Clearing Space

It is a glorious afternoon, a balmy 75, flooded with sun. The lettuces in one of our kindergarten beds – red-leaf, romaine, buttercrunch – spread their leaves to take in the early autumn light. In our other garden, back behind the school, the sweet potato vines have long escaped their bed, and Charlotte the writing spider stands guard over the remnants of a crop of black-eyed peas.

Our "Food for Thought" vegetable garden is one of my favorite Shamrock programs. During the past three years, the garden has let our kids participate in the miracles of nature by growing crops such as dinosaur kale, giant red mustard, Hopi Black Dye sunflowers and Shamrock Gold cherry tomatoes. They've produced towering stalks of okra and bright-orange bitter melons that open to reveal deep crimson, heart-shaped seeds. They've learned that worms have mouths and discovered a nest of baby rabbits tucked into the middle of a potato patch.

The lessons of our gardens extend well beyond their boundaries.

Last fall, for example, gardeners Amy Hayes and Michaele Fitzpatrick held a session on the mysteries of broccoli, one of a series of cooking and nutrition classes that they have designed to go with the garden. A group of first graders who had planted, tended and then harvested a broccoli patch took time to marvel at the deep green, bumpy heads they had produced, to inhale their aroma, and then to taste with care, top and bottom, raw and cooked. A far cry from "eat your vegetables." For the rest of the year, Amy later recalled, kids kept coming up to her and saying "I eat broccoli all the time now."


This spring, when a team of boys produced a bumper potato crop, they sat down with a phone book and made calls until they reached a food bank that could use a donation.

This has not been a small undertaking. A successful school garden depends on clearing space of many kinds – a challenging task in a busy, stressful time.

It starts, of course, with a sunny swath of ground that can be cleared and planted.

But it also requires space in people's lives, a place to cultivate the patience, creativity and dedication required to keep a cycle of crops growing year-round, despite the vagaries of weather, weeds and bugs, as well as the demands of jobs and families.

And these days, teachers must work to clear space for dirt and seeds in a curriculum jam-packed with requirements and aimed straight at the three or four spring days that students will spend huddled over test papers, filling small circles with pencil. March and April can be tough months in our garden – just as the earth warms up for planting and things start to come alive, the test-prep pressure grows, and anxiety threatens to overrun spring's sense of possibility.

Our garden's bountiful triumph over these many challenges is due primarily to Amy and Michaele, two remarkable volunteers who for the past three years have regularly made the 90-minute round trip up from Rock Hill to plant and water, weed and teach.

At a high-poverty school like Shamrock, it's not so hard to find volunteers willing to commit a few hours – once-a-week reading buddy, clean-up-day worker, one-time event organizer. It's another thing entirely to find people to build and maintain a transformative program, year after year. We are so lucky.

Amy and Michaele first came to Shamrock early in 2008, as part of an effort by Slow Food Charlotte to create one of the "edible schoolyards" that have become all the rage around the country. As so often happens, the effort started with a good-sized group that then dwindled as a variety of distractions began to pull people away. But Amy and Michaele have stuck it out, assisted by our school nurse, Suzanne. Michaele is a nurse herself, dedicated to locally grown food and the role it plays in healthy eating. She slices broccoli with the best. Amy is a transplant from Texas, a master grower eagerly meeting the challenges of a new region and climate.


They started small, with four raised beds. As they tested, planned and started to plant, they became familiar figures at the school, tromping around in boots, jeans and floppy straw hats, Amy with a seed box full of an ever-changing variety of intriguing packets. After that first year, they added a larger space at the back of the school, enlisting husbands, sons and a few other volunteers to dig and weed.

Now, both gardens teem with ideas as well as plants – fenugreek as a cover crop, a hummingbird vine to shade a wall that blasts heat into a nearby bed, Chinese long beans and lemon basil mingling with corn, peppers and tomatoes. Last month, Parker's class cleared an area for wheat, which they plan to grow, harvest and then make into bread (if they can manage to outwit the Hessian fly, which thwarted Thomas Jefferson and kept wheat from becoming a significant Southern crop). In a few weeks, we will plant a pomegranate tree.


For the first couple of years, we weren't real good at finding help for them. For so many of our families, the press of children, illness, shelter, balky vehicles, economic needs and other obligations makes it tremendously difficult to keep space in their lives for school gardening, week in and week out.

But maybe that's starting to change. This year, a couple of our moms – Bobbie and Maria – have found that space, for now. Bobbie enrolled her son in kindergarten this fall. Maria, who has four children at Shamrock, put her fifth and last in pre-K. They both love dirt and plants and the outdoors, and I often see them walking to the school, Maria coming from the east and Bobbie from the west. Once there, they weed and water and chat and plot ways to involve other parents. At a time when tight budgets have squeezed so many school programs, it's great to see this one grow.

If you build it, they will come

This morning, I took a quick look at our caterpillar bed, checking to see whether our blueberry plants had finally succumbed to this blasted drought.

The garden's been hanging in there despite the lack of rain – the advantage of native plants. That's especially helpful here at Shamrock, since the only hose tap within reach is inside one of the boys' bathrooms.

The passionflower vines are doing especially well, trailing everywhere and putting out their spectacular purple flowers.


We planted them in part because they're beautiful, but mainly because they're food for larvae of fritillary butterflies, orange-and-white spangled creatures that breed here in summer and fall.

As I clear some of the vines off the suffering blueberries, I spy a burnt-orange streak among the green. A caterpillar! It's a variegated fritillary, with long orange stripes running down its sides and black spikes designed to make it look unappetizingly prickly.

Class hasn't started yet, and kids are moving up and down the corridors. I head into Parker's classroom to tell them the good news. Parker and nature-loving Cameron follow me out to view the caterpillar.



Another student, Hernan, stops at his classroom door and asks us what we're doing. When we tell him, he points at to the brick wall at the edge of the garden. There are lots of caterpillars there, he notes.

We troop over, and sure enough, he's right. Not caterpillars, but chrysalises – lots of them. Caterpillars rarely form their chrysalises on the plants they eat. I'd been looking on other plants for signs, but had never thought to check the wall, which stands several feet from the beds.

The first chrysalis we see is in its early stages – half caterpillar, half hardening shell. It clings to the brick with the tiniest bit of silk.





On the other side of the wall, almost to the walkway, sits a finished chrysalis, bright green with gleaming golden spots. More kids pause on their way to class to look.












What's this? one of them asks, pointing further up the wall. Closer inspection reveals yet another chrysalis, this one brown, with a lower half that looks like a pair of discarded moth wings, or perhaps a fragment of dried leaf. That one's made by a Gulf fritillary, a spiky red caterpillar that likes passion vines as well.









All of a sudden, sharp eyes are looking and fingers pointing everywhere. Kids can't find half the things that are right under their noses. But now they spot chrysalis after chrysalis, on the wall, on the adjoining wall, hanging from the gutters up above our heads.

Then someone calls. Look here!

Right by the garden, hanging underneath a bone-dry drainpipe, is a butterfly with bright-patterned wings, holding to a dry brown chrysalis. Clearly, it has just emerged, and is drying its wings. Kids gather round to look. They admire its wings, point out its curled proboscis.

Morning reading can wait. The class ventures out in small groups, all eyes, to see caterpillars, chrysalises, butterfly – a lesson come to life.

First Day

The first day of fourth grade. So hard to believe that Parker is starting his fifth year at Shamrock (though even harder to accept that he has only two years left). I look at his first-day kindergarten picture, and at the one I took this morning. What happened to the neatly tucked-in shirt? What happened to the first-day-of-school haircut? Parker's not the only one who's changed.


The fourth grade classrooms look out onto the butterfly garden. Back when Parker was in kindergarten, that space held a few ragged bushes and a bumpy stretch of weeds.


It looks quite different now.


The birds and butterflies have been busy there all summer, and as I pick through the leaves I see the telltale holes chewed by a variety of caterpillars. Parker's kindergarten class won the school's "best door" prize by recreating "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" in construction paper. Now, if they look closely, they can see the whole process unfold in real time, right outside their windows.


Although school is in session, I hear only the fountain, some crickets and a few snatches of birdsong. Shamrock's adopted rabbit sits in a corner, chewing blades of grass. It's amazing how four hundred kids can be so quiet.

Across the yard, a small group of this year's kindergartners emerges from a classroom and walks toward the cafeteria, fingers to their lips, eyes down on the black-painted line they're supposed to follow as they walk from place to place.


There's a change there as well. When Parker entered kindergarten, he was the only child in his grade who went home to one of the comfortably middle-class houses that fill the well-off Plaza-Midwood neighborhood. This year, for the first time, there are several Plaza-Midwood children on the rolls.

We've been waiting for this moment. As I wrote when I started this blog, Peter and I came to high-poverty Shamrock because we don't believe in segregation. We believed we could help build a school where kids of many different kinds could thrive together. Now, we seem to have reached the point where some of our neighbors believe that too.

This shift has opened up new possibilities and new challenges.

There were advantages to having just a couple of Plaza-Midwood familes at Shamrock. Peter and I have made more new friends than we might have if more neighbors had been at the school. It also gave Shamrock time to build up on its own. The partial magnet program we have worked to establish is aimed at "gifted" students. A sudden rush of ambitious magnet parents could have divided the school, creating magnet classes that were far better off (and probably quite a bit whiter) than the school as a whole. But because the magnet drew few new families, that didn't happen. Instead, the "gifted" classes came to reflect the mix of ethnic and economic groups that make up Shamrock's broader population.

Now, it's a matter of welcoming a new group of students to an established program and helping them feel at home. They won't slide in unnoticed. Middle-class parents come to a school ready to act, wielding long lists of contacts, expectations and ideas. E-mails have flown faster and more furiously this summer than ever before. It's an energy and a focus that the school needs. But we'll have to work to mesh these new folks with the ones who have been here far longer, working in their own ways. We all have a lot to learn.

Why I Love Shamrock: I

For some time now, I've been trying to figure out exactly why I love Shamrock Gardens Elementary so much. How do you capture such an encompassing feeling, a sentiment that floats free from any single experience or revelation, slipping tantalizingly in and out of view?

But a few days ago, as I was leaving the school, I felt as though I finally held it in my hand.

I had just spent the morning helping one of Parker's classmates, Jessica, transfer to another school. Jessica's family had just moved, and Jessica couldn't stay at Shamrock. Everyone hates to see her go. She has been in Parker's class since kindergarten, and her parents have been dedicated volunteers for years.

Jessica needs a school that challenges her (she's officially "gifted" by CMS standards). But her family had just moved into the home school zone for Billingsville Elementary, which according to CMS statistics has fewer than six gifted children in the entire school. Jessica needed to be in a magnet program.

This is easier said than done. Negotiating CMS bureaucracy can be tricky even in the best of circumstances. And Jessica's parents don't speak English, which makes it even tougher.

Jessica's mom started with a couple of calls to student placement, but didn't get any clear answers, at least as far as I could tell. (I can limp along in Spanish, but it was hard for us to understand each other.) So last Wednesday, we set out in person to figure things out.

We started at the Family Application Center, where we learned that Jessica was eligible to apply to Barringer Academic Center. But the only way for her to get there, we were told, was to request a reassignment, a process that could only be completed online.

Jessica's family doesn't have Internet access. We could have done it from my computer, but I had a feeling we would run into complications. So we headed back across town to Shamrock.

The first thing you need to know about Shamrock and computers is that it often takes a full half hour just to log onto the system. Our high per-pupil funding rate has given some folks the idea that our school is a palace, with money being wasted right and left on needless frills. It only takes a quick visit to dispel any such illusion, especially if that visit involves venturing into one of our ancient bathrooms, or using a school computer.

We arrived at Shamrock's media center, started the login process, and settled in to wait. One of the fourth grade teachers, Ms. Gales, was there using a different computer. Once she saw what we were up to, she called us over and told us to use her computer, where she was already logged in. She knew the form we wanted, tapped through the CMS website, and pulled it up on screen. She told us to let her know when we were done with the computer, and she would get back to her work then.

To access the form, we needed Jessica's student number, along with the PIN number parents use when they log into CMS sites from home. Jessica knew her student number by heart. But since her family had never needed her PIN, no one knew what it was.

We walked over to the technology room, where our technology specialist, Ms. Scariot, and our media specialist, Ms. Hollar, were working together on a project (all of this, of course, was happening in the summer, when no teacher is paid to be at the school). After some exploratory hunting around the CMS computer system, Ms. Scariot made a call to someone who could guide her to the page for generating PINs. A few minutes later, we had one.

Back to the media center to fill out the form. We were going fine until we hit the page where we were supposed to list the reason for the reassignment request. We had to select one of three categories: "job," "CMS employee" or "extreme hardship." Nothing for "simple, reasonable request." Ms. Gales came back over to check on us, and explained that we should use "extreme hardship," so we did. She advised us to print out hard copies of the confirmation form, just in case the request somehow got lost in the system. We did that too.

Once we filed the request, we needed to do a second for Jessica's younger sister, who would be entering kindergarten in the fall. She too needed a number and a PIN. So we headed up to the office, where our financial secretary, Ms. Tillman, looked up the number. We got a second PIN. Some time later, our mission was complete, and I headed to the car.

This is why I love Shamrock. From the moment we arrived until the time we left, everyone at the school did whatever they could to help us. Helping a child transfer from Billingsville to Barringer isn't in the job description for Shamrock's media specialist, or technology specialist or fourth grade teachers or financial secretary. But everyone at the school cares more about kids than they do about job descriptions. They do the right thing.

As I write this, I can't help thinking about a discussion the school board held the other day, about pre-kindergarten. CMS currently pays part of the cost of a public pre-K program for disadvantaged kids, called "Bright Beginnings." Any kindergarten teacher will tell you that kids who have been through Bright Beginnings come to kindergarten far better prepared for its challenges than those who did not have a strong pre-K experience. (There's more debate about how long those effects last, but laying out those numbers would require a separate post.)

Still, debate about results aside, one strand of the anti-Bright Beginnings argument focuses purely on "job description." CMS, this reasoning goes, shouldn't offer pre-K that because, as one school board member put it, "our mandate is for K-12 education." If pre-K is to exist, she and other argue, it should be the job of other organizations – although what those organizations would be and where the funding would come from remain a mystery. Figuring that out isn't in the job description either.

Too much in our society seems to work this way, as people and institutions seek to strictly limit their responsibility, whether for children, the environment, or a host of other crucial pieces of our future. I love being at a place that doesn't march to this particular drummer.

Miracle

My friend Beth and I are in the butterfly garden, planting a milkweed patch that we hope will attract monarchs later in the summer. She notices the spice bush we planted last fall, and wanders over to take a look. She has two spice bushes, she says, but has yet to see a spice bush caterpillar on either of them this year.

Then she stops, reaches into the bush, and gently unrolls a furled leaf. There lies a bright green caterpillar with two, huge staring yellow eyes. It's one of the most beautiful I've ever seen.

The eyes aren't real, Beth points out. They're there to make the caterpillar look like a snake's head, so that it can scare away birds that might think of it as lunch. The caterpillar's real head, small and white, pokes out beneath.

Kids gather quickly to look. Another of our everyday miracles.

Science Olympiad

"Sham-rock." "SHAM-ROCK." The call echoes around UNC Charlotte's gymnasium as our students yell for their school, a blur of green and purple rocking from side to side. It is the end of a long Science Olympiad day, and the judges are late with the results. So the students from the participating schools, restless in their seats, are passing the time any way they can.


Some of our parents have caught the spirit as well, and they are leading the students in a variety of cheers: "Give Me an 'S'" "We Will Rock You," and so on. We aren't expecting to top the winners' lists, but our spirit is hard to beat. It's a beautiful sight.

It has been a long road to the Science Olympiad competition. There are fifteen different events, and a school needs to field at least two competitors for each. Our students have been coming to weekly practices since January, trying out their hands at pasta and marshmallow towers, paper gliders and (most popular) soda-bottle rockets that soar into the air with a satisfying whoosh, leaving a trail of water behind.

Fielding a top-notch Science Olympiad team is a lot of work. Materials have to be chosen and purchased. Competitors need to get a grasp of basic scientific principles: of structure, of flight, of growth and decay. And they need to work through the classic scientific process – try, fail, improve, try, fail, improve, over and over.

As so often happens, we had few resources and fewer volunteers, and a lot of the time the kids were on their own. In some ways this wasn't bad – they got to tackle challenges themselves, in their own ways. But there were predictable drawbacks.

Using spray bottles to soak each other proved more entertaining than using them to mist terrariums. Overly enthusiastic testing took a toll on many gliders. Hurried, haphazard cleanups meant that materials tended to get misplaced. And the transition from experimenting to testing and improvement was difficult to make.

The kids were definitely learning some things. But what did it add up to? Hard to tell. It was all too easy to imagine a debacle, with dozens of perfect entries putting our improvisations to shame.

Happily, the final competition fell two weeks after UNC Charlotte's classes ended, and Peter was able to step in for some last-minute coaching and tests. Having an architect involved made a big difference for our pasta towers, which had to hold a weight of 15 kilos to qualify for competition.

* * *

When competition day finally arrives, it starts at a bleary-eyed 7:30 a.m. Despite the early hour, 28 of the 30 team members show up at the gym, all but two wearing their school t-shirts. Several bring family members, who lug cameras, lunches and books. There are 23 schools taking part, and the gym quickly fills with eager students clad in a rainbow of school T-shirts.

The kids learn one lesson fast. Big competitions, like the real Olympics, look exciting on television. But for the actual competitors, they're mostly waiting, waiting, waiting.

At the glider competition, a long line of jostling competitors clutches planes of all shapes, sizes anxiously awaiting their team's turn. The judges take a while to get into a smooth testing rhythm, and the line crawls. As the packed students grow restless, planes began to crack, requiring emergency pep talks and repairs.

The first few gliders stall and dive, landing only a few feet from the starting line. But then one boy launches a craft that shoots halfway across the gym, fast and smooth. Everyone applauds.

Watching the first entries, we relax a little. The entries are all over the map – some clearly better than ours, some not nearly as good. We will not be embarrassed. We will fit right in.

The day goes surprisingly smoothly. All the gliders fly, and so do the rockets. One of our pasta towers cracks beneath the test weight, but the other holds. Our kids get to all their events, more or less on time. Between events, they play games or explore. A couple of our chess club members settle in for a match, while other students run up and down the grassy hills outside the gym. Everyone loves the bathrooms, where the sinks spurt water in great streams. No one gets lost for long. Only one kid melts down.


When it comes time for the awards ceremony each school groups together, kids in the front and families in the back, chatting, cheering and watching volunteers arrange the trophies and the big piles of medals. As the wait drags on, we joke that the judges must be using the time-consuming SOLVE process with which Shamrock students approach their End of Grade tests (STUDY the problem; ORGANIZE the facts; LINE up a plan; VERIFY with action; EXAMINE your results).

Finally, though, the organizers come up to the podium to announce the winners. A couple of events into the presentations, we hear "Shamrock Gardens Elementary," and everyone erupts. Our bottle biome team has taken fourth place! The two competitors make their way to the front, and come back with their medals and big smiles. A little later, we hear our name again – eighth place in the glider competition! At the end of the day, we will take home three eighth-place medals – glider, pasta tower and mystery engineering, along with the bottle biome fourth.


For the adults, it was a satisfying day. Our kids got to do something they hadn't done before. For a first effort, for the level of organization we managed to pull together, our performance was entirely respectable. The teams that took home the lion's share of the medals, as well as the team trophies, were the county powerhouses – the schools with high-powered gifted programs and far greater percentages of well-off families. Tough competition for a small, working-class school. Just showing up was its own victory, and for us that was sweet.

But for a school like Shamrock, the meaning of victory raises a dilemma There are the miracles, so often chronicled in movies, where underdog teams bring together hard work, persistence and a touch of crazy genius to knock off bigger, wealthier schools. Beyond the silver screen, however, it doesn't happen often.

But how can you explain to kids that being at a small, low-income school puts them at a big disadvantage in events such as these? How can you tell them that it will always be an uphill battle, because other schools find it easier to raise money, buy equipment and recruit parent volunteers? How can you ask them to lower their expectations? Yet if they don't, and our team doesn't finish near the top, how can you keep them from feeling that they're just not as smart as the kids on the other teams?

So we have no choice but to work harder next year. We'll be better organized, and we'll search more diligently for volunteers. We want one of those top eight spots, where the school gets a trophy, and everyone a medal. We'll see . . .


The top-finishing teams in Mecklenburg County's 2010 Elementary Science Olympiad Competition were, in order, Barringer, Olde Providence, Villa Heights, Polo Ridge, Providence Spring, Hawk Ridge, Idlewild and Myers Park Traditional.

Beautiful Music

Sunshine streams in the windows at St. Luke Methodist church, warming the sanctuary's pale yellow walls to a bright glow. The late spring air feels fresh and light. A perfect Sunday morning.


At the front of the sanctuary, just below the choir loft and the pulpit, a dozen children stand in front of folding chairs, looking out over the congregation. They have come to play the annual concert of the St. Luke Hand in Hand Orchestra, sponsored by the church for Shamrock Gardens students.

Each Tuesday afternoon for the past seven years, a group of Shamrock students has crossed Shamrock Drive, instruments in hand, and descended the set of concrete steps that leads to St. Luke's fellowship hall. Once there, they eat snacks, work on their homework, and learn to play violins, violas and cellos, with the guidance of music instructor Maya Johnson and under the watchful eyes of St. Luke volunteers.

St. Luke is an aging church. Most of its members joined half a century or so ago, when the nearby brick ranch houses were brand new, and the young couples who filled them were all white, as were the students at the recently built Shamrock Gardens Elementary. Over time, as neighborhoods and school have diversified, many long-time residents have passed on or moved away. But members of St. Luke have remained, still welcoming newcomers to their streets, still looking after the children in the school across the road.

St Luke members started Hand in Hand ten years ago. They bought sneakers for the kindergarteners, made treats for the teachers and began to acquire orchestra instruments for the fourth and fifth grade orchestra. Three years later, when Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools cut its elementary orchestra program, St. Luke members hired a teacher and organized the weekly parade across the road. Members also tutor, buy glasses for kids without insurance, help pay for field trips and support the school in countless other ways.

It isn't easy for a small church to raise the money for these programs. Twice a year, church members serve up the best church barbecue in Charlotte, as well as brownies, Mountain Dew layer cakes and sweet potato pies. They write grants, and hold sales. Year after year, they find a way. A former school board representative is fond of saying that if every church in Charlotte gave according to its means the way St. Luke does, there wouldn't be a problem in the city.


This morning's service is devoted to children. The congregation starts off singing "Jesus Loves Me," and the text is from Luke 18: "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these."

In his meditation, Pastor Richard Clough talks about how much adults can learn from children. He praises the students for the work they've done. Success does not come easy, he says. But when you reach a goal you've worked hard for, accomplishment is sweet. And no one can take it away. You can always look back and remember it.

Then comes time to play. Orchestra members make their way through a series of light, short tunes: "Caribbean Island," "Carolina Breeze," "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." Back in the fall, the students could barely hold the unfamiliar instruments. Now they bow fluidly, in unison, and more or less in tune. To the parents, teachers and friends ranged in the pews, it could not sound more beautiful. The students finish and stand, to loud applause.


Afterwards, the church offers a good-by to Angela Beavers, the Communities in Schools representative for Shamrock, who has worked with the orchestra since its beginning, but who is now leaving Shamrock for a higher-level job. Ms. Beavers has to pause and wipe her eyes as she talks about St. Luke's devotion to music, to children and to God.

Awards follow: medals and trophies to the students, plaques for some of the most devoted volunteers. Relatives and friends smile, take pictures, and sometimes tear up themselves. Everyone exits into the brilliant Sunday sun.


Back home, I tell Parker that he will never in his life meet better people than the members of St. Luke Methodist Church. He nods, although I can tell he is distracted. His mind is full of games and friends and what he's going to do this summer. He can't fully appreciate the spirit that allows you to embrace a stranger's child. But I hope that someday he will look back, and understand.