Students at Hogan Preparatory Academy, an urban college preparatory charter school, will participate in all aspects of this garden project as a service-learning component to their education, become aware of and reflect on the nutritional barriers that low-income urban students face and students become motivated to advocate for equal access to nutritional food across all economic levels. Multifaceted, deep, and rich with learning possibilities, food gardening provides many opportunities for student engagement, from planting to harvesting (life cycles, from seed to seed), with composting (nutrient cycles) and healthy eating in between. Food gardens can help to address concerns about the urban child's diet; about community access to locally grown produce; and about a variety of environmental issues, from pesticide use to greenhouse gas emissions. Students will learn to respect and care for the soil, as well as improve self esteem, behavior, social skills and interpersonal relationships. The gardens are beautiful spaces that connect students to their school and help them develop a sense of pride and ownership, which in turn improves attitudes towards school and discourages vandalism, all the while significantly increasing science achievement scores. The U.S. Department of Health and Senior Services reported that 11.64 percent of the city populace does not have enough money to meet their basic nutritional needs. A major obstacle to obtaining fresh and nutritious food is the high cost of those items. For people who are relying on emergency food, such as those families in the Kansas City Restart Program, our students, and our local daycare center, fresh fruits and vegetables are the things they can least afford. The lack of supermarkets in the inner-city area does not help the situation. While Hogan Prep students will participate in lessons that fulfill environment and ecology standards that are integral to this project, students will also study the interactions of ecosystems and how humans fit in to these systems through their use of natural resources. The Garden project will deepen their understanding of relationship among proximity to fresh food, the Kansas City's obesity epidemic and diseases such as diabetes that are affected by diet.

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