordinator is Qawan Bollar. These individuals each act as a point person who organizations can always contact, whether they are long-standing partners or are looking to establish a new relationship with the school. School 17 has a number of "Community Engagement Teams" (CETs) that arrange partner liaisons into groups according to their area of focus, and which meet regularly throughout the school year. In our interview, Reed shared that William Cramp holds monthly meetings with partners. These meetings allow both parties to check in with each other, get updates on how their programs are progressing, and troubleshoot any issues that may come up.

Expanded Network

For public gardens such as Denver Botanic Gardens, which belongs to the Collaborative of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, finding organizations and schools with whom to partner is less of a challenge. Their membership ensures that they will have regular contact with a wide array of potential collaborators. However, most public gardens lack such an institution in their area. This means that potential program partners can be significantly more difficult to come by.

A community school is like a spider, with its web extending out and touching many different actors in its community. When a public garden connects with a community school, they inherit the vast network of connections the school possesses. If the community school has community engagement teams grouped by mission, as does School 17, the public garden will automatically connect with synergistic organizations it may not otherwise have contacted.

Not only do organizations affiliated with community schools stand to inherit their extensive network of partners; the school can also pass along its strong relationships with individual members of the community. Community schools prioritize relationships with the families they serve. As Caterina Leone explained in her interview, this rapport can be passed along to partner organizations in what is referred to as a "warm handoff." Public gardens stand to benefit greatly from this vicarious trust, particularly when they have historically been regarded as inaccessible.

Community schools also stand to benefit greatly through partnering with a public garden. As Rakow, Gough, and Lee write in Public Gardens and Livable Cities, public gardens are anchor institutions. This implies that they are “frequently trusted resources with strong ties to the local community,” with extensive “scientific knowledge, technical expertise, and long-standing presence in many cities” where they “use plants as the connectors between disparate groups in a community” (Kindle location 188-201). Thus, the expanding network resulting from public garden and community school partnership will be reciprocal; not only will the public garden inherit new relationships, but the community school will also come into contact with the public garden’s vast coalition of partners and volunteers.

At Enrico Fermi School No. 17, for example, master gardeners affiliated with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Monroe County have helped out with the school’s neighborhood beautification efforts, its after-school garden club, and class workshops. For a community school looking for extra hands to help with its garden programs, a public garden partner would be a perfect source of additional volunteers. For William Cramp School, its involvement with the Trust for Public Land (TPL) has likewise led to new streams of helpers with garden experience from TPL’s own vast network of green partners and volunteers, such as Interpret Green, Mural Arts, and the Philadelphia Orchard Project. Most public gardens are similarly connected, and would be able to provide the school with the same type of “warm handoff” when introducing a potential partner.

Conclusion

To summarize, the key features community schools possess which can reduce barriers to collaboration include:

  • Dedicated site coordinators

  • Broad partner networks

  • Goal-oriented community engagement teams

  • Regular partner meetings

  • Robust community outreach

  • Family relationships built on trust

  • Extended learning time

  • Emphasis on experiential learning

Public gardens of any size can benefit from partnering with community schools. Public gardens that are smaller in scale or newer to community outreach efforts may find it easier to partner with community schools that will already have the capacity and infrastructure to support program development with consistent communication and reporting and a high impact. Larger public gardens may find that working with a community school can help them extend into a neighborhood that they found it difficult to get a foothold in.

The potential for these partnerships to positively impact the lives of students is not to be understated. When public gardens and community schools partner together, students gain access to:

Curated spaces designed to educate and inspire

Public gardens organize their collections in service of a great variety of aims: some are taxonomic; some are meant to represent a specific region or culture; some serve to model sustainable methods of cultivation; some are specifically for teaching; some exist simply to be beautiful. Whatever the purpose, there is something in the thoughtful design and execution of a public garden’s landscape to enrich the lives of visiting students.

Staff with a high degree of expertise and experience teaching

Staff can take visiting students on detailed guided tours of the garden that serve a specific purpose. Through selecting the collections they will look at, garden staff can tailor the experience to the precise aims of the visit. Many public gardens have even created spaces with the express purpose of being used to teach students. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, for example, has had its children’s garden since 1914. For younger students, this versatile space can be used for cultivation, craft-making, and play, while older students learn lessons about urban ecology and other hard sciences.

Help with greening school grounds and creating an in-situ garden program

At William Cramp School, their partners Interpret Green, the Trust for Public Land, and Mural Arts all collaborated to beautify the school’s landscape, transforming it into an outdoor learning space and a community asset. At Enrico Fermi School No. 17, a number of community stakeholders came together to serve the same purpose, constructing a greenhouse and seven raised garden garden beds in order to provide opportunities for project-based learning in the garden and to allow members of the community immediate access to fresh produce. Public gardens in a position to do so have the opportunity to mobilize some of their resources to help develop spaces for on-site garden programming at their partner schools. This opens the door for students to engage meaningfully with a garden on a weekly or even daily basis, and can enhance the possibilities for science curricula in a profound way.

For gardens which lack the resources to establish gardens at a school, or could not execute such endeavors in a sustainable way, Naples Botanical Garden (NBG) has modeled an innovative and effective alternative. Their Collier Greens program is a teach-the-teacher model which involves providing free workshops and resources to educators interested in starting and maintaining a school or community garden. To this end, NBG staff designed a gardening manual with information tailored to the specific growing conditions in their community. They also have an EarthBox Lending Library open year-round, where teachers can rent self-watering grow boxes for their schools at no cost. During their seasonal workshops, NBG also gives out free vegetable plants to participants. Collier Greens was designed in response to a growing need/interest of schools in the area looking to build or expand their own gardens. NBG lacks the capacity to go out to schools and build gardens for them, and would not be able to sustain such an effort. Instead, they developed a network that empowers educators to do it themselves, and created a community with much-needed resources and support.

Programs built around state standards to enhance the school’s curricula

Public gardens know their collections better than anyone, and can leverage their assets to provide learning opportunities not available anywhere else. Public gardens can work with teachers to fill gaps in their lesson plans and develop programs in accordance with state standards. Naples Botanical Garden’s Tropical Topics program, for example, is a standards-based program in which students tour two collections, the Kapnick Caribbean Garden and the Lea Asian Garden. These collections introduce them to plants that have been historically significant in trade, directly building on what the students have been learning in school. The Growing Scientists partners have also developed their school visits with standards in mind, with the aim of helping to close achievement gaps at Title I schools.

Ultimately, the shared values and complementary structures of public gardens and community schools makes them logical partners who, together, can be greater than the sum of their parts.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
— Walt Whitman