Rationale
John B. Cary (JBC) Elementary School is a public elementary school in the Richmond Public Schools (RPS) District in Richmond, Virginia.1 It is one of 25 elementary schools in the district, which also includes 1 charter school, 7 middle schools, 5 high schools, 3 specialty schools, and 5 preschools. The district serves roughly 21,000 students across the city of Richmond with a graduation rate of 74% for the 2022-2023 school year.
During the 2022-23 school year, 263 students were enrolled in JBC across grades K-5. Of those students, 49.8% identified as Black, 32.7% identified as white, 8.7% identified as Hispanic, 8.4% identified as multiple races, and 0.4% identified as Asian. Also, 11.8% of students were classified as students with disabilities who receive exceptional education services, and 54% of students were classified as “economically disadvantaged.” English language learners accounted for 4.6% of students. JBC was accredited for 2022.
In 1954, JBC moved to its current location at 3021 Maplewood Avenue amidst school segregation in Richmond when its former location was renamed the West End School, which was to be used for Black students. JBC was opened as its segregated counterpart for white students, and it remained segregated until a shift to open enrollment in 1969, which was petitioned by a local group of citizens to the School Board. The school remains at its 3021 Maplewood Avenue location as an open enrollment school, though RPS considered closing the school due to low enrollment in 2012—in this year less than 39% of children who lived within the JBC school zone actually attended the school. Given the large number of city neighborhoods that JBC draws from, strong, effective teaching has the potential to impact students from different communities across Richmond. Additionally, focusing on pollination in an urban setting where over half the school is economically disadvantaged could have important impacts on the health of students and their families.
One unique aspect of JBC is that it was distinguished as a US Department of Education Green Ribbon School for the 2021-22 school year. Receiving this recognition award means that a school has engaged in “cost-saving, health promoting, and performance-enhancing sustainability practices…it is a one-time recognition of an institution’s progress in the award’s three sustainability focused pillars.”2 The school was able to show sustainability practices related to the three pillars of the Green Ribbon program, which are 1) reduce environmental impacts, 2) improve health and wellness, and 3) engage in environmental and sustainability education.
The school website describes the following ways in which being a Green School benefits the school community:
- “Green schools teach students about sustainability and the environment, giving them the tools to solve the global challenges we face now and in the future.
- Green schools support sustainability literacy through curriculum and instructional practices that are interdisciplinary, place-based and rooted in real-world context.
- Green school buildings are better for the planet because they reduce environmental impact, conserve resources and contribute to educating the next generation of environmental stewards.
- Green school buildings are better for communities because the process of creating greener schools requires learning, collaboration and engagement from the entire school community. The result of this process is a healthy, sustainable environment for learning and working that often becomes a source of civic pride.”
JBC has a large campus bordering Byrd Park and has ample green space for community and school use. Outdoor spaces include open grass fields, a swing set, two playgrounds, a community garden, a butterfly garden, a Monarch waystation stop, a reforested plot of land, orienteering markers, and picnic areas (covered and uncovered).
JBC has many community partnerships through which it facilitated its work towards the three pillars of a Green School, including but not limited to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a local chapter of Kiwanis International, the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, Fit for Kids, First Lady Pam Northam, and the Maymont Foundation. The participation of these groups is documented in a mural painted near the community garden that is outside the school cafeteria, which highlights local produce and promotes recognition of produce that might be grown in the garden. A sign in front of the school boasts that JBC is a “No Child Left Inside School,” which is a program facilitated by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in an effort to get school children into nature as much as possible. Though a direction or cohesive program has not yet been developed for these partnerships with the entire school community, some of these partners continued working with the student body at JBC in the 2022-23 school year when I joined JBC in the fall of 2022.
Though there are several active partnerships, there are very little means by which students or school members take responsibility for the work that has begun with support from the outside groups. For example, Fit for Kids is a local nonprofit that is the primary sponsor of JBC’s community garden, which their program describes as a “learning garden.” Fit for Kids Garden Educators utilize the VA Standards of Learning in garden lessons at partner schools, each of which they visit 24 times during the school year. A teacher who serves as the garden coordinator supports Fit for Kids in creating a schedule so that all classes have the opportunity to visit the garden programming on a bi-weekly basis. At JBC, Fit for Kids also hosts an after-school gardening club that meets once a week in the fall and spring. The role of garden coordinator does not extend beyond scheduling classes and attending gardening club at JBC at this time. Students and/or staff do not intentionally participate in the garden outside of their slotted gardening times, and there are not necessarily any explicit connections being made to the classroom curriculum.
Given that the same grade-level standards are being utilized by the program and the school, it would seem that more explicit and intentional connections could be made to helps students see sustainability as an overarching theme within the school community. I also would like to develop more concrete means of collecting qualitative data of science knowledge, such as pre- and post-assessments about science knowledge like pollination (the focus of this unit) —currently K-2 in RPS do not follow a formalized science curriculum, but rather create materials on a school-by-school basis to meet standards. At a time when RPS Science SOL scores are very low, we cannot allow our K-2 students to move to higher grades without science content knowledge and the ability to connect science to their own lives.
Through this unit, I hope to introduce my kindergarteners to all of the nature that we have at JBC, and to provide students with the opportunity to take greater investment in our ecological community at Cary. I want to inspire them to be active participants in caring for our local natural ecosystem—it benefits our local and global ecological health as a community. I would like to focus on the essential understanding that humans within these natural systems have the ability and onus to make purposeful choices which benefit nature, rather than just exploiting it. I hope that by modeling this type of teacher and student learning in kindergarten, we will be able to create more implicit curriculum connections and whole school structures at JBC that produce students who care about their natural world with equity, and understand the ways in which they can actively support more sustainable practices, even in kindergarten. The unit will culminate in a community action plan developed by the class with intentional steps we can take to keep our local pollinators (and our class) healthier all year.
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