It all started back in 2011 with a discussion involving two disengaged senior students. Omar Chahrouk, then a PDHPE teacher at Belmore Boys High School, asked the boys what it would take for them to be proud of their school. When they replied, “Look at this place, there is nothing to be proud of”, he realised how much value the boys placed on their immediate physical environment. To improve their learning outcomes, he would have to improve the environment surrounding them.
“Literally with a shovel and a pick, the students and I dug out a decent-sized brick pit with clay soil to make way for our first garden at Belmore Boys High,” Chahrouk says.
![Omar Chahrouk is the driving force behind a successful high school gardening initiative.](http://web.archive.org./web/20180418073718im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/h/0/y/m/j/8/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.p4z8zw.png/1523787965477.jpg)
Since then, it has grown to include an urban food forest, a rooftop garden, a chook house, a native reserve and eight ponds for the school’s beloved ibis colony.
Attendance and attitudes have improved. The school gardens are recognised locally as well as professionally by the Canterbury and Bankstown Council and the Royal Botanic Gardens.
“Gardening is an equality leveler; there is no class system in a garden,” Chahrouk says. “Boys don’t feel anxious going into gardening as there isn’t a set of criteria that they have to achieve. There isn’t a minimum standard or a competency test. You pick up the shovel and you dig. Its physical, challenging, stimulating and the stakes are low if your plants don’t do well.”
At the insistence of the students, the school has now added agriculture as an elective for Year 11 and 12 students. More than a dozen students have enrolled in the course this year. Several of last year’s students are pursuing related apprenticeships in a range of TAFE courses.
“The students needed a program that would immediately cater to their emotional, social, physical and cognitive needs,” Chahrouk says. “A garden program supported by the inclusion of agriculture as a choice for study at the HSC level produced favourable changes to student wellbeing and overall happiness. The boys saw the changes to their physical surroundings and this manifested in respectful and responsible attitudes.”
Chahrouk says the life lessons from tending to gardens run deep.
“When I finish a garden bed with a group of students I notice that they monitor its progress and report back on how it’s growing,” he says. “This teaches them the virtues of patience, nurturing, compassion, protection, diligence, loyalty, responsibility and many others.
“In society we have this idea that boys have got to be tough, reckless and dangerous. Gardening teaches them that you can still be strong, but you can also be gentle. You don’t have to fit norms, and how awesome and how exciting it is not to fit norms.”
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