Planting the seeds of innovation

When Melissa Tracy first proposed bringing a community garden program to Odyssey Charter School, a K-12 school in Wilmington, Delaware, she didn’t exactly have a green thumb. “I had zero gardening experience,” says the food studies and social studies teacher.

But what she did have was a passion for food justice. Tracy wanted her students to understand the importance of ensuring everyone has access to fresh, healthy food. And what better way to connect learners to the food system than by having them grow and donate produce themselves?

That first growing season yielded a bumper crop of leafy greens — and so much more. “There is an educational component [to the community garden program]. There is a therapeutic component. But it really helps kids make important connections,” said Tracy, one of three winners of McGraw Hill’s Pathfinder Award in 2023. “It just clicked for me: We need to do more of this type of programming for students and have all students benefit from it.”

Seeing the world through the lens of food

Building off the success of the community garden program, Tracy created a food science program in 2018. It’s offered exclusively at Odyssey and is considered one of the most unique career and technical education programs in the country.

In it, students learn culture, history, power, the environment and more through the lens of food. Classes run the gamut from a foundational plant science course to a course on public health to next year’s “Future Food,” which will examine the friction between climate change and the food system. There’s also a chance for learners to earn dual-enrollment college credits.

But the beating heart of the program is food justice. “I tell students that service learning is the curriculum,” Tracy says. “It’s what we do on a weekly basis.”

Thanks to $300,000 in grants and funds she’s secured over the years, the community garden program has expanded into a full-fledged eco-school infrastructure. The vegetable garden is now 1,000 square feet with 34 raised beds. There’s also an extensive hydroponic lab program, a vertical garden with 200 planters, and an urban farm with three goats and 16 egg-laying hens.

These additions give students opportunities to apply what they learn in the classroom while also providing meaningful ways to address food insecurity in the community. Every month, they grow 3,500 vegetables on site. So far, they’ve donated more than 7,000 pounds of fresh produce and distributed more than 6,000 culturally relevant meal kits to families in need. The rest of the food is consumed by Odyssey’s nearly 2,000 students.