Tierney, community leaders visit Ford School garden in Lynn

LYNN – It was just over two years ago that the Ford School and the Highlands Coalition set out to transform an underutilized portion of concrete into an urban garden, marrying the family-oriented school and the struggling community it serves.With vegetation thriving and volunteers abound, the neighborhood gathered Thursday to celebrate the success of the project and share the Ford School International Garden with the local community leaders who helped make the idea a reality.Congressman John Tierney, whose efforts at the state and national level have helped projects like the international garden reach their goals, joined representatives from the City Council, School Committee and School Department in spending an afternoon in the Highlands Thursday, where they were treated to food from the garden and performances by Ford students and neighborhood youth.While volunteers from the school’s nutrition education partnership with the University of Massachusetts prepared fresh vegetables from the garden in the background, the crowd of about two dozen people were treated to performances from members of the school’s after-school program and new summer creativity camp.”The idea for Camp Creativity is to create new leaders,” said Highlands Coalition President David Gass. “The idea is to give them the confidence to perform when they are young and to lead when they are older.”Students from Camp Creativity performed skits and shared artwork, while their classmates in the after-school program performed dances they had created to accompany Michael Jackson songs.While the day was mostly a positive one, the after-school program did take a shot at the School Department and Superintendent Catherine Latham, who was in attendance, by changing the words to Jackson’s hit “Bad” to “I’m mad, I’m mad” in protest of the department closing the Ford School Annex due to budget problems.Tierney, whose summer schedule allowed for an extended stay at the event, mingled with Ford students and school employees and sampled the prepared foods from the garden.He praised the Highlands Coalition and other community organizations that played a role in the garden’s success and made it a point to thank those in the neighborhood who volunteered their time.”I am very happy that President Obama made it a point to call for volunteerism this summer because when times are tough like they are now we need to do as many things as we can as individuals to help one another out,” he said. “When times get tough sometimes the first thing to go is funding for summer work programs, so that is one of the things we are working very hard to protect, summer jobs for kids.”Along with neighborhood volunteers and students from the school, the Highlands Coalition employs youth in the garden as a summer work program.Along with serving as a meeting place for the community, the garden has inspired hard work and community leadership traits in the students, who, along with Gass and the coalition members, have taken their efforts beyond the school’s fences.”Someone came up to us earlier and asked why we were picking up papers on the sidewalk,” said Gass. “And I said, ‘Because that is what you do in your community.’ If there is a problem you don’t rely on the government to fix it for you, you do what you can. This is our neighborhood and it is our responsibility to solve problems ourselves and then you can turn to the city for help if you need it.”Gass said the next steps for the garden, pending funding, is to build a green house and a cistern that will collect rain water for use in watering the plants.”It is our goal not to use any city water,” he said.Along with Tierney and Latham, School Committee members Maria Carrasco and John Ford, City Councilor and mayoral candidate Judith Flanagan Kennedy and School Committee Secretary Thomas Iarrobino attended the event.