August 2nd, our team was out at Thurgood Marshall Middle School--tending the raised garden beds in their outdoor classroom, and finishing construction on the whiteboard roof that's been in the works.
Small maintenance, real infrastructure. The kind of work that doesn't announce itself but makes the space usable for another year of students learning outside, hands in the soil, roof over their hard work when the weather doesn't cooperate.
Spaces like this, and schools like Thurgood Marshall Middle School, don't ask for much— just people willing to keep putting in the effort.
Thurgood Marshall Middle School Outdoor Classroom
At Thurgood Marshall Middle School, Green Interchange is putting the finishing touches on something pretty special -- an outdoor classroom built around a food forest and herb garden, designed specifically for the school's culinary program. A food forest is exactly what it sounds like: a diverse, self-sustaining ecosystem full of edible plants, fruits, and vegetables that mimics the way a natural forest grows. After three years of tending and waiting, the apple trees are finally beginning to bear fruit — real ingredients that students can bring straight into the kitchen. Alongside the food forest, an herb garden fills the air with basil, rosemary, and mint, giving students a hands-on introduction to the plants they'll actually cook with.
The impact goes well beyond the kitchen. This outdoor classroom functions as a living laboratory where science, agriculture, and nutrition stop being abstract subjects and start being something students can touch, smell, and taste. Green Interchange sees this as a model worth replicating — a proof of concept for what environmental education can look like in schools across Tennessee when you give young people real soil to work with and real food to grow. Healthy eating habits, environmental stewardship, and genuine curiosity about the natural world: this is what it looks like when all three show up in the same place at the same time.
