Secondary students in the Extended School Year (ESY) program teamed up with Greenstreet Gardens, the nearby neighborhood garden center, to add life to summer school.
Embracing this year’s ESY theme, “Good Friends and Great Citizens,” with a focus on community connections, Greenstreet Gardens donated indoor plants to T.C. Williams High School at the start of the summer session. The plants where distributed throughout the school by students.
Over the summer, staff from Greenstreet Gardens visited the school daily to water the plants, observe their growth and gain exposure to all parts of the T.C. community. The project has not only fostered the growth of new greenery on the T.C. campus, but it has also grown connections between T.C. Williams staff and students and staff at Greenstreet Gardens.
Students also had the opportunity to visit Greenstreet Gardens to learn about their products and see how the center operates from the inside out. Students learned how they work as a team to keep their plants growing, how they work with customers from all over the city to meet their needs and how Greenstreet provides employment to local residents.
This has been a great experience for our ACPS students, thanks to the support Greenstreet Gardens. The project helped the students connect their small-scale project inside T.C. with a real-life community enterprise. We are grateful for the support that has been shown to our students. Greenstreet staff members were incredibly accommodating, tailoring the tours to accommodate a variety of abilities in order to ensure all students could benefit from the experience,” said Seamus O’Connor, ESY secondary coordinator.