{"id":47605,"date":"2021-03-30T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/durango-ag-class-puts-focus-on-helping-feed-less-fortunate\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T03:39:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:39:40","slug":"durango-ag-class-puts-focus-on-helping-feed-less-fortunate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/durango-ag-class-puts-focus-on-helping-feed-less-fortunate\/","title":{"rendered":"Durango ag class puts focus on helping feed less fortunate"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Lily
Lily Gallacher, left, and Maizy Nichols make turkey sandwiches for Manna soup kitchen in their agriculture class at Escalante Middle School.<\/span>Courtesy of Julie Popp, Durango School District 9-R<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Bailey Gaskins and Flint Gervais, two 14-year-old eighth graders, learned more than the importance of crop rotation and soil health in their agriculture class at Escalante Middle School.<\/p>\n

The pair, joined by about a dozen other students in their cohort, studied community needs and the importance of volunteering to make Durango a better place for everyone.<\/p>\n

The cohort spent the last two weeks of their nine-week ag class learning about community work and the role of nonprofits, which culminated with students making sandwiches and helping prepare food for the cooks at Manna soup kitchen.<\/p>\n

\u201cI learned you could do a lot to help your community by volunteering. A little bit of work by a group of people can really improve things,\u201d Bailey said.<\/p>\n

\"Bailey
Bailey Gaskins, left, and Flint Gervais bag turkey sandwiches for brown-bag lunch meals for Manna soup kitchen. The eighth grade agriculture class at Escalante Middle School made sandwiches and helped chop vegetables for Manna&#x2019;s kitchen while studying the value of volunteer work.<\/span>Courtesy of Julie Popp, Durango School District 9-R<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Flint said by helping Manna\u2019s cooks, he gained knowledge about how to properly and safely handle food, and his work helped the community and its homeless population.<\/p>\n

In their classroom kitchen they chopped vegetables for Manna\u2019s cooks and assembled sandwiches for Manna\u2019s pickup lunches.<\/p>\n

Using the school\u2019s classroom kitchen allowed Manna to minimize the number of people in its own kitchen and helped Manna maintain stricter kitchen operating procedures to reduce the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus.<\/p>\n

\"Hailey
Hailey Woodworth prepares to box turkey sandwiches to deliver to Manna soup kitchen for bag lunches.<\/span>Courtesy of Julie Popp, Durango School District 9-R<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Ag teacher Lu Boren said she likes teaching about the power of volunteering, but struggled this year as nonprofits across the country are adhering to stricter standards for interactions with their volunteers.<\/p>\n

Escalante\u2019s classroom kitchen was ideal in providing the needed extra space and equipment so students could still help at Manna without burdening the soup kitchen\u2019s facilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t believe how fast they were able to chop up two huge boxes of vegetables,\u201d Boren said. \u201cWe put them in plastic bags for Manna\u2019s kitchen to use for their meals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ethan
Ethan Wright, left, and Bergen Hein finish a batch of turkey sandwiches that will be sent to Manna soup kitchen for bag lunches.<\/span>Courtesy of Julie Popp, Durango School District 9-R<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Besides the chopped vegetables, the students made turkey and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches.<\/p>\n

Bailey said the importance of donating food to food pantries was another big takeaway for her.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes, they don\u2019t have as much food as they need,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Overall, Boren said the class met her objective: \u201cMy goal was to get the kids thinking of people other than themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

parmijo@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Lu
Lu Boren&#x2019;s eighth grade agriculture class spent two weeks learning about community service. Students helped prepare meals and bag lunches for members of the homeless community.<\/span>Courtesy of Julie Popp, Durango School District 9-R<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

students make sandwiches for homeless<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47606,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[408,1431,28,611,29,93],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-47605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-charity","tag-escalante-middle-school","tag-headlines","tag-homelessness","tag-newsletter","tag-students"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47605"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87217,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47605\/revisions\/87217"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47605"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=47605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}