Brandon High School’s community school is in its third year of supporting its students and their families by providing food and clothing.
“We are entering year three as a community school,” said Lauren Leto, Brandon High School’s community school resource teacher. “At the end of year two, we formed a partnership with Feeding Tampa Bay and our pantry sponsor is BayCare. We receive biweekly deliveries to support our students and families.”
Leto and Brandon High School’s agriculture teacher, Casey Wood, have had discussions on ways that her agriculture classes could support the school’s food pantry long before they started getting consistent funding for it.
“She and I both wrote grants this summer to support and remodel our old greenhouse area into a garden,” Leto said. “We receive produce and meat through our partnership with Feeding Tampa Bay, but this was a way for our students to get hands-on experience and support the school as a whole at the same time. Bristol Myers Squibb provided us with a $1,000 grant and the National FFA Organization awarded us close to $5,000 to create a community garden on our campus.”
From the agriculture program’s perspective, adding a community garden not only gives students a chance to connect the school to the program but also allows for them to experience hands-on learning that is practical and something they can even do at home.
“We strive to give students pathways to careers after high school and sometimes even in high school,” Wood said. “This is a great way for them to learn a skill or hobby they can continue outside of school as well as give them a buy-in to things happening on campus to make them proud of where they go to school.”
Every student in the agriculture program, which is about 315 students, has been working hard to clean out the greenhouse area and will continue to do a lot of the work as it aligns to the curriculum, but the program’s goal is to have workdays in the spring and open itself up to community members and students outside the agriculture program as well.
“I would love to be able to use the garden area to branch out to the science classes to allow for students all over campus to help take care of the garden,” Wood said. “Eventually, when we get big enough to start growing landscape plants, we would also love to have plant swaps or sales in the future. I think it would be fun to do monthly community workdays to allow people to come and see the progress and continue to help us grow. I know many of my students’ families utilize the food pantry, and it would be cool for them to go home and be able to say they grew some of the items they took home that week.”
If you would like to learn more about the community garden at Brandon High School, you can contact Leto at lauren.leto@hcps.net.
