StarShine Academy has had a school garden since we opened in 2002 and it has been extremely beneficial for our students and our community. Our StarShine Garden Curriculum continues to evolve, and this past year we had our inaugural StarShine Farmers Market, selling produce to our local neighborhood. The long-term goal that our students and teachers are working tirelessly towards is to expand in our pursuit of developing a sustainable food supply for our school lunch program and instilling agricultural awareness within our student body.

The culture of our school is distinctive. Global awareness, financial literacy, career, personal, and holistic development, StarShine also instills environmental awareness in our students as well. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is our motto. Our students understand that lettuce doesn’t come from McDonalds, but from hard strenuous labor in a garden similar to their own. Because they are aware of the origin of the food they eat, our students instantaneously develop a sustainable mindset. They are able to relate with the farmers, and the hard work it takes in growing and selling food. Our garden is distinct in its own right, but our students’ actions in collectively improving the garden impress every visitor of our school. It’s because of our environmental awareness curriculum that has been instilled in our students subconsciously. Planting crops, adding leftover food to our compost bin, watering our garden, and harvesting crops lends a sense of normality within our school. Compare that to my experience in primary and secondary education where the closest thing I’ve ever had to gardening was putting a potato in water and watching it grow leaves.

Today, President Obama delivered an education reform speech at the National Urban League’s 100^th Anniversary Convention. In it he explained how important charter schools are to “stir up” things by trying innovative techniques to engrain true knowledge within our future generation. He hit the nail on the head, and its what the foundation of StarShine Academy is all about. Our garden and our environmental awareness curriculum is only a small example of different techniques we have used in the past 8 years to change struggling students into healthy, productive, and happy individuals. Meeting the needs of Maslow’s Hierarchy allows our students to grow into their full potential. At StarShine Academy our curriculum is based around knowledge based learning. As mentioned before, our students have a StarShine Farmers Market where they sell their produce to the local community, and learn first hand entrepreneurial skills.

It’s so rewarding to see how our garden, our students, and our community has grown and flourished together over the past 8 years. We look forward to another great year at StarShine Academy, and we can’t wait to try whatever creative ideas our students always tend to come up with for how to best use our garden.

Please feel free to comment on any advice you would like to pass on to our StarShine Student Gardeners. Thanks!

For eight years StarShine has been researching, testing and collecting data on how to best educate all children, from all socioeconomic status, to create the most efficient and effective educational facilities.

Our first school was in the worse crime-ridden neighborhood in the Phoenix Metropolitan area. Our students had gang members as brothers and drug addicts as mothers. The hope for a better future was scarce. The hope for a peaceful and happy life was out of sight. I knew that in order for them to overcome these hardships our curriculum must revolve around instilling happiness into each and every one of them, which also means keeping your back straight- confident in your own skin, and having a positive perspective on life and what direction you want to head in your life.

Forward thinking was the key to overcoming these hardships. I didn’t have enough time in a day to talk about how their brother was shot in a drive by or why their mother is hardly ever home at night. I wanted to change the way these kids perceived their future. Positive influence, guidance, and encouragement is something these children never had, and that’s all they need! It’s so simple, and yet it’s being overlooked by our entire education system.

There are 6.2 million students that will drop out of high school every year because of the lack of education in our teachers. 87% of our teachers are misinformed on how to interact with students. Our entire country is caught up in a paradigm of how a teacher should “teach” and how the student is there to “learn.” The preconceived notion that students are inferior to teachers creates a command and control dynamic in the classroom where students “fear” the teachers, and the teachers use fear based techniques to “control” the students. Changing the mindset of the students is accomplished through changing the mindset of how the teachers, for lack of a better word, interact and perceive the students. That’s why we need help to train teachers as fast as possible to be able to work in schools of all types- rich, poor, public, private, charter, etc.

Our StarShine schools are structured in a very particular way:

Our schools must reflect the needs of the community for body, mind, spirit, health, wealth and happiness. This means that the entire community gets involved including politicians, business leaders, corporate sponsors, parents and elders volunteering as mentors.

Our schools must also be k-12 and serve no more than 500 students in one school, so the children become normalized to change and diversity.

Our StarShine schools develop leaders of tomorrow by developing speaking skills, protocol, negotiation, empathy, environmental engagement, animal training to teach parenting skills, peace making, civic engagement, financial and business skills, and international travel and understanding, both for the teachers as well as the students.

StarShine focuses on providing rich Socratic learning emersion so the students learn to embrace change and solve their own issues by collaborating with and learning from others. We develop compassion, understanding, self-motivation, self-empowerment and accountability by allowing no shame, blame or victim behavior. We don’t want “normal”; we expect extraordinary for each child to find and develop their unique way to give back to the world. Teachers must learn how best to work in this environment and how to develop and encourage their own unique, outstanding abilities.

It is hard to believe that these models exist in this day of so many things being such a mess…but they do and they are providing hope and data that will turn the world around. We chose to do this project under the radar until we were sure that it would thrive under scrutiny and duress. It was too important of a project to succumb to too much money too soon or leadership without the heart.

We are ready now and we need help in every category in order to replicate this fast, far and wide…This project will help to shape other schools to follow the light that StarShine creates. And we will continue our journey to change the world literally one child at a time, to help each child to save themselves as fast as we can.