At Cesar Chavez School, as elsewhere, federal guidelines are keeping kids inside.

Scientists say kids who plant a garden grow better brains. On Saturday, March 20, CSU Monterey Bay hosts a conference on science- and garden-based learning, “Bring Science Back to Life!” Sponsored by the Life Lab Science Program and the Monterey County Farm to School Partnership, the conference, in its seventh year, hopes to inspire parents and educators to use the outdoors as a classroom.

(Full disclosure: The Monterey County Weekly Community Fund is the primary sponsor of the Farm to School Partnership, a coalition of local groups that link farmers and schools.)

Alicia Dickerson of Life Lab, a garden-based science education center at UC Santa Cruz, says the conference will include demonstrations of cooking and gardening activities that meet academic science standards for teachers.

The Life Lab Science Program started in 1979, Dickerson says, when “several elementary school teachers turned their dirt parking lot into a thriving living laboratory for the study of science, ecology and nutrition.”

The group has helped more than 1,000 schools across the country plan outdoor science activities, and has helped set up school gardens in 38 states. Life Lab has helped set up gardens in six school districts in Monterey County.

Dickerson says the conference’s theme this year is about the fact that “in a lot of schools, they are not allowed to teach science anymore.”

Case in point: Last summer, Life Lab set up a garden at Cesar Chavez elementary school in Salinas, with the intention of turning it into a science lab come fall.

“We had a beautiful garden for the kids to use in summer school,” Dickerson says. “There were hundreds of kids doing experiments in the garden and it was so neat to see this interactive science.”

But with pressure to get kids to meet math and reading standards, in part from the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative, science instruction at Cesar Chavez was taken out of the kids’ day.

“They have cut science out of the daily schedule,” Life Lab director Joyce Swenor says. “The intention has always been that the school garden be used for teaching science.”

Sonia Jaramillo is on leave from the Alisal School District to work at Life Lab as a staff developer, training teachers in Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz counties how to use gardens as learning centers.

“It’s not only science [that they’re learning in the garden], it’s language,” she says. “They’re using real-life things like plants—things they know about—and as their vocabulary grows, they develop more skills. At the same time they’re getting science. They need to know about science—they might be our future doctors, you never know. We want to expose them to using the garden as a part of science so that they grow up to be more curious, wanting to learn about different things, not just be in the classroom reading about something, but be outside and making sense of these things.”

Jaramillo says that the garden at Cesar Chavez school, which was lush at the end of last summer, is now withering away.

“Someone needs to continue with the work,” she says. “It’s dying, not blooming.”

Bring Science Back to Life will take place on Saturday, March 20, at CSUMB’s University Center, Sixth Avenue, Seaside, from 9am-4pm. $30; $20/students, includes breakfast and lunch. Call 459-5395.