Tyne Bankester

In the city of Scott, L. Leo Judice Elementary School serves as Lafayette Parish’s only academy for environmental sciences for elementary students. For more than a decade, this school’s environmental science program has increased awareness of local environmental needs, promoted stewardship and provided opportunities to make meaningful connections between its curricula and the environment, all with help from the LSU AgCenter.

The growth and expansion of this program is due in large part to the vision and devotion of veteran teacher Paula Guidry, who began teaching 25 years ago at L. Leo Judice as a first-grade teacher. She made the jump to fifth grade 15 years ago as the school became an environmental science magnet program. Since then, Guidry has cultivated several relationships with community partners and LSU AgCenter programs. For 14 years she has worked with the Lafayette Parish 4-H school garden program. This program represents a collaborative effort among school administration, faculty, students, Lafayette Parish Master Gardeners, the LSU AgCenter 4-H Youth Development Program and the Lafayette Parish School System Child Nutrition Program. The resulting gardens are outdoor laboratories that incorporate school curricula in multiple subjects including science, math, English, history, language arts and physical education.

While Guidry integrated the school garden into her curriculum and supported other teachers to do the same, meaningfully reaching every child at her school felt like an impossible task. In the 2023-2024 school year, a solution appeared with another layer of hands-on experiential learning with the creation of the Environmental Science Lab. The lab, and its dedicated, full-time teaching position, is designed to reach all kindergarten-through-fifth grade students with focused 30-minute segments of experiential science lessons on a weekly basis. Guidry was selected to facilitate the programming of the lab full time.

“It was a great year for us to get more hands-on activities and to really dive into environmental science lessons and units with each grade level,” she said of the inaugural year.

Guidry has additional experiences planned for the students of L. Leo Judice for the 2024-2025 school year, many of which are made possible through LSU AgCenter programming. Although every student visits the lab regularly, their experiences are unique to their grade level — each cohort engages in a specific yearlong focus that ties into the school’s environmental science mission. Upcoming plans shared by Guidry include third grade students working with the AgCenter Coastal Roots program and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Ecology Center to grow plants to help restore the Cajun Prairie in their region, and fourth grade students learning how to grow their own vegetables in the school garden with support from the Lafayette Parish Master Gardeners.

To unify the school community across the grade levels, L. Leo Judice has also implemented a robust Louisiana Harvest of the Month (HOM) program through the Environmental Science Lab. The Harvest of the Month program is a promotional campaign produced by the LSU AgCenter’s Seeds to Success: The Louisiana Farm to School Program and showcases locally grown foods. Guidry plans monthly programming around a new Harvest of the Month that all 370 students experience through the Environmental Science Lab. Students participate in taste tests, read books about the featured agricultural product, study its life cycle and complete lab activities involving the product. Guidry reports that the science lab has increased Harvest of the Month participation among students and improved the vegetable garden program. It “brings an awareness of where food comes from, the process and the life cycle of different plants,” she said.

Tyne Bankester is the program manager for curriculum integration and MarketMaker for the Seeds to Success: The Louisiana Farm to School Program.

This article appears in the fall 2024 edition of Louisiana Agriculture.

Paula Guidry, a fifth-grade teacher at L. Leo Judice Elementary School in Scott, works with the Lafayette Parish 4-H school garden program. Photo courtesy of Louisiana Farm Bureau