Press

Students, parents, faculty and community members of Emerson Middle School pitched in to get their urban gardens ready for the season, in honor of Earth Day. The school is celebrating the fourth year of their indoor hydroponics lab where more than 500 pounds of produce are grown every year for students to enjoy.

Sarai had never tried mint before. But the fifth grade student recently had the chance to sample the herb directly from her own garden. Specifically, her class’ hydroponic garden. Sarai, together with other Northern Manhattan school children at P.S. 28 – Wright Brothers School on 155th Street, are growing greens and vegetables in their own classroom.

After muddling through with limited resources for nearly 3 years, students and teachers alike celebrated the opening of a new Green STEM Lab at P.S. 34 in Greenpoint this morning. Excited elementary students gave tours through the bright green vines of peas, tomatoes and cucumbers, which climbed from hydroponic Dutch bucket systems, soundtracked by the trickle of recycling water running down through tower gardens and across nutrient trays, feeding leafy basil, rainbow chard and kohlrabi.

Students at Astoria‘s P.S. 122 will grow their own vegetables in class with the help of two hydroponic science labs that will also serve to teach students about agriculture, biology, technology and sustainability. Councilman Costa Constantinides allocated $160,000 through discretionary funding to help build the labs in an elementary and middle school class at P.S. 122. In a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Dec. 8, the classroom labs, constructed by New York Sun Works, were unveiled.

Tribeca resident Shakira Provasoli was treated to a once-in-a-lifetime field trip to the White House last week, where the public-school teacher was honored with the Presidential Innovation Award for Environmental Educators in recognition of a ground breaking curriculum she developed to support her uptown school’s greenhouse learning center.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been very busy, but not too busy to make time to meet the fifth graders who wrote to him asking him to find solutions to the universal challenge of climate change. Today, Mr. Ban will talk to them about what the UN is doing to tackle this issue, and what they can do themselves to clean up our planet and ensure the well-being of generations to come.

Greenworks science barge and greenhouse in Yonkers, NY inspired a group of parents to build a greenhouse on top of their kids public school--PS333--on the upper West side of Manhattan. Watch science teacher Shakira share their vision for rooftop classrooms of the future in this beautiful segment on rooftop greenhouses as living science labs in urban environments.

Shakira Castronovo stood in a classroom at the Manhattan School for Children on West 93rd Street on a recent afternoon and hushed a squirming group of kindergartners perched around a blue carpet. “Where do you think I picked this?” she asked, pinching a leafy-looking thing between her index finger and thumb. “It was picked fresh just few minutes ago.”

When Celia Kaplinsky, a Brooklyn elementary school principal, visited a schoolyard garden project in Berkeley, Calif., a few years ago to see if it could work back home, something impressed her more than the lush rows of tomatoes and cucumbers.