Nomadic educators carry earthy message
Register Pajornian | 1 April 2008 | by Roger Sideman

LA SELVA — Students beat on drums and planted trees as a caravan of earth-loving ecology educators rolled into Renaissance High School.

As part of a statewide fruit tree-planting tour, members of the nonprofit group Common Vision travel in three vegetable oil-powered buses, visiting 25 cities and planting 1,000 fruit trees in hopes of teaching urban students about sustainable ecology and the benefits of eating locally grown food.

The idea is to use the schoolyard as a place to connect with the natural world and learn about global and environmental issues, such as oil dependence, organizers said. Exercises like hip-hop poetry writing are aimed at getting tight-lipped and reserved students to open up and express themselves.

“I had one kid giving up a lot of resistance, saying he shouldn’t care about the environment because he lives in a city,” said educator Sarah LaRock. “But we tured it into a conversation about how cities can be more sustainable. There’s room for kids to be rebellious but still be creative.”

Sitting in a field behind the school off San Andreas Road, the group beat on African drums to demonstrate how various cultures honor the earth and its bounty.

“It was fun because they never teach us this kind of thing,” said Renaissance student Richard Franco.Now in its fifth year, the thee-month-long tour covers urban areas in California from San Diego to San Francisco and Sacramento. During each stop, the “Earth Educators” plant as many as 40 fruit trees, such as peach, apple, pear and fig.

With its brand new organic garden, which is used for an after-school program that began last year, Renaissance High already has a leg up on environmental education, said principal Tom Tatum.

Tatum would like to see the garden-based curriculum integrated into the regular school day, serving the entire school’s 200 students.