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Petaluma City School District
is located in southern Sonoma County. Two schools were involved in the Unified
Education Strategy (UES) grant program: Valley Vista Elementary and Mary Collins
at Cherry Valley Elementary, a charter school within the district. Both schools
have gardens on site and garden coordinators who help to tie the garden into
classroom curriculum. The gardens are also directly related to the cafeterias,
which offer a weekly salad bar with produce grown, harvested, and prepared by
the students. The salad bar is free to students.
UES grant funds were used to develop and implement standards-based lesson
plans and included the following approaches:
- A "buddy system" approach has been used to disseminate information and
understanding between the upper and lower grades. This cross-age mentoring
has built and strengthened a community feeling within the school. This has
generated a schoolwide adoption of resource conservation that students will
carry with them throughout their elementary school experience.
- The two schools exchanged groups of students to share the information
they gathered through waste audits and diversion efforts.
- Students from both schools made a joint presentation about their work at
the school board meeting in April 2005.
- In acknowledgement of years of exceptional collaboration, Petaluma’s
garden coordinators, administrators and classroom teachers at Valley Vista
Elementary and Mary Collins at Cherry Valley Charter School have become
recipients of Sonoma State University's 2005
Jack London Award for Excellence in Education. The UES program gave the
Petaluma team the tools and means to document their instruction and
communicate the benefits of using the environment as an educational
framework for their “Teaching Garden.”
- When the City of Petaluma was looking to contract with a waste hauler in
2005, the sixth-graders from Valley Vista offered sound advice. In a letter
to the City Council, the students urged the City to contract with a hauler
that had a quota for “compostable” waste. If they instituted the use of
compostable trays in the Petaluma City schools, the city would meet the
hauler’s quota as well as divert waste from the Sonoma County landfill. It
was a “win-win” for the city and the waste hauler, and a powerful learning
experience for the students and staff at Petaluma’s UES schools.
- Following a well-received presentation at the California Science
Teachers Association conference in 2005, Valley Vista’s principal and garden
coordinator have been asked to present once again at the 2006 conference.
- Staff changes at Cherry Valley caused a breakdown in communication
between the two school sites, and impacted the level of collective knowledge
about the program’s requirements and timeline.
- Although staff changes occurred after the grant ended (resulting in only
one UES team teacher at Valley Vista and another new principal at Cherry
Valley), the Petaluma UES team members expressed their continuing commitment
to their vision and to carrying out the efforts that have begun under the
UES grant.
Through the UES grant, both schools have strengthened the
purpose and visibility of their gardens and have implemented the following
diversion activities:
- Composting programs have been started and vermicomposting systems are
being refined to handle higher food-scrap intake.
- The use of organic, biodegradable food trays has been introduced at both
schools as an alternate to the polystyrene foam trays that were previously
used. The biodegradable food trays are currently being shredded and added to
the compost pile at each school site.
- The district joined a purchasing co-op that includes schools in
Berkeley. The larger number of schools increases the co-op’s buying power,
thereby significantly reducing costs to the district.
- The district has also created and strengthened its partnerships with
local waste management representatives.
- Valley Vista’s weekly volume of waste has dropped from seven dumpster
loads to two.
- During the first year of the grant, a campus
needs assessment (Adobe PDF, 321 KB) was created and carried out by
staff and students at Valley Vista Elementary. This gave the schools an idea
of where to focus their efforts during the second year of the grant.
Unified Education Strategy Grants Home
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