A farm in Prince George’s County that doubles as a summer camp for high school students and a basketball and academics camp for middle schoolers in Baltimore City are just two examples of summer camps available this year that keep Maryland students’ minds active and their bodies healthy until school starts in about a month and a half.
Near an apartment complex in the town of Bladensburg, which has been classified as a “food desert” by the US Department of Agriculture, a Maryland nonprofit set up a small farm, thanks to about $350,000 from Kaiser Permanente, the Maryland Gazette reports. About a dozen high school students have tended the farm for six weeks every summer since 2010, with some earning service hour credit or even wages for their contributions. But as far as the people who run the farm are concerned, “Eco City Farms” is providing an education for students about healthy eating habits.
A food desert is a location—here, the Autumn Woods Apartments on 57th Avenue—where getting basic dietary nutrition generally requires a vehicle. And on June 24, according to the story in the Gazette, the students were making a pizza from scratch and using many of the fresh ingredients grown on the farm. “I’ve never seen a pizza made from scratch before,” one rising sophomore was quoted as saying. “I’ve seen it on television, but actually doing it, I’ve never seen it like that.”
The program is called Seed to Feed, and over the course of six weeks, students are engaged in cooking projects, poetry writing, and other sustainability efforts like field trips. “The whole idea is that young people will learn everything, not only about cooking and growing food,” the paper quoted Margaret Morgan-Hubbard, founder and CEO of Eco City Farms, as saying. “A lot of it has to do with the fact that there isn’t healthy food access or healthy food traditions out here.”
Program leaders hope that after six weeks of farm-fresh food, students will become more aware of healthy choices and begin to make a dent in the obesity epidemic. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonprofit research and public policy institution based in Washington, D.C., 69 percent of the county’s residents are overweight or obese and about half the children who live there are overweight or obese. “We have to understand that we’re working with a community that’s been so disconnected [from] nature, [from] food in general,” the paper quoted Viviana Lindo, Eco City Farms’ community education director, as saying.
Basketball and academics in Baltimore City
A five-week camp known as Mindful Mentors Planting Seeds has nothing to do with farming, despite the name. Rather, the free program, thanks to a grant from the Annie Casey Foundation, brings Baltimore City middle school students together with former and current college basketball players, who mentor them throughout the camp. Students work on math and language arts skills and also play basketball nearly every day, WBAL-TV (NBC affiliate) reports.
“Our goal is to improve academic achievement in student athletes to help them maintain and to make sure summer learning loss doesn’t occur,” the station quoted Natasha Thurmon, the program’s spokeswoman, as saying. “So, we are here to help them stay healthy, keep them fit and help with their academics.”
The basketball players give students much more than advice on the basketball court: they mentor them physically, emotionally, and academically. And those relationships don’t end when the camp concludes. “I can go to [a mentor] with problems,” one students said. “We just hang out and have a good time. It’s not just academics and sports, but we have fun together, just like friend-to-friend stuff.”
Another student who attended the camp said, “If I have a problem in math, I can ask her certain things because I feel comfortable around her—comfortable enough to ask her any questions. I can text her or call her.”
