KAILUA-KONA — Before the official school day begins at Kahakai Elementary School, class is already in session for a small group of students.
Keiki are painting, raking leaves, planting seeds, harvesting food and weeding small patches of dirt in their garden under the watchful eye of Leah Winkler.
Winkler isn’t a teacher at Kahakai Elementary. She’s a mother and volunteer who wanted to create a space for children to learn about gardening and about the importance of creating a better community.
“It’s really about creating a safe place for kids to come before class to build the school community and do plant-based learning so they can learn about the plants that we can grow,” Winkler said. “And they’re learning about the plant cycles and starting that dialogue with each other. I think it’s kind of important for them to learn those kinds of things.”
Winkler’s off-the-curriculum gardening class meets every morning at 7 a.m. in the school’s garden in the center of campus.
“It was super overgrown, but it was all established. This was all here, but it was just weeds,” Winkler said. “So we’ve been slowly just propagating and starting from seeds at the seed table and slowly incorporating different plants into the garden.”
On Thursday morning, Winkler and the students were digging through the garden’s soil to plant beet seeds. Winkler showed students how to make holes in the dirt for the seeds to be planted in, using their fingers in the shape of a “magic shaka.”
“It’s fun to come here and help her,” said student Kimo Estoy-Keka, who said weeding was his favorite job in the garden. “And when I come back every day, I always just get started to work. I know what to do.”
Beets are just one of the many types of food Winkler’s students learn to plant and grow. Fruits and vegetables such as bananas and tomatoes, as well as different types of herbs, are all on the menu.
“The kids, before they grow a tomato, they may not love tomatoes,” Winkler said. “But when they grow it, they’ll eat it. They’ll eat anything that they grow back here. They put their energy into it.”
When the food is harvested, the students weigh the fruits and vegetables on a scale and log the harvest in the garden’s journal.
Some of the food is eaten by the students, and some of it is sold to raise funds for the garden. Wednesday is the school’s next “market day” with Winkler and the students selling their crops and plant starts before school at the front of campus to teachers, parents and guardians.
A few of the crops are used to teach healthy eating and healthy habits to the keiki.
“We have been harvesting kale and we have a food teacher who has been helping to harvest the kale and doing nutrition classes from the garden with the kale,” Winkler said. “And she’s starting to use more food here so that the kids can get a little more nutrition-based learning.”
There’s also a compost bin for learning about soil and how to have a healthy garden.
Abigail Afan spent her morning raking the garden for leaves to later be turned into mulch.
“I like weeding and I like raking,” Afan said. “And I like hang out in the garden.”
Sprinklers being turned on in the garden’s beds signal to the students that their time with Winkler is over — for the moment — and it’s time for their real classes to begin.
Even installing the sprinkler system was a teaching moment for the students.
“Last summer, we added the irrigation,” Winkler said. “The kids helped us engineer and design it and put it in the beds and then we put all the sprinkler heads and stuff on there. So that’s made a huge difference in harvesting.”
Winkler’s a mother to two students at Kahakai Elementary — her daughter, Nai’a Nakasone, is in fourth grade, and her son, Nalu Nakasone, is in first grade. Last year, her daughter attended a before-school program that had Winkler and Nalu up at the school an hour before classes were set to begin.
Winkler didn’t want to leave Nalu at school with nothing to do, so she stayed and began going back into the garden with him.
“I started coming back here with him and then slowly kids started seeing us back here,” Winkler said. “At first, there was like six kids, and then there was 15 kids, and now there’s about 20 kids every morning.”
Winkler said it’s mostly the same students who come to the garden every morning to help, and not every student in the garden is looking to work. She said some students just come by to socialize or read a book in a “safe space.”
“They choose to be here,” Winkler said. “The kids that are here every day, they don’t have to be here. They get really pumped to be back here.”
Winkler, who works as a bartender at Kona Brewing Company, conducts the before-school gardening class voluntarily, on her own time. The plant starts the garden began with were purchased with her own money, as were some of the equipment and tools the students use.
Kahakai Elementary School vice principal Nia Lovell also supplied Winkler with a few hundred dollars for some of the equipment needed to start the garden.
“I love doing it because I see how strong it makes these kids, and how it makes this really strong community within the school,” Winkler said. “And no matter if it’s tomorrow, or next week, or in a year, their work that they’ve done here will always be here. That energy and that mana that they’ve put into it, it stays in the garden.”
Since starting the program last school year, Winkler and the students have also created several new gardens on the school’s south side.
One is a “zen garden” with plants such as succulents that require less water and attention.
Another garden across the path has banana trees donated to Winkler from the Kona Brewing Company’s Brew Pub. It also has a crown flower plant, which has been attracting the attention of butterflies.
“There was like 100 caterpillars on here yesterday, which is super cool because you can do a whole lesson on the life cycle of a butterfly just off of one plant,” Winkler said. “It’s super easy and tangible for the kids to grasp the idea when it’s right in front of them rather than inside a classroom.”
Winkler hopes the before-school gardening project will continue making Kahakai Elementary beautiful for years to come.
“These kids work hard every day back here. It’s incredible what they’ve been able to do,” Winkler said. “One of my favorite quotes is, ‘Never doubt that a small group of committed, thoughtful citizens can change the world.’ That’s kind of like this little group. That’s my little motto for these guys because they’re just super dedicated every day to coming back.”