Rolling up their sleeves

St. Helena Montessori students dig in to make farm come to life

By CAROLYN YOUNGER
For the Register

On a bright winter morning, St. Helena Montessori School students Amelia Hardy and Jackson Graff were in the Grace Episcopal Church kitchen whipping up frosting for a honey cake, and Julia Eyer was rolling out impossibly long lengths of paper-thin pasta for cannelloni.

A mile away, a group of Montessori School elementary students were suited up and peering into the opened hives of industrious bees — possibly the very ones that contributed to the honey cake — as apiarist Rob Keller gave hands-on instruction on beekeeping and discussed the deadly verroa mite.

Both activities are part of the Montessori school’s curriculum which relies on the farm, a key element in the school’s ambitious proposal for a new campus on 20 acres off St. Helena’s College Avenue. While plans for three single-level buildings with solar power, natural air conditioning and low water-use systems make their way through the city planning process, students and instructors have been busy at the old farm property.

Although still in the early stages, the farm is already a vital part of the school’s education philosophy and has been abuzz with activity since early summer.

In August, before the official opening of school, students in the newly initiated adolescent program had staked out an area at the end of the narrow lane past aging farm buildings.

They disked and amended the soil for a vegetable garden, working under the guidance of garden and viticulture instructor Lia Bettinelli and various volunteers.

The teens installed fence posts, strung wire, dug trenches and laid out irrigation lines — even undertook some arc welding to create a garden gate.

By the end of September they were ready to plant, and in November the whole school of 108 students (pre-kindergarten to eighth grade) took a farm-day field trip to harvest pumpkins and gourds and bright summer flowers.

During harvest they picked grapes at a local vineyard and followed the fruit to the winery.

The pumpkins they harvested from the farm and apples picked from the Crull family trees went into Thanksgiving pies or jugs of cider and became lessons in chemistry, budgeting and business.

At the end of November the students took a week-long field trip to Southern California where they expanded their knowledge of California history.

In early December, the farm was humming again — not only with bees, but also with lively conversation — as students in the elementary program attacked weeds, deadheaded spent blooms, explored the mysteries of seed pods or enjoyed getting their hands dirty.

At the moment, the vegetable garden is given over to cold weather crops such as chard, broccoli and lettuces. Nearby, two cardoon plants, easily mistaken for artichokes, are thriving in a field of newly sown fava beans and other cover crops.

Every element is seen as a educational opportunity an a means of creating a lasting understanding of the region’s environmental and agricultural heritage, said Alex Heil, instructor and adolescent program head, in addition to offering hands-on math, language and art experiences.

“Obviously our goal in time is to be as self-sufficient as possible,” Heil said. “The students in the adolescent program have made a lot of progress. Amelia has ambitions to sell the produce to local restaurants and to tailor what’s grown not only for our own table but for the local economy. The overall goal for the whole school is to connect students with reality, especially with nature, but also with community members and economic enterprises.”

Real-life experiences

Guiding the younger students in the various activities are the student managers from the adolescent program. Hardy is in charge of the garden and Graff works with the bees.

Back in the Grace Church kitchen, culinary arts student manager Eyer and fellow students were preparing lunch under the tutelage of instructor Grant Showley, a former chef and restaurateur.

Other students in the new program — Susan Gleason, Hanna Gleason and Alex Herman — have also taken on student manager roles.

“We’re trying to provide as many real-life experiences for the students as possible,” said  Heil.

As with the school’s other programs, the adolescent program makes use of a number of community resources:

They’ve made paper with which to cover their journals with Calistoga artist and Nimbus Arts instructor Anne Pentland.

They’ve gone birding with local enthusiast George Gamble (one of those responsible for artist Herman Heinzel’s impressive “Birds of Napa County”).

They’ve learned about the valley’s terrain from Ken Stanton and Eileen Bileci, studied the early pioneers who helped shape the valley’s growth, and been given a crash course by David Garden Sr. on the history of a neighboring property now occupied by Stonebridge Apartments and the upper campus of Napa Valley College.

St. Helena Montessori School, based on Maria Montessori’s child development theories, has existed for 26 years.

When parents and teachers realized the school was about to outgrow its current quarters behind the New Harvest Baptist Church — the six seventh- and eighth-graders are currently taught in Grace Church’s Bourn Hall across the street — a parent committee sat down with an architecture firm.

Together they developed a campus plan that would accommodate the school’s toddler, primary, elementary and adolescent programs in two low-slung buildings set in an outdoor “classroom” of native plantings.

In addition, a third building was included to serve as a permanent home for the  Nimbus Arts programs which incorporate science, the environment and agriculture in its classes for children and adults. The programs would be open to the public during non-school hours.

As proposed, this 7-acre portion of the property departs from the current zoning as ag land and the school is asking to have it rezoned for public  use.

The remaining 13 acres, which includes the farm, would retain its ag designation.

Plans for the relocated campus are expected to be aired at a public hearing early this year, said Lester Hardy, a parent and attorney who is shepherding the project through the planning process.

“In some ways we are really quite a ways along,” Hardy said. “We’ve spent, all told, something like a year doing the environmental studies and in refining the plans, putting together a draft initial study for the department to consider for purposes of environmental review ... There are a lot of different elements that have to be pulled together to ... incorporate all the features and address the different concerns.”

It has been a long slog requiring changes and modifications. But, Hardy added, “the most wonderful thing is to see how genuinely engaged in the ag work the children are just as soon as they get the opportunity.”

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