By Emma Margraf
Matt Grant is a busy man.
He has about twenty minutes for an interview, and he gets right to the point, because he has told this story before. This is his ninth year as principal of Olympia High, and after years of status quo he went searching for a different answer, one that would engage the students he could not reach. He went to San Francisco, and saw what he was looking for in Delancey Street, a non-profit that turns lives around that are thought to be untouchable: chronically homeless, addicted, unstable residents tell success stories every day. They didn’t do the same work Grant does, but they had the quality he was looking for. He thought maybe that if he found that quality in Olympia, together they could figure out the rest.
And back in Olympia, Grant found what he was looking for in the staff at GRuB. He went to them and started a conversation that this week will change the face of local education: the GRuB in the schools program. Starting this school year, seventeen Olympia high school students will make up the first GRuB cohort at Olympia High. They’ll spend the first half of the day on the Olympia campus, then the second half at the GRuB farm, where they will earn credits taking Horticultural Science, Introduction to Business, Entrepreneurship, and Biology through Horticulture.
Blue Peetz, GRuB Co-founder, went back to school himself in order to make this happen. He is now an official employee of the school district, and he has gone from farmer to public school teacher. Blue led the curriculum development for the Schools Program, and ensured all of the needed certifications were gotten – a process that was just recently completed.
Sierra, 17, is an Olympia High student and a Peer Crew Leader at GRuB who went through the program last year and spent much of her summer this year with the new group of students. She was part of the planning process for the GRuB in the Schools Program, and she says they decided to have students spend the second half of their day on the farm because it’s such a happy place – and school is not.
Sierra says she remembers what she’s learned when she doesn’t have the pressure of test taking, that it makes more sense to her when she can put her hands on something directly, and that her time at GRuB is what has shown her how to see people for who they are, not who she thought they were. She thought she knew a lot about the youth who were in the Olympia High cohort this year when they started this Summer, and discovered through the course of their work that she that they were much different than what she thought. By the end, they refer to each other as family.
“I think we’re in a state of wonder” says Kim Gaffi, GRuB’s co-founder and Executive Director. “The frameworks are in place, the classes have been approved, and I can’t wait to see what happens when they go back to school as a group, they’ll all be together”.
Relevance is the word Gaffi likes the most. School seems to have no relevance to these students lives – but once they take the science they’ve learned at GRuB and turn it into kitchen gardens for low income families, vegetables and flowers for the market stand, salves and ointments for medicine, and more – suddenly the world becomes whole. Living in the natural world goes from being the boring class you want to sneak out of to the class that makes you wonder if you could run your own business.