Trustee digs too deeply in gardens
by Bernie Scheffler, editor-in-chief

    Some Fort Worth middle school students recently learned some dog-eat-dog, real-world lessons.

   Students at the Applied Learning Academy, funded partly by a Federal Fulbright grant, had spent two years cultivating an environmental garden. When they came to school one morning, however, they found bare earth—their gardens had been obliterated.

   It turns out that FWISD trustee Elaine Klos didn’t like the appearance of the gardens and asked district landscaping crews to clean out the beds. Klos now says she just meant for the beds to be weeded.

   Was the fruit of these students’ labor really destroyed over a simple “miscommunication?”

   Would a landscaping crew asked to “clean up” an area really pull up every single plant?

   We’ll never know whether Klos really sent an unclear message to the landscapers, or if she is trying to cover her mistake, but Klos did admit that she did not previously know about the scientific purpose of the gardens (to study native plants, butterflies and insects) or the Fulbright grant that helped fund them.

   The lessons the students learned? The world is a mean place, even to kids who deserve better. A simple five-second miscommunication negated two years of effort.

   Or, depending on how students interpret the situation, they might think because someone more powerful thought their gardens were unattractive, their work was for nothing.

   Martha Stewart would probably be treated better in prison. Certainly no warden would ever have the audacity to uproot Martha’s prison-yard flower beds and vegetable garden.

   The kids also learned that large administrations do not work very well on the lower levels. Detailed management should be left to the administrators closer to those details.

   Decisions about the care of a student garden should be left to each individual principal, not a board trustee who is far removed from what teachers are trying to accomplish in the classroom.

   Besides, don’t trustees have some more important construction contracts to worry about?