CLEVELAND, Miss.—Class by class, students from D.M. Smith Elementary School in Cleveland, Mississippi, received a first-hand look at their school’s new garden.
First, a visit under the gazebo for a taste of blueberries. Krista Davis, a health, wellness and nutrition coordinator for the Cleveland School District, explained to the students that fourth graders from a Madison, Mississippi, elementary school—children just like them—were responsible for lobbying the Mississippi Legislature to name the blueberry as the state fruit in 2023.
Why the blueberry? “Because it is a nutritious treat,” one student answered.
Next, the students toured the adjacent garden, featuring vegetables like okra, cucumbers and purple hill peas. Todd Davis, Krista Davis’ husband, asked the students to try identifying each plant and if they recognize any of the vegetables. This garden, he said, was something students may experience for themselves going forward.
Finally, the students visited a pop-up Cleveland Farmers Market, where each child received a bag with nutritious goods to take home. Coordinator Ryan Betz invited them to visit the full Farmers Market during the summer season that started May 30.
It was all a celebration for the official opening of D.M. Smith Elementary School’s new gardening education center on May 13. A similar center was opened at Parks Elementary School the following day. In total, the Cleveland School District has invested in gardening education programs at four of its schools, including Cleveland Central Middle School and Bell Academy.
“We’re just trying to do everything we can to pique the interest of students and this garden stuff is really neat,” Superintendent Lisa Bramuchi told the Mississippi Free Press on May 19. “And we have so many (people) that are diabetic—not just students, (but) adults, teachers—diabetes is terrible. If we can start educating kids young about how to grow their food and all that, we’ll have taught them something.”
The idea of building these gardening centers came from Todd Davis, a Delta State University recreation professor who heads Friends of the Cleveland School District, a nonprofit organization that works to support the district.
Bramuchi credits Davis with making the program come to life, but Davis counters by giving credit to Bramuchi and the school principals for being supportive. Davis believes the programming goes beyond just gardening—and that it is crucial to not just maintain but grow the district and Cleveland as a whole.
“I know that the Delta is slowly shrinking. Cleveland is not immune to that,” Todd Davis told the Mississippi Free Press on May 13. “We are slowly shrinking as well. Delta State struggles with enrollment. But if you lose Cleveland School District and it goes down to a failing district, you’re going to lose major institutions in town. You’ll lose businesses. You’ll lose families. You could ultimately lose Delta State. There’s no safeguard right now. It’s all about community action and community involvement.”
Trying New Things
D.M. Smith Elementary School Principal Rashida Barksdale jumped at the chance to bring a garden center to the school.
“The idea was brought to us about a year ago to this date,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on May 13. “We’ve seen that it has gone from an idea that was on paper to being brought to fruition for our kids.” Two teachers will lead management of the garden, while the school and district also lean on the partnership with FoodCorps.
Evelyn Greer, the district’s FoodCorps partner, told the Mississippi Free Press that gardening education goes beyond planting and incorporates math, science, language and literature; for example, using mathematics to determine the appropriate distance between gardening plots.
“You can tie in science to food or garden,” Krista Davis said. “Think about cooking—that’s science right there. Plant-life sciences. Math is tied into measurements with cooking and spacing (gardening plots) and things like that. It’s just an easy way to infuse food and nutrition and gardening into the curriculum that they’re already learning in the class.”
Davis explained that the blueberry tasting and handing out free foods through the Farmers Market are also both intentional.
“One of the most impactful things, other than (students) being exposed to the garden aspect, is providing them with taste tests,” she said. “At first, they may be apprehensive about, ‘Oh no, I don’t like that,’ even though they’ve never tried it before. But the more you introduce them to things, the more willing they are to try it.”
“I’ve been here a year—from the beginning of the year to now, the excitement behind learning in new ways has definitely grown, especially in the garden with them being able to almost do a lot of these things on their own now, with supervision,” Evelyn Greer said, referring to the other Cleveland schools that have introduced gardening education. “They’re not only learning educational things but they’re learning responsibilities, tasks, skills, planning—all of that goes into gardening.”
‘This Is Where It Starts’
More than half of the Mississippi Delta’s available land is cropland, a fact not lost on Rashida Barksdale. Part of the gardening center’s appeal is introducing students to the land and careers around them.
“I wanted to create something where it’s not that they’re just receiving information from a textbook but they actually get the chance to interact with the ground. We’re in the Mississippi Delta. It’s agriculture,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “I want them to know what they can produce, that they can feed themselves from the land. And there’s many careers here in the Delta. We don’t have to worry about the brain drain and going somewhere else to be productive. We can be productive citizens right here through our agriculture process.”
“We have agriculture surrounding all of our schools—in fact, most of our schools have farms around them,” Krista Davis said. “But (students) still don’t understand where their actual food that they eat comes from. A lot of our agriculture is made for feed and fuel and things like that.”
Todd Davis wants to see a garden center at each of Cleveland’s schools. Agriculture science, he said, is an obvious career for Delta students and is a path that hasn’t been fully cultivated.
“It’s astonishing to me that we—in the middle of the Mississippi Delta with Stoneville, Mississippi State University, all these major agriscience institutions and organizations that are doing significant research and work in the Delta—and we don’t have a school right now in the Delta that is just pouring into their agscience program. And Cleveland of all places should be the leader in agscience. We really do feel that way. This is where it starts,” he told the Mississippi Free Press.
Davis explained that the Friends of the Cleveland School District, in searching for ways to help improve school programming, looked to Bell Academy, one of the district’s two magnet schools, and asked students what they enjoyed most about the school. The top response was the school’s gardening program, which was established roughly 10 years ago. Lisa Bramuchi told the Mississippi Free Press that Bell Academy’s success gave her the confidence that the program could be expanded.
From there, the Friends went to work on the first garden project at Cleveland Central Middle School.
The Fruits of Labor
Cleveland was historically divided by west and east through a railroad track that has since been dismantled. The campus of the former Cleveland High School and Margaret Green Junior High School, which traditionally served white students, is on Highway 8 on the west side of the tracks. The campus of East Side High School and D.M. Smith Middle School, which served Black students during segregation, is located on Lucy Seaberry Boulevard on the east side of town.
In 1965, a group of Black students and parents filed a suit against the district in an attempt to force desegregation. The lawsuit was still active in 2016 when U.S. District Judge Debra M. Brown ruled that the Cleveland School District’s efforts to fully desegregate were insufficient. Brown found that while some schools featured substantial white populations, other schools remained entirely Black, including those schools explicitly designated for Black students during the era of segregation. She also ruled that the district had not done enough to rid the district of the dual system.
The district dropped its fight a year later. Cleveland High School and Margaret Green Junior High were combined into the new Cleveland Central High School. East Side and D.M. Smith Middle School became Cleveland Central Middle School.
But Todd Davis said the Friends and the district soon found the new middle school to be a “hemorrhage point.” Many white students would be enrolled in the district, with heavy representation at public magnet schools Bell Academy and Hayes Cooper Center, but would leave the district upon graduation.
Data from the Mississippi Department of Education shows that Margaret Green Junior High in its final year from 2016-2017 had a population of 405 students, including 156 white and 229 Black. Just two years later—the earliest available year for Cleveland Central data—there were just 90 white students at the new middle school compared to 383 Black students. White enrollment at Cleveland Central reached a low of 50 in the 2023-24 school year. There were 63 white students enrolled in the 2025-2026 school year. The Black student population has also declined during the same period, but at a slower rate, and it includes more than 300 students as of this past school year.
The Davis’ 10-year-old daughter attends Bell Academy, and Todd Davis said the new generation of students has no memory of the town’s previous issues.
“There are children in these schools that won’t even know the word ‘consolidation.’ They don’t know and honestly they don’t care,” he said. “I think we’re in a new age where families want good things to happen at the school. They want their children to be in safe places. They want their children to have good teachers. They want their schools to be structurally good, clean and safe. And they want programs. We want to see programs that are going to be career-ready.”
Davis also rejected any misrepresentations of Cleveland Central Middle School or its surrounding neighborhoods.
“White families have this perceived notion—that is really not well addressed and is really untrue and it’s really sad—that there’s this ‘Black side of town’ and that it’s bad over here,” he said. “I’m a white person—very privileged, I will admit that—but I’ve been over at that school every day for four straight years working on building their garden program, beautification projects (and) working with the principal. I’ve worked inside (and) outside. I’ve given workshops for teachers.”
In 2023, the Friends’ hopes came to pass. The Bolivar Medical Center Foundation donated $187,000 to Cleveland Central Middle School to develop the Wolfpack Wellness Program, referencing Cleveland Central’s wolf mascot. The donation helped create a complete gardening education curriculum, including agriculture science partnerships and before- and after-school programming. The foundation also contributed financially to the district’s two new garden centers.
Superintendent Lisa Bramuchi told the Mississippi Free Press on May 19 that a recent performance of the district’s middle and high school bands made her proud of the district’s diversity, something she wants to keep investing in.
“My philosophy is if we can all get together and work together and build our public school systems, you wouldn’t have to pay private school tuition,” she said. “There are some people that are going to choose private schools for their own reasons and that’s their call. But I want to try and make the public school the best it can be for everybody that lives here, attends here and wants to go here. Because when a public school is strong and thriving, the town mirrors that.”
‘A Human Connection’
Ryan Betz has been involved with health and wellness education for nearly two decades. He told the Mississippi Free Press on May 13 that one of his hopes for the program is to better connect children with not just the classroom but with their food and community.
That’s where the Cleveland Farmers Market comes in. For nearly 25 years, it has opened every summer, with its latest opening scheduled for May 30. Betz, one of the market’s coordinators, said he grew up in rural Missouri, surrounded by garden culture, which made gardening “as normal as brushing your teeth every day.” Betz hopes the kids can use food to connect with the people around them.
“It slows you down,” Betz said of farmers markets. “You get to see people. You get to see the farmer. For a kid, it’s a huge educational opportunity because it’s giving them a chance to experience something about their relationship with food that usually doesn’t get seen. …This is really important. It’s a human experience. It’s a foundation to, I think, having human experiences. Having some sort of direct connection with your food.”
And importantly, Betz said this education is not about correcting or lecturing children.
“This isn’t us trying to teach what is healthy. ‘You’re not eating healthy, so therefore, we’re going to teach you what’s healthy.’ I don’t think that’s the angle that these school gardens are (using),” he said. “This is an opportunity to reconnect and to reestablish and to remember. And to bring some of that back into some of this. Especially with food. Everybody has some sort of a food memory.”
What’s Next?
Todd Davis told the Mississippi Free Press that the Friends will likely take the next few months off from planning before deciding what project to tackle next. Both he and Bramuchi said it would be nice to have gardening education follow from elementary school all the way through high school.
Davis said that when the Friends approached the district about these projects, it was made clear that the nonprofit group would set the table, but it is up to the district to maintain the gardens once they are established. Bramuchi said that each school is responsible for its respective garden, but the district may explore hiring a district-wide coordinator of some sort in the future.
“It is amazing what they have done,” Bramuchi said. “I wish somebody would have done that for me. I am a terrible eater. I don’t eat many vegetables. But if I would have had that in school and all my friends were eating them, I might have tried to eat them.”
Disclosure: Kevin Edwards graduated from the Cleveland School District.
Read more stories from the Mississippi Delta Bureau here.
Mississippi Free Press stories are always free because we believe everyone should have access to quality journalism. Donations from readers like you make that possible. Please click here to give to help sustain and grow vital, people-over-power journalism for Mississippians.
Readers can sign up for our free newsletters here.
