The plan also mentioned that 39 percent of elementary school students in Mississippi are overweight or obese. The Mississippi State Department of Health’s 2016 action plan included a Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey from 2013, which reported that 11.1 percent of youth did not eat any vegetables or fruit in a week’s time. “Our school has seen the success of the garden and the learning that has taken place,” Laurie Beth Ellis, fourth grade teacher and member of GFOS Advisory Board, said. “It has been amazing to me to watch eat spinach and mustard greens right out of the beds and be excited to try vegetables or fruits that they normally would not be excited about consuming.” The program’s goal for the future is to see the children who are currently in the program becoming healthier than the children before them. GFOS already makes 75 percent of the children’s meals from scratch, right in the cafeteria, but its hope is to increase this number by buying more food from local farmers.
The program’s overall goal is to raise healthier students not only by providing them with nutritious food but also by educating them and their families on nutrition. The GFOS program began five years ago to help fix this problem by simultaneously improving food in school cafeterias and educating students.
“The rate of unhealthy children in our state and overall obesity of adults in Mississippi is alarming and contributes to so many other health problems, so it is important to teach people from a young age how to be healthy,” Green said. Green said the goal of the Garden Party is to help raise parental awareness of the school gardens and to get parents more involved. The GFOS program has helped start five different garden sites in elementary schools and Oxford High School, but not many parents know much about or have the chance to participate in the gardens. “They are not just giving access to the foods in the schools but giving them the knowledge of how to carry a healthy lifestyle over into their home lives,” Hunt said. Beth Hunt, mother of two children in the Oxford School District, said the educational component is the most valuable.
Green said the GFOS program works in classrooms, cafeterias and gardens in the Oxford community to help educate both students and their families about living a healthy lifestyle through gardening skills.
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