On a recent spring Friday afternoon, families gathered around the garden beds at Becker Elementary. Parents served food with vegetables grown by their kids: rice with cilantro, kale muffins and hibiscus-raspberry-mint water. Third grade students provided salsas that they had mixed themselves as part of a competition; the more adventurous ones included pineapple and mango, creating sweet and spicy salsas. Younger students ran around the garden with butterfly-painted faces.
The Green Classroom has provided food and a community space for the Bouldin Creek neighborhood for 37 years. But this was the last time the community would come together for its yearly gala to celebrate the school's unique garden.
Becker is one of 10 Austin Independent School District campuses set to close at the end of this year. It's part of an effort to save $21 million as the district struggles to balance a projected $181 million budget deficit for the 2026-2027 school year.
The first seeds
The Green Classroom is located in front of Becker Elementary on a plot with a house in the middle. The house is surrounded by vegetation that attracts all kinds of insects and critters. The program was created in 1989 by Carla Marshall, who was inspired by her grandmother and her travels around the world. Marshall wanted to have a place where kids could learn about the environment and connect with the world while receiving a hands-on education.
"One of the things that's wrong with school is we teach the abstract. We don't teach concrete," Marshall said in an interview for the Texas Legacy Project in 2008. "So a child's having trouble with addition, or subtraction, or multiplication, come over here and pick four squash and divide them, or count them. It is so concrete, they get it."
Marshall successfully proposed the project to the school's principal at the time. AISD already owned the land and the house had been refurbished as classrooms. Marshall would donate her time to carry out the lessons. The rest came from the community.
"Everything you'll see in this garden was donated," Marshall said. "And I used to say that I wore kneepads because all I did was go around and beg people for stuff."
Over almost four decades, Becker students have used the garden to help them in several subjects. They have learned math by counting seeds and measuring the perimeter of gardening beds. They have learned science through watching tadpoles become frogs and have followed the pollinating habits of bees. Students learned about migration and geography by observing butterflies.
Regina Melo, who has two sons at Becker, said they have used the garden to help grow language vocabulary in the school's dual-language program.
"Any vegetable you ask these kids, they know how to say it in Spanish for sure because of this garden as well,"Melo said. "It's also very much cultural and very much about integrating all those different countries and different backgrounds that all our students come from."
Leanne Arismendez was one of the first students to plant seeds in the garden. When Arismendez started pre-K in 1990, each student would grow their own vegetables inside an old tire. She remembers getting garden beds ready, planting mustard and growing loofahs. Over her six years at Becker, Arismendez's class had an impact beyond the garden. They taught their neighbors about recycling, carried out a tree census and learned about water quality in the neighborhood.
Arismendez said the Green Classroom expanded beyond environmental learning. On weekends, Marshall would take five or six kids to Whole Foods, where they would set up a stand and sell fresh produce.
"We'd have our little box of coins and dollars and our calculator," Arismendez said.
Students were pushed out of their comfort zone, talking to strangers in a different environment from the H-E-B they were used to.
"[It was] exposure to different things and something new," she said
The garden took Arismendez and her classmates further than Whole Foods. In the 1996-1997 school year, she was among the students and teachers who flew to Washington, D.C., to receive one of three President's Environmental Youth Awards given to the garden over the years.
Marshall said the kids loved spending time in the garden from the moment the program started. She wanted to teach families how to grow their own food. But at first, it was hard to get parents involved as Bouldin Creek was a low-income neighborhood where parents often did not have time to attend activities.
Marshall also faced pushback from teachers who worried that spending time in the garden would reflect negatively on the students' scores on state-mandated tests.
A community garden
Now, decades later, adults attend the Green Classroom with as much excitement as the students. The community set up a nonprofit to raise funds to maintain the garden. Parents began teaching lessons, volunteered to clear the weeds from the garden beds and water the plants at least once a day. Over the summer, neighbors pitched in to make sure the garden was kept up.
"It is very much driven by the community and by parents," Melo said. "So it's very dear and near to our hearts."
The program expanded over the years and grew to serve Becker's more than 500 students. The garden evolved from old tires into garden beds. Each class would get a small plot of land where they decided what to grow. They added a pond with turtles, an herb garden, a water runoff simulator and a compost zone where kids learned the different stages of biological decomposition.
The last harvest
As the school year comes to an end, the community is saying goodbye to the garden. The last activity for one third grade class was to take home a memory from the garden: an ornament made with clay and flower petals.
During class, students gravitated outside of the house and into the garden. Kids scanned tomato plants, picking out shiny red ones ready to be eaten and leaving behind green ones that needed more time. They collected flowers, comparing colors and shapes of the different species. Some of them played at the pond, waiting for a turtle to surface. Others flipped rocks to find roly-poly bugs and other insects they observed and then freed.
Students knew that next year they will be attending other schools and not returning to their small plot of land.
It is unclear what will happen to the Becker campus. AISD officials are working on finding non-education uses for five of the 10 closing campuses The community is asking the district to keep the green spaces that the elementary campus provides open to the neighborhood.
The Becker Green Classroom organization, the nonprofit that runs the garden, is hoping it will be allowed to continue using the space as a community garden. But it is waiting to hear the district's final decision regarding the property.
Generations of children have gone through the Green Classroom to learn about their impact on the environment. In return, the environment also had an impact on them. Arismendez said when she was younger she thought having a school garden was something every kid had. It was years later that she realized what a special place she grew up with.
"You don't know it at the time, you're just a little kid, but seeing how those seeds were planted in us and have flourished today and I'm just very grateful for everything," she said. "I'm sad that it's not going to keep going, but I'm glad for everything that's happened."
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