Sat, Jul 04, 2009
 Sam Shivers and his son, Samuel, 6, work together to cut a wire inside a pile of concrete pieces for the new garden at Sunrise Drive Elementary School.
Danielle Sottosanti / Arizona Daily Star
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Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.18.2008
A garden in the works at a Sunrise Drive Elementary School aims to provide people from both the school and the surrounding community a place to exercise their green thumbs.
Sunrise parent Lisa Hawkins wasn't an avid gardener in the past, but her passion for environmental sustainability sparked her idea to create a community garden on the former site of two portable trailers.
"I had no garden experience whatsoever. I could barely keep my ficus tree alive," Hawkins remarked. She is president of the Friends and Family Organization at the school, 5301 E. Sunrise Drive.
Since the trailers were removed in February, she has been spearheading volunteers' efforts to give the site a new lease on life as a community garden — an addition Principal Julie Sherrill said she supports.
"I could just see so many benefits," Sherrill said. "Historically, our third grade has always had a classroom or grade-level garden, and so now we have opportunity to expand that K (to) 5," she said.
When completed, the garden will be a tool for teaching students about such environmental-sustainability issues as rainwater harvesting and where their food comes from, said Hawkins, 38, who has two children at the school.
Because it will be a community garden, Sunrise Drive Elementary will allow the use of some garden plots by people who live in the surrounding community but are not connected to the school.
"I think we should always try to connect the work of the school to our community and to be able to be collaborative with community members," Sherrill said.
Hawkins tried to get community involvement early on by having her children distribute fliers about the garden to people in the surrounding neighborhoods.
For Foothills resident Andrea Owan, the decision to take part was easy. "I always wanted to be involved in a community garden," said Owan, 50.
She home-schools her son Cory, 13. Though they are not otherwise linked to Sunrise Drive Elementary, they will work together as gardening buddies in the school's community garden.
They are taking an active volunteer role in the garden's creation and started to build it earlier this month.
The transition from old trailer site to community garden has been a multistep process for the volunteers.
Even after the trailers were gone, the two concrete slabs they sat on remained. A Southwest Gas Corp. crew tore up the slabs for free and found a construction company willing to remove the debris, also for free, Hawkins said.
But she wanted to find a new purpose for the debris to help students understand that everything can be reused, rather than dumping it in a landfill. That's where a lot of man-, woman- and kid-power came in on a recent Saturday morning.
Thirty-two volunteers saw what at first looked like an insurmountable concrete pile diminish in size, as they placed the pieces along the dirt slope to create a retaining wall, almost like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
"I love the idea that we're starting from scratch. We're getting so much kid involvement," Hawkins said.
Sunrise parent Sam Shivers, 42, worked hard all morning to break the concrete into manageable pieces — first using a sledgehammer and later a jackhammer.
His 6-year-old son, Samuel, worked by his side, wearing jeans and a cowboy hat — just like his dad.
"My children go to school here, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get involved in their school, do some work in the community, teach the kids about community service a little bit . . . (and) use a jackhammer," Shivers said.
Foothills
● Contact reporter Danielle Sottosanti at 618-1922 or at dsottosanti@azstarnet.com.
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