Another Country / Magnificent Transitions Over the Course of One Year

by Ray Pultinas

This past July marks one year of my quasi-retirement after teaching at DeWitt Clinton High School for 25 consecutive years – a quarter of a century - and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve grown not only roots, but stems, fruits and flowers.  And I try to take good care of them too.  I’m learning to be ever more mindful of what plants might need – compost or mulch or moisture or light or less light, if possible, and so much more.  You might say that the plants, the buds, the flowers, and by extension, the bees, the butterflies and turquoise colored dragon flies, the worms, (especially) the mosquitos, even the rabbits (most annoyingly) are using me.  I have become their tool, but I don’t mind.   It gives me great joy to be of use and delightfully coincides with my transition from having been a formal educator to becoming a non-formal educator. 

First graders from PS 4, The Duke Ellington School who visited Meg's Garden in May.

butterfly balm

Becoming an informal educator

We are now in the third growing season at Meg’s Garden and slowly and surely the garden has attracted countless regal pollinators, beautiful monarchs and black swallowtails, golden and purple finches, squirrels, bats, opossum, rabbits (most regrettably)  - to name those we’ve personally witnessed.  But it has also attracted community: Sung Kim, fellow passionist of permaculture and gardening, has helped us increase both diversity and productivity in the garden; Laura Chevnon has donated numerous beloved plants and shares with us her gardening wisdom and skills; former Environmental Affairs Club members and DeWitt Clinton High School graduates Clarissa Reclaimier, Jocelyn Bautista, Yelissa Vasquez, Maribel Vitagliani have been studying gardening while helping to plant, water, mulch, weed, and harvest now for 6 years and are introducing the next generation, their little nieces, nephews and siblings Kylie, Seth and Paul to the garden experience.  There are so many others in our community who are helping me to learn and we are teaching each other.  We witness pedestrians stopping to admire the garden, some venture in to ask questions or sign up and some I know are about to.   We are adding to our contact list of nearly 300 community members, volunteers, supporters, guests, visitors and admirers.

Yelissa and Jocelyn with Daikon Radishes

Yelissa and Seth

This past spring, we witnessed the fulfillment of what first seemed to many, a far-fetched idea: the transition of a former chemistry lab at DeWitt Clinton High School, room 332, into a state of the art hydroponic farm.  The Sun Club Teens For Food Justice Hydroponic Farm is a reality and history was made on March 22 when Sustainability students brought the first two lugs of butter crunch lettuce to the student cafeteria making healthy, fresh, local grown produce available to all students who attend the DeWitt Clinton campus.  Students from Ms. Sun’s three sustainability classes, an ELL class called Human Impact from Bronx Collaborative that I co-taught with Ariel Nadelstern, and Work Study/TOP Program students that I supervised helped construct the systems that will now grow over 25,000 lbs. of leafy green vegetables and 9,000 lbs. of vine crops on the farm per year. The Sun Club Teens for Food Justice Hydroponic Farm is the bold fruition of our partnership with Kathy Soll, CEO and director of Teens For Food Justice.  To have witnessed a new, state of the art hydroponic farm in our nearly century old building is a dream come true.  The farm not only produces fresh produce to serve to students, but distributes its surplus to our site based Good Shepherd Food Pantry, City Harvest and directly engages students with site based, hands-on sustainability, science, nutrition, career and work training.  Many other educational, teaching and learning opportunities and are yet to be realized but have now become possible.  

First delivery to student cafeteria

Harvesting on the hydroponics farm

Inspired by the continued success and expansion of our school and community gardens, the establishment of our edible forest, our successful partnerships with Teens For Food Justice and numerous other community organizations, our being awarded an National Endowment for the Arts Work Grant and, perhaps most especially, our continued willingness and freedom to dream and commit ourselves to “making it better” we incorporated as a non profit named the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center on March 23, 2018.  Our mission: to strive for inquiry-based solutions at the juncture of food, environmental and social justice.  Our organization utilizes existing and planned school resources, grounds and gardens to develop programs in outdoor environmental education for sustainable living and food preparation/service.  Our goal is to build a healthier community by integrating, educating and serving students and community members, especially low income and marginalized people, in collaboration with numerous partner organizations with common interests.

The James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center will be comprised of two hubs connected by an accessible trail with a series of program spaces that run along the trail between them.  Accessibility is essential to guarantee equal access for all students and community members presently thwarted by steep stairs and narrow automobile ramps in surroundings marked overall by prohibitively dangerous highway intersections and barriers to surrounding green spaces.   Our Community Hub will be the welcoming gateway, a destination for healthy and sustainable living, a place where neighbors can meet and learn with each other about sustainable practices that support the health and future of the earth while sharing good food and community spirit.   The School Hub will be a versatile and intimate conference, classroom, and garden space guided by an ethos of social justice, environmental justice and food justice.  Here will be the Welcome Table to memorialize the celebrated American writer and DeWitt Clinton High School graduate, class of 1942 and to promote dialogue, sharing, responsibility, and unity.

SYEP in action!

This past summer, in collaboration with Teens For Food Justice and the Transition and College Access Center, whose Bronx headquarters is now based at DeWitt Clinton High School, we hosted our first Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) and it was a great success.  Fifteen students rotated through three interrelated work programs either working outside in the gardens, inside on the hydroponics farm or within our community doing food justice advocacy.  We also suceeded at establishing our youthmarket in which we sold produce grown right on our campus.   We are expecting to continue the operation of our market this fall.


Could it be that we have found Another Country?


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Gratitude: This Year's Harvest Celebration and the Love of a 90 Year Old Oak

Mark the date! October 27th for the 8th Annual Harvest Celebration on the lawn near Meg's Garden and our newly planted edible forest.  Invitations are on the way!  Start up time will most likely be at 2:00 pm and we'll at least witness the sunset, so stop by and spend as much time as you like.  This year we are especially grateful to one of our 90 + year old oak trees that is providing us with an abundance of timber for future use for various outdoor purposes but especially as the building material for what will become the centerpiece of the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center, the Welcome Table.  The huge pin oak that split this past summer and was then taken down completely was planted when Calvin Coolidge was president and has served our school marvelously throughout its life.  Of course it should be studied, honored and continue to be revered.   I can't think of a better use for this grand old tree than as building material for the Welcome Table and other features at the community school hub we are creating for gathering community members, students, family, friends, teachers and learners of all ages. 

A gift to the Garden and The James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center.

Our plan is to store the timber (and allow it to cure) at two locations.  A stack will be brought to the swing space on the lower parking lot (site of the future Baldwin Center) and the rest will remain stacked in an out of the way area near Meg's Garden (the community garden) and newly planted edible forest on the Goulden Avenue side of the building.  I am grateful for the assistance and cooperation of our Custodial Engineer Tom Esposito and Adam's European Construction for helping us secure this valuable resource.

Clockwise from upper left: new compost system made from repurposed pallet courtesy of Adam's European; one of many harvests of serrano peppers for Bronx Hot Sauce; cockscomb or brain celosia (in Meg's Garden); Blueberry and Native Plant Bed (recently mulched by beloved oak tree woodchips).

Our DeWitt Clinton High School building is presently being oppressed by an overwhelming amount of scaffolding and tarps but just outside this construction zone the natural potential of our beautiful surrounding campus continues to flourish.  If given the right conditions of sunlight, good soil and caring hands, even in proximity to the worst conditions, a garden will grow.  While school construction is expected to be complete in 2019, the growing and sustainability initiatives at our school are well under way and thriving. 

PLENTITUDE !! : Clockwise from upper left: Ray Pultinas next to the actress Jennie Garth; Principal Orbe; Tools of the Tree Planting Trade; Vitafusion sponsored Fruit Tree Planting Foundation (FTPF) donation; FTPF Arborist Rico Montenegro demonstrating proper tree planting before a crowd of students and community member volunteers.

This past spring, we were honored with a grant of 35 fruit trees and 10 blueberry bushes from the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation (FTPF) and supported by the makers of Vitafusion Gummy Vitamins.  The grant enables us to establish an edible forest on the north lawn of our campus. Our application was chosen to kick off the United States leg of a campaign to plant 10,000 fruit trees throughout the world in 2017.  The incredible staff of arborists and experts from the foundation had just finished planting trees in Uganda when they helped us start our own orchard at a ceremony and planting day on June 6.  Celebrity and actress Jennie Garth flew in from Los Angeles to help kick off our event that we dubbed “Plentitude” because our gardens have literally multiplied each year since we started our 5 raised bed Clinton Garden in 2010.  Despite the rain, all the trees were planted and are now being well maintained and nurtured.

About 4 weeks after the planting, a total of 9 fruit trees including apple, cherry, and plum were stolen from the site.  A police report has been filed.  The foundation is sending us replacement trees in November and we have received a private donation of $200 to make our edible forest even more plentiful.

At a ceremony on June 8, the new DeWitt Clinton High School Community Garden (built over the past 2 years from a United Way seed grant) was named Meg’s Garden in honor of the late Megan Charlop whose care and love for the environment and for the health of our Bronx community residents will never be forgotten.  It was Megan’s suggestion that we start a school garden back in 2009 as a class project in my Witt Seminar on Activism elective.  Tragically, Megan suffered a fatal bike accident before getting to see the garden’s first harvest in the spring of 2010.  Remembrances were shared and plans for a Meg’s Garden sign are in development.
 

Herb pallet at Meg's Garden.

The event took place on Montefiore’s annual Day of Service and volunteers joined us as they have every year to help us in the garden.  In this case it meant fence painting, spreading compost, harvesting chamomile and planting vegetable seedlings and seeds. The success of our new community gardening initiative at this point can also be measured by the number of neighbors who might just stop by to say hello or introduce themselves or the responses over this past summer to my email invitations for volunteering.  Presently we have a contact list of almost 300 community members who have volunteered their labor or support in some way to our garden projects.  But we still need your help!

On left DWHS Parent Coordinator Inés Cariño and Super Parent Volunteer Santia Gonzalez-Cancel

Community volunteers Laura Chenven and Kevin Nipal '12. 

Since being awarded an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) design grant in 2016, we have been working with Linda Pollak and her team of architects and designers at Marpillero Pollak Architects as well as Jessie Kerr Vanderslice, director of Grow to Learn, Deborah Pannell of Project Mavens and other artists, community leaders and their organizations to begin planning the James Baldwin Center and Trail.  Imagine, as we do, a gathering space for community and students featuring a Welcome Table built in memory and honor of the great American writer and DeWitt Clinton alumnus.  Imagine what is typically done around a table – sharing of food, conversation, stories, performance and informal learning.  Imagine further a campus that is unified in its connectivity and accessibility through a walking trail augmented with installations and exhibits, gardens and edible forests, lookouts and works of art and sculpture.  Each turn of the trail might be met with opportunities for discovery, inquiry, and exploratory learning and all to supplement a rich academic education that we will be offered indoors.  Principal Orbe is continuing Sustainability programming and has expressed support for each of our initiatives.  Our Baldwin Center and Trail Coalition is presently pursuing additional grants and funding. 

The Baldwin Center and Trail Coalition is hopeful that our application is approved for the New York City Department of Transportation's Plaza Program to make the underutilized traffic triangle and abandoned turn off on Goulden Avenue the Gateway for James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center and Trail, Meg's Garden, our new Edible Forest, and our other Sustainability Initiatives on our campus.  This is the potential site for our DeWitt Clinton High School green/youth market.

Finally, this fall we will also witness the opening of our hydroponics farm that will grow enough greens and vine crops indoors to supply the needs of our student cafeteria as well as surplus for our food pantry organized by Good Shepherd and newly conceived youth market.  The indoor farm will be located in room 330, the former Chemistry lab and the last DeWitt Clinton High School classroom on the 3rd floor.  Growing out of a unique partnership with Kathy Soll of Teens For Food Justice, City Council Member Andrew Cohen's Office, Montefiore School Health, New York City Department of Education, and Green Mountain Energy Sun Club the garden will begin operations this coming school term.  At the same time we will begin planning a DeWitt Clinton High School green/youth market, a student led business initiative with support from an Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation Grant and the DeWitt Clinton High School Alumni Association.
 

The hydroponic farm is now ready for growing systems to be installed by students in Sustainability classes at DeWitt Clinton High School, another space that has been transformed at our school.

I’d like to use this opportunity to thank all of our friends, partners and contributors who have  continued to support and encourage our growing team.  Together we are building a DeWitt Clinton High School for the future.  If you want to be added to our contacts and be invited to this fall’s special happenings including our annual free Harvest/Gratitude Celebration with our award winning Garden to Table Chef Noah Sheetz, and the DWC Chorus and Band as well as be in the know about future volunteer events, please email me at raypultinas@gmail.com   




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Wondrous Spring Happenings Abound ... (despite appearances)

Friday, May 5 - Bronx Music Garden Postponed because of rain/ rescheduled for June 6 to coincide with Community Tree Planting (see below)

DJ Omar Morsy combines his love for gardening and music for this first ever Bronx Music Garden event. With our majestic new community garden as a backdrop, the rhythms will pulse our Bronx students and neighbors as we plant, play and groove to DJ sets with an earth beat in mind and live performances by Never Yet Contested and Ane.  If you've been lucky enough to attend any number of our events over the last few years you will have already delighted in the delicious garden to table offerings of Executive Chef Noah Sheetz.  With as many sustainability students as we can muster, we'll show you what we do!

Tuesday, May 9 - Class visit from PS 125

Our awesome second grade supporters from PS 125 return to adore our garden and discover its wonders.  This will be the third year that Behind the Book Executive Director and Founder Jo Umans has helped organize this trip of students from Harlem.  We can once again hear the wonderful questions and witness the brilliant curiosity of these visiting youngsters.

These 2nd graders were no match for our excellent sustainability student big brothers and sisters two years ago when PS 125 first visited DeWitt Clinton High School.

And if you're inviting 2nd graders into your garden it might be a good idea to have some worms on hand.

Wednesday - Friday, May 17 - 19 - Third Annual Sustainability Expo

Students in my sustainability class as well as students from Ms. Vargas research class will present their sustainability and research projects in what has become an annual event at DeWitt Clinton High School.The work of sustainability teaching, as I see it at DeWitt Clinton High School, is to successfully organize a class full of students into different but related learning activities (committees) in order to launch multiple sustainability initiatives in garden planning, garden expansion and community input for the design of the James Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center and Trail, paper recycling, plastic recycling, composting, seed collection, cafeteria recycling, food waste recovery, climate change education, etc.  Our school community gets to witness the results at the Expo and we are planning for plenty of surprises!
 

One of the surprises of last year's Sustainability Expo was being recognized as Eco Heroes by internationally renowned Environmental Economist-media producer-television host-author-artist, Pamela Peeters. 

Monday, May 22 - DOE Sustainability Showcase

Chancellor Fariña will be helping to celebrate school efforts, actions, innovations and dedication to sustainability and leadership at this event to be held at UFT Headquarters, 52 Broadway, New York, NY. We look forward to exhibiting at the event.  

Tuesday, June 6 - Community Fruit Tree Planting

We have been awarded 25 fruit trees to start a sizeable orchard in the area of the community garden on the Goulden Avenue side of our building. 
"The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation (FTPF) is an award-winning international nonprofit charity dedicated to planting fruitful trees and plants to alleviate world hunger, combat climate change, strengthen communities, and improve the surrounding air, soil, and water." FTPF has chosen DeWitt Clinton High School to launch the organization's 2017 United States campaign and is one of 20 sites across the country to receive an orchard.  Save the date for now, but details and information on how you can get involved will be announced soon.  For more information about The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation go to http://www.ftpf.org/index.php

Thursday, June 8 - Day of Service and Dedication Ceremony in memory of Megan Charlop

The Montefiore School Health Program will hold its 7th annual Day of Service in honor of Megan Charlop. The annual event is a memorial to Megan's tireless advocacy for building a stronger community, helping improve the lives of Bronx children and encouraging healthy lifestyles. This year we are proud to announce that we will be naming our new community garden in honor and memory of our friend, Megan Charlop, who was a major influence on starting our own award-winning school garden, The Clinton Garden.

Last year's Day of Service marked the largest number of community service volunteers that ever assembled at one time to help in the garden.  This year we should easily surpass the 21 volunteers from last year, but whose counting? (photo Ahna Pultinas)

Meghan Charlop, former Director of Community Health for Montefiore School Health Program, died tragically on March 17, 2010 in an accident while biking to work.  Her untimely death left colleagues and friends charged with continuing her work improving the health of Bronx communities.  (photo: Ray Pultinas, some text from Montefiore Update, June 8, 2015.)

And Finally, What You Probably Didn't Know About

Our school building still exists, believe it or not, behind walls of scaffolding and while our beloved Clinton Garden may, for the time being, be under wraps, we are fortunate to be able to enact the spirit and momentum of sustainability at our new community garden. This past school year, we are grateful for the assistance of Deborah Carlin from Gotham Grazers and Earth Day Initiative who has helped us plan sustainable food curriculum and organize garden events like our first community work day on April 14.  Our next community volunteer work day organized by Deborah will be held on May 23.

Guggenheim Project Volunteers wore the purple at our first volunteer work day, April 14, 2017. (photo: Deborah Carlin)

Past, Present and Future Environmental Affairs Club alumni from left Clarissa Reclaimer, Danny Acosta, Ray Pultinas (advisor), Yelissa Vasquez and present DeWitt Clinton student and EAC member Redwan Galal. (photo: Deborah Carlin)

It was a gorgeous Spring Day to work among the daffodils! (photo: Deborah Carlin)

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A visit to the DeWitt Clinton High School

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Harvest Celebration of Abundant Progress: Streams of Sustainability and Justice Woven Together at DeWitt Clinton High School

Friends, neighbors, community members, students around the ceremonial fire at our 7th annual Harvest Celebration, November 10, 2016. (photo by Nathanial Gary)

Our 7^th Annual Harvest Celebration took place at DeWitt Clinton High School on November 10, 2016.  We celebrated our most recent harvest and numerous accomplishments over the past year with a ceremony led by Roman Guaraguaorix (Redhawk) Perez, the Kacike (chief) for Maisiti Yukayeke Taino; a tribe of the Taino Nation.  We gathered in fellowship around a fire, sang and participated in a snake dance.  We also stood in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are protecting water from the likelihood of contamination from oil pipelines that have been proposed to traverse sacred Native American sites in North Dakota.  Towards the end of the ceremony, Redhawk asked each of us to place an offering of a pinch of tobacco in the raised beds of our new community garden built this past summer by community volunteers and student interns as a gesture of thanks to the earth for sharing with us its bounty and protection.  The community garden was built after we received a United Way Seed Grant of $30,000 sponsored by our school’s Community Based Partner Organization, Good Shepherd.  Award-winning chef Noah Sheetz of Hudson Valley Chef's Consortium capped the evening with his gracefully prepared and amazingly delicious garden to table treats served with hot cider on what was a windy and cold but gorgeous Fall evening with the moon waxing towards its super status days later.   

Roman Redhawk Perez leading the Snake Dance at the site of our new community garden.    (photo by Nathanial Gary)

Earlier in the day, a community planning session was held in the school library to gather more ideas and creativity from our attendees about the James Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center and the Baldwin Trail that is being designed to facilitate universal access around our school building.  Linda Pollak, and her team from Marpillero Pollak Architects are conceiving a trail that will circumnavigate the school building at a 5% incline so as to create new spaces for community activities, create a sense of circularity around the building, and be completely accessible and ADA compliant.  Our castle on the parkway may have been built as a fortress but unfortunately large swaths of campus are not presently accessible to students or adults in wheel chairs or children in strollers.  Even our the narrow single lane ramp to the lower parking lot shared by vehicle traffic in two directions only grants access to the playing fields and school garden.  There is presently no access from there to the Goulden Avenue side of the building without climbing steep and crumbling steps by the tennis courts.  There were some new and eager community members who gathered around a planning "game" that Marpillero Pollak Architects created as a beautiful and effective means of gathering input from the community.  There was also valuable interaction with our students many of whom were being introduced to the project for the first time.  Though we are unlikely to build a Walmart on our campus, no student suggestion went unheard or was unappreciated.  I don't think any of us were ever asked to contribute ideas to the creation of a public space and in such an exciting and accommodating manner.

At the planning session, the team from Marpillero Pollak Architects lead students and community on a game that let them choose an identity, and then activities and design elements that they envision at different points along the Baldwin Trail. (photo by Henry O.)

Jessie Kerr-Vanderslice, Director of Grow to Learn, explains the game to the curious.            (photo by Nathanial Gary)

During the whole day there was a tremendous synergy that coalesced around the idea of creating the James Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center and Trail in memory and honor of the contributions made to social justice by this great American writer and as a means to access and create community spaces on the campus of our community school.  For instance, students from my senior English classes displayed their Lives that Matter projects consisting of profiles of vulnerable friends or victims of state violence and inspired by our study of the Black Lives Matter movement and its precedents in the writing and activism of DeWitt Clinton alumnus James Baldwin.  Students in my Sustainability class displayed maps they had created after researching the ratio of healthy food to fast food options in their neighborhoods.  Their findings clearly indicate that our students live predominantly in food desserts where the availability of healthy food and restaurants is severely limited.  If students were looking for signs of hope they might have been inspired by the accomplishments the Environmental Affairs Club that were also on display.  Hopefully some of our students in attendance were motivated to join the club whose dedication to environmental awareness and service has helped build and maintain The Clinton Garden, our award winning school garden, for the past seven years. 

Sustainability students pouring over their maps that reveal that a majority of them live in food deserts. (photo by Nathanial Gary)

We are breaking the mold at DeWitt Clinton High School and this is the mold of the failing, under-performing and impoverished large urban overcrowded high school.  We are creating in its place a new model for community schools.  This is most evident in our what is perhaps our most ambitious project of all, the establishment of a high production indoor hydroponic farm in room 332, the last remaining DeWitt Clinton classroom on the third floor of our DeWitt Clinton Campus building.  Our students predominantly come from areas in the Bronx that are food deserts.  We are about to become a school that not only educates our community and its young people in a real world way, but feeds them healthy food and educates them on how to eat well with an abundant supply. What is perhaps most radical is that we are teaching our young people how to grow their own food, indoors on a massive scale, and outdoors as well, and providing them with cutting-edge skills that boost their college readiness and employability.  We are addressing, in the most bold and spirited way I know, the still neglected role of healthy diet and healthy living on learning. 

Sustainability students in the midst of their food mapping project visited this neighborhood farmer's market that is run by Friends of Van Cortlandt Park. (photo by Nathanial Gary).

 

Perhaps after reading about all of our projects you might consider contributing to our crowdfundingcampaign that is running through the month of December.  Help us raise the money to build three farms in three schools (including DeWitt Clinton) that will grow 60,000 lbs of produce for families.  It will be an investment towards DeWitt Clinton’s abundant future. 

 

We found this shell/fossil/relic at the site of our ceremonial fire a few days later and learned that it had been gifted to us by Roman Guaraguaorix (Redhawk) Perez, the Kacike (chief) for Maisiti Yukayeke Taino; a tribe of the Taino Nation. (photo by Ray Pultinas)

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