If the weather pattern holds, students at East Providence Area Career & Technical Center are going to be cold over the next few weeks. Real cold. Dozens of them will be outside building a greenhouse.
But when they are finished, you can be sure it will have been worth the effort. And they just might have gotten themselves started on the path to lucrative careers.
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Charles B. Rocha, Jr., is director of the East Providence Area Career & Technical Center. Talk to him even briefly and you realize he possesses that certain quality that makes for a terrific educator. He gets excited talking about creating opportunities for students.
Ask him about this greenhouse program he has started and that excitement is palpable.
Rocha took the idea to East Providence School Supt. Dr. Taras Herbowy a while back. As it turns out, Herbowy had been thinking the same thing – for years.
“It was an easy sell,” said Rocha.
Next stop, the state.
And give the state Department of Education credit. Officials there came up big. They quickly approved the school’s request for a $140,000 three-year grant to get the landscaping program started.
To his credit, Rocha had done his homework. He presented such a case that it was an easy decision for the state to make.
He supplied data from the U.S. Department of Labor showing that between 2000 and 2010 there will be an excess of 265,000 new jobs in the field across the country. Excuse the pun, but it’s a growing industry. It’s been that way for years.
“I remember talking to someone five years ago,” said Rocha. “He was looking for a greenhouse manager, $45,000 to start with full benefits. And he couldn’t find anyone.”
Rocha mentions that national trade magazines have been recommending to those in the industry that they expand their growing seasons by building greenhouses.
“You put up a greenhouse for a few thousand dollars…it augments their income during the winter and keeps the help busy all year long,” said Rocha.
Other factors seem to be playing in the industry’s favor. More families have both parents working. Weekend time for family activity has never been more precious. Landscaping responsibilities are being farmed out.
Brian Maynard is a professor of horticulture in the plant sciences department at the University of Rhode Island. That horticulture is suddenly a “hot” career does not surprise him at all.
“Gardening is the number one pastime,” said Maynard. “People are spending more money on flowers and landscaping than they have in the past.”
And that’s not all. Federal trade restrictions, he said, have been eased in recent years. It is no longer as difficult to export soil, for example, and the result has been the opening of markets in Japan and Europe.
As for programs such as the one taking root in East Providence, Maynard thinks it makes all kinds of sense.
“Horticulture really is a science,” he said. “You need the hands-on experience of growing.”
Will Green, a professor of landscape architecture at URI, concurs..
“In landscape architecture, every seat is spoken for each year,” he said. “So there is a real need for landscape architects.”
Rocha has seen such a greenhouse program succeed. In fact, he’s done this all before.
Prior to coming to the East Providence Area Career & Technical Center, he ran the Attleboro Vocational and Technical School in nearby Massachusetts. While there, a program to teach students how to build greenhouses was wildly successful.
“By the second year the program had blossomed so much that we built a second house and by the third year we built a third,” he said. “That’s how well the kids took to it.”
Rocha has received the green light from the East Providence School Committee to begin ordering equipment and supplies. He expects the greenhouse to cost about $23,000 to build and supply. The students will build the aluminum-framed Quonset-hut shaped building in the parking lot of the technical center.
Once the greenhouse is built, Rocha expects that as many as 70 students will be participating in the program this spring. He expects that in the spring, they will have flowers to sell.
Rocha expects something else to happen, too. Because the students will build the greenhouse themselves, he said, he isn’t worried about vandalism. Everyone will know that it was fellow students who worked hard at the project, who braved chilling temperatures.
“They’re going to be proud of it – as they should be,” said Rocha. “They’ll walk around like peacocks.”
