- January 22, 2025
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The 40th anniversary of William H. Bashaw Elementary is coming up in August, and the school is working on a facelift so it can look its best for the occasion.
Several campus-wide improvements have been underway this school year, from fresh paint in the interior buildings to a new playground for Pre-K and kindergarten students.
On Jan. 14, some students had a chance to help give the school’s garden a makeover with freshly planted tomatoes, peppers, milkweed and flowers.
Bashaw Elementary is one of six schools in the School District of Manatee County, along with Bayshore Elementary, Moody Elementary, Samoset Elementary, Sugg Middle School and Braden River High School, that received part of the $37,250 awarded via the USDA’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant for turnkey edible school gardens.
Bashaw had a unique need for the funds after its longstanding garden — the Dr. Bashaw Garden — needed some work after years of use.
“What’s happened over the course of time is that things start breaking down,” Bashaw Elementary Principal James Dougherty said. “So this past January, I got with our SAC (student advisory council) and we discussed various campus improvements that we can make here at our school.
“So this was 12 months ago, and the garden was one of the areas that was pinpointed among other areas of the campus, too.”
Students from Kamille Bratton’s emotional and behavioral disorder self-contained class learned how to use EarthBoxes to grow plants with some hands-on experience with instruction from Will Carlton of EarthBox Garden Center.
With some assistance, students stuffed dirt into their EarthBox — a planter that protects against flooding and makes gardening easier to manage — inserted their plants and then watered the soil.
The garden will have a variety of applications.
Tomatoes grown from the garden will be harvested for the National School Lunch Program at the school. Other plants harvested, like peppers, flowers and milkweed will be used for cooking lessons and math and science lessons.
Skye Grundy, the supervisor of student nutrition for the School District of Manatee County, said that math lessons, like learning how to use fractions, can be easily applied to recipes while the science of the plant, including pollination and physical makeup can be studied in a way that’s easy for students to see.
“Those hands-on visual learning moments are priceless,” Grundy said. “Especially for educators to be able to see that light bulb go off for a student that learning it out of the book didn’t do it. All of a sudden that light bulb goes off.”
The plants will be tended to and maintained by Bratton and an in-school and after-school garden club.
There will be more mulch added to the garden, pavers added and picnic tables brought in to finalize the project in the coming weeks.
Bashaw’s new edible garden is one step in a campus-wide improvement project.
The school raised $15,000 in November during a color run in which it asked students to raise money via pledge sheets, and the money is already being put to use.
Along with freshly painted walls, a new playground and a new edible garden, Bashaw is planning to add a sensory pad near its new playground — helping younger students and students with disabilities learn in a fun and interactive way — along with a new school mural that’s nearing completion.
Although these additions aren’t as directly related to education as new textbooks or new teachers, Principal Dougherty said that they’re necessary additions to what Bashaw Elementary is trying to accomplish.
“We’ve needed something to make everything a little bit more lively and give everything a little bit more of an elementary school feel, but also something that makes the kids excited to come here,” Dougherty said. “It increases school pride, and you should have seen when the kids first came out of campus and they saw (the mural) and how excited they were.”
