Politics in the children's garden: Can our kids teach us?

We try to keep politics out of this blog but we could not pass up this opportunity.  We have been
working with 100 third graders from all across the country on a gardening project.  We have been teaching how to compost, how to grow food, and all of the other things that go along with that.  Students have been learning that there is about the realities of the natural world and how things like pollution can impact food to technology that can be used on farms in the future.  Everything has something to do with the natural world.

Each Thursday morning we meet in the garden and this week
was one of our most important sessions.  Last week, on Earth Day, we collected over 400 pounds of aluminum cans.  We turned those cans in to Newell Recycling in Doraville, GA and, at $.51 per pound, we made $234.17.   Now comes the hard part; what do we do with the money.

On Monday, a group of us are heading to Haiti to help them
start a garden and add them to our network of school gardens in Atlanta, Augusta, Greenville, and Seattle.  We will be taking seeds, plants, know how, and strong backs into an area ravaged by Hurricane Matthew and still reeling from an earthquake in 2010.  We have everything we need for that trip but we can always use more.

We have also been growing plants to give away for our #takeatomato project where we give away tomato plants and whatever else we can grow to shelters, Meals On Wheels programs, and just people who want to grow plants.  We are sending plants all over the country to people who will be growing them in different climates and helping us collect data for next year's projects.  We could use the money for that.

We also talked about just giving the money to a school lunch program so that kids whose accounts are not up to date will still get to eat.

The adults discussed it and we thought this might be the best lesson that we could teach them and left it up to them.  The kids have until Monday morning to think about what they want to do with the money and vote on it.  Whatever 51 of the students decide, is what we will do.

The options above are on the table, of course, but they also have until Monday to present their own option in the form of a bill.  They could opt for a pizza party or even for us to send them each $2.34 or whatever they want.  This is a chance for them to learn about civic responsibility in a real world replication of the world they will face when they are older with a couple of differences.  The ballots and the schools are hidden, unless they present a bill.

In this time of marches and protests, government gridlock, etc. etc. blah blah blah, can our children show us how it is done?

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