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Meet Colorado Farm to School Champion Sandy Story!

The Basics:

Name: Sandy Story

Organization: Sowing Seeds

Title: Director of Sowing Seeds

School District: Eagle County School District

Interview Date: April 3, 2012

Questions and Answers:

First, tell us about what you do!

I actually work with the kids during the school day, from 8:00am to 3:00pm. Currently I'm in two schools. One is Brush Creek Elementary in Eagle, and the other one is Edwards Elementary, in Edwards, Colorado. Eagle County School District runs all the way from Vail to Gypsum, so it's about a 60 mile range of schools. Our goal is to put a greenhouse and a school garden that grows vegetables in every elementary school. So far we have one greenhouse and one outdoor garden at Brush Creek Elementary, and we just built an outdoor garden at Edwards Elementary last year, and we're hoping to put a greenhouse up there. What I do is I teach horticulture, with a little bit of botany, and I teach them how to grow food, and anything we harvest in the greenhouse, we put right into the cafeteria.

What has been your primary focus or involvement in helping to get more local foods into schools?

The idea of growing foods in the greenhouse was kind of my idea because for years we just grew flowers, and then I saw how horrible school lunches were. So I decided we were going to grow food, and I was going to teach kids how to grow anything they could in a pot that they could eat. So with the help of the Vail Valley Foundation, we started planting all the vegetable beds in the greenhouse, and then we bought some hydroponics and started growing lettuces. We harvested about 150 heads of lettuce, and we took it into the cafeteria. They were upset because the lettuce wasn't “inspected,” but meanwhile they

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were cutting the brown part off the iceberg lettuce. I decided we would skip the whole cafeteria experience and eat it out in the greenhouse. It created uproar with the parents because they all wanted fresh vegetables and things but the school wasn't providing it. So the Eagle County School District food director got on board with the whole program and realized that an immovable force of parents weren't going to buy the hot lunch unless we provided the kids with a good lunch. So they started a program here called Fresh Approach where everything in the cafeteria has to be cooked and peeled, and nothing can be frozen. That’s every day of the week at Brush Creek Elementary, versus the other schools that get Fresh Approach at least once a week. We are trying to raise money to get all the schools retooled to have Fresh Approach. So it really wasn't just my focus, it was parents stomping their feet and saying they weren’t going to buy the hot lunch and the school district listened.

How long have you been involved?

Since January of 2010 at Brush Creek and May 2010 at Edwards. So for three years. I went ahead and wrote one grant application at for Lowe's Toolbox for Education, and we got $6000 to build an outdoor garden. We’re moving along and we've been doing this now for 2 1/2 years.

What first interested you in local foods or Farm to School?

My husband is a grower of organic vegetables and he sells to restaurants. We also farm ducks and chickens. Our kids both went to school at this elementary school, and we actually donated and put up this greenhouse eleven years ago to the school. So like I said, we were just doing flowers and the kids would hang out at it, and then I thought, well we should really use this to grow some real food that kids could eat and to learn about where food comes from.

What else motivated you or provided that “spark” to get involved? What made it possible or easier for you to get involved?

Being funded by this private foundation is a big help because for years it was just volunteer but now they've actually added this to their educational initiative, so that's been a great support. We also have the huge support of the Top Chef, Kelly Liken, who has a restaurant up here. She is probably my greatest mentor for helping me choose what to grow, how to grow it, and how to service it. She cooks food with the kids and eats at the schools, so she's

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all about it. If it weren't for her I don't think I would be interested in doing it. She was at the Washington, D.C. Top Chef event where the goal was for all the participants to cook a school lunch and she won that event, by cooking some healthy food that was way under budget for a school district. The judge was Sam Kass--President Obama's private chef at the White House. Kelly invited Michelle Obama to come eat at her restaurant in Vail, so she spent the weekend there with her daughters and ate at Kelly's restaurant and we served some of the food from the greenhouse. Michelle Obama invited us to the White House, which is even more exciting. We took three elementary kids with us to Washington, D.C. and we toured the gardens and met the chef. They're pretty knowledgeable, these kids, they've been doing this program for about a year and a half, so they knew a lot of what was growing. A lot of kids up here had never even seen a corn plant before starting the program. The whole thing about Kelly and the student initiative with the current administration and its Let’s Move campaign has really motivated all of us.

Were there specific tools, models, partners, programs, or resources that really helped you to get involved? What about them was so helpful?

Initially the first year was Kelly and I just figuring out how we could do to get the kids out there because we didn't want to take them away from their science classes. It was initially just horticulture, and then last year we really had to tie the curriculum to the school district’s science curriculum, so we've been working hard all year on that to make it relevant. The kids cannot come out to play or prance--it always has something to do with what they're learning in science, whether it's the weather, recycling, worm composting, or how plants grow.

Are there other factors that have contributed to the on-going success or sustainability of your efforts? What specifically?

Yes, along with the Vail Valley Foundation, we are also supported by the Youth Foundation, to help me and Kelly communicate with our volunteer base, get fundraisers within the

school going, and to make sure the program is sustainable. We are working closely with the county on greenhouses and things like that, making sure they’re green and not using so much fossil fuels, and instead using geothermal.

Where do you see your efforts going and growing? What do you see as the next steps?

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We're trying to complete some models, which we'll model each school after with a greenhouse and an outdoor garden for food. So we've almost got that accomplished at two schools along with the curriculum for indoor classes during the winter. We’ve written the curriculum, we're building the green houses and gardens, and now we're just choosing the schools that have strong PTA and parental support.

What do you think others can learn from or model from what you have done? What would you suggest to others in your role who want to do similar work?

I think sometimes when people or other interested schools come and visit us they're overwhelmed by the big greenhouse and the huge garden. But really, I started in the classroom with a regular pot, growing food in containers, and doing small steps like composting and making sure that snacks and lunch aren’t processed food, and can be composted or recycled. Really it's more of a green initiative. So I'm working with them to grow things in pots. We grew corn in containers even though we are at high altitudes, 7000 - 8,000 feet. You can still grow a lot of food; you just have to make sure it's something that works well within the climate. Obviously you can't grow pineapple here, but we grow lots of lettuces, lots of radishes, stuff like that.

What else would you like to see happen in the state of CO that would help advance your efforts?

I like the fact that our district has really been proactive in allowing us and the Vail Valley Foundation in the schools during the school day. We're not an afterschool program or an enrichment arts special, we actually are a vital part of the curriculum. Children recognize that they need to eat and whatever they put in their stomach helps them learn, and they are choosing carrots over Oreos. Even with elementary kids if I put a pile of freshly picked carrots with the greens on them, and two packages of Oreos, 85% of them will now choose the carrots first. So that's a good start. Even for schools that don't have scratch cooking, if the kids cannot buy junk food, then they have to make better choices.