Hillcrest Elementary Gardenpalooza plants food, stewardship and community pride

Herbs and vegetables went into the soil at Hillcrest Elementary, 1500 NW 2nd Avenue in Oak Harbor, as the school’s fifth annual Gardenpalooza turned a Saturday planting day into a lesson in food, stewardship and community care.

Students, staff and parents gathered to tend Hillcrest’s two campus gardens, carrying forward a project that starts in classrooms long before transplanting day. Seeds are raised into seedlings inside the school, then moved outside during Gardenpalooza, where the Green Team leads the work with help from volunteers and families. Meghan Trueman, the teacher librarian who coordinates the Green Team, said the school was eager to keep building the effort. Amber Hagel, a speech pathologist who also works with the team, said every class at Hillcrest takes part in the horticultural work in some way.

The garden program is about more than growing food. Trueman described the gardens as a sanctuary for students, a place where hands-on labor and careful observation can help children feel grounded and responsible. That lesson matters at a school where the harvest is shared as well as studied. Community members are invited to take what they need, and whatever remains goes to North Whidbey Help House in Oak Harbor, which says it was incorporated in 1977 as a stand-alone food bank serving Oak Harbor and North Whidbey Island and provides emergency and supplemental food.

Smith Gardens supported the event by donating seedlings through its Cultivating the Future outreach program. Sarita Cantu, the company’s marketing manager, said the goal is to help students get their hands dirty and learn by doing. Smith Gardens says Cultivating the Future has expanded to 18 public and private schools in three Washington counties, and that each year it works with multiple community groups and more than a dozen schools and FFA programs.

Hillcrest’s garden work also reaches deeper than one Saturday in spring. KidsGardening says the Hillcrest Garden Learning Program began in 2011 in partnership with the Oak Harbor Garden Club and Oak Harbor Junior Gardeners, tying Gardenpalooza to more than a decade of garden-based learning on campus. The Washington State Department of Agriculture says school gardens can support teaching in science, math, art and reading, and Hillcrest’s program showed how those lessons can also build ownership, calm and a shared sense of pride.