Steven Wagner is the child nutrition program manager at Summerfield Elementary School in Shreveport. He has a passion for gardening, and in 2022 he began sharing his interest with students by establishing a pollinator garden. The chef in him had bigger dreams of showing students how food is grown. A 2023 school garden leadership training from the LSU AgCenter Seeds to Success Program provided Wagner with skills and inspiration to expand the school garden to include a pollinator garden and a small-scale school vegetable garden. The 2024 school year is Wagner’s third year gardening and second year growing fruits and vegetables with Summerfield Elementary School students.

How did you decide to start a garden at your school?

Whenever I was working as a paraprofessional at a different school in the district, the principal approached me about starting a butterfly garden, and that was fun. When I transferred to the nutrition department and started here at Summerfield, I did another butterfly garden. Since I grow vegetables at home, I started to bring over potted plants like tomatoes and herbs from my own garden and added them into the school garden last year. We also were able to get 95 students, with the help of their teachers, to start seeds in their classrooms. Last year, I pulled three to four students each day to help with the garden during the school day, so we were able to reach a lot of students and get them excited about the food we were growing. Throughout the school year, we started preparing our in-ground garden plot and started composting to help build our soil up. With this new year, I’m excited to get more students involved with the school garden and hopefully grow more things so we can cook more of what we harvest and less of what we have to buy.

What do you want to tell others to encourage them to integrate cooking gardens into their school culture?

It’s not hard. You have to realize that you’re not going to be able to grow enough to feed everybody, but everyone can have a special experience. For example, I will never be able to grow enough sweet potatoes to feed 400 students. But I can let the kindergarten class plant and care for sweet potato slips, harvest them and then let those students sample the potatoes. If I have a child that harvests tomatoes, I make sure that they get a separate salad the next day with the tomatoes they harvested on it, but we used purchased tomatoes for the rest of the salads that meal. None of it is hard if you’re excited to do this work, but you have to carve out the space to make it happen.

What are you most excited about with the start of the new school year?

I’m excited that we’re going to have homegrown tomatoes in our salad on the first day of school. I’m also excited for the kids to see how much the garden has changed over the summer. One boy grew basil from seed last school year and planted his transplants in the garden at the end of the school year. When he comes back this fall, he’s going to see this big patch of basil. We’re going to pick and dehydrate the leaves together so that we save and use it all year long in our kitchen.

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.

Steven Wagner, the child nutrition program manager at Summerfield Elementary School in Shreveport, poses in his garden. Photo by Anthony Bailey