Worthing HS agriculture program tackles Sunnyside food desert challenges

A year and a half ago, the plot of land behind Worthing High School was nothing but grass. Today, it is a living classroom. 

Rows of kale, collard greens, banana peppers, and cabbage stretch across raised beds. A chicken coop built by students from scratch houses hens and their feed. In the heart of Houston’s Sunnyside neighborhood, one of the city’s most recognized food deserts, a group of students and teachers is learning to feed the community.

“Within a year and a half, with the resources from HISD and the help of our partners, we were able to make this a pretty decent green space,” said Reid Turner, the lead agriculture teacher at Worthing High School and head of its Career and Technical Education (CTE) program, who also credited Nutrition Services in establishing the program. “They’ve been a main factor within our partnership in helping us build this and giving us the blueprint of how to build it.”

The program is part of HISD’s broader effort to bring food and agriculture literacy into schools across the school district. Through the district’s Nutrition Services Food & Agriculture Literacy Department, HISD now serves its “Get Growing Houston” food literacy initiative across 110 of its 274 schools, and operates the 6.5-acre Mykawa Farm in the Sunnyside neighborhood as a living educational center. 

A classroom without walls

Turner describes his teaching philosophy as “the 360 of agriculture.”

Students start each class with a “do now”, a review exercise or animal care task, like tending to a rabbit or a guinea pig upstairs, before heading outside to apply what they have learned in theory.

“Agriculture really doesn’t work without application,” Turner said. “So them doing this is really teaching them not only the theory, but also the application of doing the work and actually trying to see how we can help the community.”

His colleague, Paige Phillips, a CTE agriculture teacher who earned both her undergraduate and master’s degrees in agricultural economics from Prairie View A&M University, teaches animal science and equine management.

Phillips says she pushes her students to see agriculture as the foundation of everyday life.

“Agriculture is food, shelter, and clothing,” Phillips said. “That is something that I really do express to my students. I love combining the real-world connection to things that they are actually putting their hands on…that’s giving them that ‘aha moment.’”

These “aha moments” range from learning seed germination to understanding how fast fashion’s supply chain connects to animal welfare.

Phillips added that her favorite part of teaching is when students make those connections months after a lesson. 

“They come to class eager and ready to learn. ‘Miss Phillips, what are we doing today?’, or they’re having a connection to what I taught them months ago, to something that they’re seeing now,” Phillips said.

The students: Fruits of their labor

Samaya Jackson, a 12th grader who came to Houston from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after her family experienced homelessness, found her footing at Worthing through agriculture. Her career path has been set since middle school. She wants to own her own veterinary business.

Having faced hardships of her own, Jackson said her mission is to make food more accessible to residents of Sunnyside.

“I do understand how far it is to go out and try to get fresh produce. Some people don’t have the advantage to be able to go do that,” Jackson said. “So having our program and being able to give back to the community here, you can just walk here. It’s not that far. We can actually give them fresh produce instead of them going all the way to these other places.”

Jackson, who has already secured her college acceptance to Texas A&M University, where she will focus on veterinary medicine and agribusiness, believes anyone can navigate hardship if they set their mind to it.

Donald Smith, an 11th grader who describes himself as always having been drawn to plants and animals, said the program gave him a vision of owning land, which he had not previously imagined.

“The one thing that I’ve learned from this program is that anything is possible. I never imagined that I’d be raising chickens here at school,” Jackson said. “I’ve always loved agriculture, even when I was little. I was always outside messing with plants, planting stuff.”

Smith was part of the program from the very beginning, when the green space behind the school was just a tree stump and bare earth.

“We were tilling the ground, we were building up the chicken coop,” he recalled. “It’s really amazing how far we have come…When I go to supermarkets, and I see those outrageous prices, I’m like, dang. I don’t like the pesticides and the chemicals they put in our food. I want to see the actual fruits of my labor, literally the fruits of my labor.”

He hopes the program will also change how the outside world perceives his school.

“People hear the name Worthing High School, and they’re like, ‘oh.’ I really hope this program brings up Worthing’s name,” Smith said.

Bridging the gap in a food desert

Sunnyside has long faced what residents and researchers call food access challenges, a neighborhood where bus lines do not always reach grocery stores in Pearland or Pasadena and where fresh produce is rare.

Phillips added that addressing Sunnyside’s food desert issue is central to the program’s mission. 

“We are trying very, very hard to produce food here,” she said. “If the students want to learn how to produce, we tell them just get a plot of land, some potting soil, some seeds, and water it daily…They can turn those into nice, hearty meals that they and their families can actually enjoy.”

The program already provides teachers on campus with fresh eggs laid by the school’s chickens. Turner said the school produces three to four eggs a day and is working toward contracts for larger-scale egg production. The longer-term vision is to establish a sustainable farmers’ market rooted in the community.

“And advocacy is one of our big things; we make ads about everything from what we’re growing, how we can grow, food deserts, we do all of that. But in the process of that, we are creating permanent solutions to actually have things for our community,” Turner said.

Pathways beyond the garden

The program also serves as an academic pathway.

Students in Turner and Phillips’s courses can earn industry-based certifications (IBCs) in areas like equine management and the Elanco Animal Science program under livestock production, credentials that can follow students into college and careers.

Graduates of the program are headed to Prairie View A&M University to study animal science, with others considering environmental science, veterinary medicine, agricultural economics, and agricultural engineering.

Turner is still in his second year at Worthing, meaning this spring’s graduating class is his first.

“Everything, when it comes to agriculture, is not perfect,” he told the group during one class discussion about plant science. “You may have the perfect soil, you may have the perfect plant, but it may die for no reason. So everything is a little bit of practice. Everything’s a little bit of theory and just putting it all together to come up with a product and a great solution.”