What are SGSOs doing now that schools are closing due to Coronavirus?

[Stephanie Dobbie]

We are curious to know what others are doing with school gardens as school districts close for social distancing? What are some best practices if we choose to continue maintaining gardens during this time? 

[Dawn Cleaves]

I spoke with a pediatrician the other day and asked recommendations for the school gardens. She said soap and water works for cleaning handles of tools and watering cans. I will start procedures to clean tools after each class when we go back.

After I go around and clean what I can, I will reach out to school leaders and volunteers to organize maintanance and harvesting. Some weedy areas are going to just get tarped. 

I will also post videos of the plants growth and show journaling. Hopefully we will be back in time for the big harvest. 

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 11:13 PM Stephanie Dobbie <dobbies...@gmail.com> wrote:

We are curious to know what others are doing with school gardens as school districts close for social distancing? What are some best practices if we choose to continue maintaining gardens during this time? 

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[Lauren Henricksen]

Our schools are closed here in Washington until the end of April, and the superintendent in one of our districts has asked that school garden staff stay off school grounds, which means at least for the short term, we can’t even be in our gardens. 

Our initial plan was to cancel spring programs with kids, but keep staff busy with more of a production farming model, and later working to distribute lettuce and peas and such to those who need it in our community. But with these new restrictions, that plan has been scrapped! 

 Now, we’re trying to figure out how to keep our staff—who are trained and familiar with working with kids and gardens—busy behind a computer for the next 6 weeks! 

We have some tasks we’ve brainstormed, but would love to hear other ideas about what other school garden programs are doing! Thanks for starting this thread! 

For best practices we were employing before our closures:

-sanitizing our shared office space daily with disinfecting cleaner like bleach or 60% alcohol or more

-additional hand washing stations or hoses and soap for kids entering the garden

- tasting stations had disinfected tings and garden staff were serving kids rather than having them help themselves (kids were still picking plants to eat as well) 

- practicing social distancing and keeping groups farther apart during garden times

-not sharing tools and disinfecting after each use

Thanks!

Lauren

Lower Columbia School Gardens 

On Mar 16, 2020, at 6:39 AM, Dawn Cleaves <zwar...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Erin Taylor]

Those seem like good steps! Also if you want to let your staff work from home as much as possible, which seems like the safest thing to do for general public health, they could work on formalizing and documenting all kinds of curricular practices that might be in their heads. Have them type up all the great lessons and activities they've invented themselves in great detail so that others can use them in the future. Have them document the energizers, openers, closers, name games, etc that they might have learned elsewhere or invented and are infusing into their work.

And model a healthy workplace in other ways too, beyond physically. Have virtual check ins where folks just get to share how they're doing with all of this. Some of our organizations have a little bit of spaciousness right now, and most of us are not used to that! It's okay to have some work time dedicated to building relationships among staff-- that'll help in the future for sure.

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Erin Taylor

she/her/hers

610-283-5462

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