Planting Hope
A quest to turn D.C.’s public school system into something like Eden

By Kim Orr

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George Telzrow’s students don’t often make the news for their good deeds, though by some accounts they should. February’s headlines read less like a human-interest story than a police report, pitting students against each other in a lunchtime brawl that resulted in 16 arrests.

Like many schools in the D.C. area, Cardozo High School students find themselves in a perfect storm of low-income families, a struggling education system, drugs and violence. They are typecast and set aside as another failure of the system. And even those who have managed to escape one tidal wave seem dead-set on the next.

But it’s a city of two tales: one pits Cardozo with every other failing school in the metro area and one gives hope to a community in which the word peace is about as rare as a glimpse at the nature within its walls. Whether by accident or artful planning, Telzrow is leading the revolution toward the later. And he’s doing it in a place most of his students rarely venture, let alone study: the garden.

“It’s a good metaphor for life because you don’t just start a garden and then there it is,” says Telzrow, who in 2002 broke ground on an 860-square-foot “Peace Garden” at Cardozo. “You have to work at it. There are loses and you have to bounce back from that.” In Telzrow’s garden, hands are used for nurturing instead of fighting; students learn the importance of the greenery around them—whether it’s a source of food, energy or inspiration; and all the struggles they face in the real world are channeled into helping something grow.

If he gets his way, soon those lessons will be just as integral to students’ education as the textbooks they bring to class. But fixing D.C.’s notoriously substandard education system will take more than a couple trees—it’ll take an entire ecosystem of change.

Seeds of change

It all started with a seed. For Telzrow it was a snowball viburnum, common to the Columbia Heights neighborhood where he teaches ninth and 12th grade history and government. For the hoards of other D.C.-area organizations looking to improve local educational standards through gardening activities, that seed was slightly more metaphorical.

Numerous environmental education programs have existed in some form since the 70s and 80s, but 2000’s Chesapeake Bay agreement was the one to remember in D.C. Nicknamed C2K, the agreement requires that every student in the watershed participate in a meaningful Bay experience before graduation from high school. In its first year, C2K spurred numerous supporters and drove thousands of students to the Bay for activities ranging from trash cleanups to research projects. It also gave footing to environmental programs that had been neglected over the years.

One such program was the District of Columbia Environmental Education Consortium. “With this agreement, D.C. was committed to getting some sort of environmental education program in high schools by 2005,” says Grace Manubay, co-president of the DCEEC, a volunteer organization made up of and supporting environmental and conservation programs and educators. “So organizations started meeting on a more regular basis and decided that it was not only helpful to co-ordinate programming and outreach to schools, but also a good network for professional development.”

Since then, the DCEEC has grown to represent more than 30 organizations and aided in projects ranging from “D.C. School Garden Week,” to “Powershift 2009,” a conference that brought together 10,000 young leaders from across the U.S. to discuss clean energy and environmental policy.

Oddly, it seems many of these programs start not with the students but the teachers who are prodded to take part in improving D.C.’s public education through environmental learning. This was the seed that sprouted Project Learning Tree, a national program to help educators integrate environmental and conservation activities into their curricula. What makes PLT unique is its convenience.

Teachers don’t have to add more hours to their ever-growing lesson plans because PLT works at the state level to match its materials with concepts already outlined by state education standards. In D.C., teachers even have the opportunity to apply for PLT GreenWorks grants, which first require classes to assess their school’s waste management, air quality, school-yard habitat and so on, and then come up with a plan to improve it.

Senior vice president Kathy McGlauflin has been with the program almost since it began in 1976 and seen an unmistakable impact on students and their future. “With our new administration’s emphasis on greening the economy and greening the environment, we need young people who understand these concepts at an early age,” she says. “I think it’ll have a huge impact on their quality of life.”

Convincing D.C. officials that these programs are about more than planting a couple trees, however, has been less successful. Programs like PLT are making headway by concentrating on educators first, while the DCEEC, which as a volunteer network doesn’t have the time to appeal to lawmakers, still struggles to find substantial government support. Still, there are signs that the concept is beginning to breach the soil on the beltway.

A garden without water …

This year, the district will pour more than $570 million into reinventing its public school system. While that money represents a nearly 34 percent drop from 2008’s public school budget, much of the lost funds will be reallocated to the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization, which has laid out a plan to build, buff and bolster local schools out of the doldrums. This means hope isn’t lost for educators like Telzrow, who are using outdoor spaces to inspire students. And for the DCEEC and PLT, it’s one more flower in a field of weeds.

“It would be so awesome if someday there was someone within the school system who was in charge of environmental education,” says Manubay. “We’ve seen other school systems that hire garden coordinators, and because of that, there’s a dedicated staff person to teach kids about gardening and the environment.”

While it hasn’t quite reached the grand proportions Manubay is hoping for, The DCEEC and others have found a slowly growing support network among D.C.’s officials.

In 2007, the DCEEC had a small breakthrough when it launched “D.C. School Garden Week.” Mayor Adrian Fenty and new chancellor of education Michelle Rhee officiated the event, bringing positive media attention to a city that normally makes news for its faults. And this year, the October event, which promotes greening and gardening projects among local schools through a photo contest, panel discussions, garden tours and other activities, attracted hundreds of supporters including about 150 schools that were involved in service projects. It wasn’t the most significant event in environmental education, but Manubay, McGlauflin, Telzrow and their scores of supporters know better than anyone that it takes time to see something grow.

“That’s what environmental education is all about,” says McGlauflin. “It’s not about taking kids somewhere else to learn about their environment, it’s about investing in the environment where they live.”