From Garden to Table: How Alicia Garcia Reshapes Home Ec with ESAs

Homeschooling Journeys with Alicia Garcia – this transcript has been edited for clarity

[00:00:00] Mike Goldstein: This is Homeschooling Journeys with Curious Mike. And I’m here with Alicia. I love your story, what I’ve read of it, so now I get to hear it. So, you’re a chef, you’re a designer, you’re a novice urban gardener, and you’ve built this education venture that you describe a little bit as Home Ec class gone green. So welcome. Could you tell us a little bit about what you provide to your homeschool students?

[00:00:54] Alicia Garcia: Sure. Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here. A little bit about what I provide.

I think that home economics is core subject matter. I think that life skills, not that takes away anything from kind of core curriculum in a traditional school setting, but I just feel like it’s more applicable to real life, and as I was going through a homeschool journey with my own four children, I just found a way to tangibly interweave that into our learning and daily life, and then thought that it was really worth it. Something that I should bring to more people.

[00:01:30] Mike Goldstein: Inside a lot of traditional schools, they have math, English, science over here, and then they have art, music, home ec, and a bunch of other things kind of over here for educators like you (less important). (And you’re saying) home ec shouldn’t diminished as it often is inside of a traditional school.

When a homeschool family comes to you, what can they get? What’s the offering?

[00:01:59] Alicia Garcia: So, I have two main offerings that I bring to homeschool communities. Both programs are home economic based and what I cover is Edible Earth, which is plant forward cooking. So, anything related to food literacy and food.

I also incorporate a natural apothecary, which is still very much mixing up recipes per se, but it’s not something that you would eat.  More kind of home remedies for cleanliness, managing your spaces in a more holistic manner and just self-care and just taking care of yourself. And lastly, more of like natural crafting or seasonal crafts, I would say.

And so, I incorporate all three of those into a kind of curriculum. And that is including all core subjects because it’s very easy to interweave that.

You can talk about food through ELA. You can bring food into math. You can bring food into social studies and absolutely applicable in science. So it’s very easy to make it interdisciplinary.

[00:03:16] Mike Goldstein: Totally resonates with my own experience with cooking and teaching my kids.  Math comes up automatically (in the kitchen). You can’t do a recipe without math and conversions. We only want half of that recipe because we’re only a family of four. So, we got to resize it, all those kinds of things.

Would I sign up for a course and you would ship me some ingredients that the kid and the parent would jump in every day at 10 a.m.? Or like, describe for us a little bit the experience they might have with you.

[00:04:01] Alicia Garcia: Okay, great. So, if you came to one of my Food For Thought classes, you would go through probably like a greeting where we would sit and have an introduction about what the subject matter was that we were going to be talking about today.

[00:04:16] We would ask a lot of questions. I wouldn’t necessarily answer the questions. More questions would come from that. Students will draw some conclusions based on how we navigate the day and also just other students just feeding off of each other and sharing. Lived experiences because everyone has one, especially when it relates to food.

[00:04:34] So we talk about specifically what the subject matter is of the day, and then it would be broken down into probably 3 different centers. Give you an example. If we’re talking about honeybees and pollinators for the day.  Going to visit three different stations.

The first one is going to be natural apothecary and maybe we’re going to do an infused herbal honey or one that’s infused with garlic that we can use during cold and flu season.  We would talk about the benefits; we would talk about how the honey and the garlic may mix and what that does and how long it cures and then what it in turn is going to do for our body.

Then we would maybe go over to our food lab and we would do a recipe that’s plant forward that also celebrates honey.Maybe it’s a granola that has honey in it.

And then maybe we would go to the last lab, which would be a natural craft. And maybe we would talk about honeycombs. Maybe we would talk about bees. Maybe we would really unpack, um, kind of the hierarchy that goes through. Making honey, and we would talk about what that process looked like.

We would talk about, um, pollinators. We would even go into maybe the math and the logistics of it about what it takes to produce it, bring it to the consumer, and then in the end, what you purchase it for in the store and what that entire process has gone through. And through just honeybees and pollinators, we can touch history, we can talk on economics, we can talk about climate change and how that affects the bees and maybe how that affects the price of the honey that you were buying in the store last year versus this year.

Mike Goldstein: And Alicia, just logistically, is this 10 kids showing up at your studio? Is this an online experience? What’s happening here?

[00:06:33] Alicia Garcia: So, there’s a few different offerings.

I host at my kitchen classroom, as I call it, in Learning Garden. So that’s where the novice gardening comes in, where I’ve just planted a variety in my yard and I want to teach at home because it’s important to me that it’s tangible and kids can know that you can really go home and recreate this versus me taking you to a commercial kitchen that kind of feels a little intimidating.

Or sometimes when I’m working with micro schools, I will have created a series for them that goes through the course of the months, and maybe I’ve talked to their educators, and it aligns perfectly.  So then I would come, I would bring my wagon, I’d bring all my supplies, I would set up and then I’m there for probably two hours of engagement. We would go through again, our prompts, our active learning, and then we do recipe reflections at the end where we kind of unpack what was challenging, what’s something new that you learned, and all the takeaways that we may have from the day, and then how we can apply it to real life.

[00:07:42] Mike Goldstein: I love it. And so, let’s say I were lucky enough to live near you, and so my kids could come over and do one of these classes. Just what’s the approximate pricing for that?

[00:07:56] Alicia Garcia: I really try and make it accessible, just comparative to what other homeschool offerings are as well as cooking classes because I am working with perishable, really good quality ingredients.

[00:08:08] So it is probably around $30 to $40 a class. I try and keep my class sizes small, which of course is a little challenge with pricing because obviously the more kids you have, you can be a little more. Flexible with pricing, but it’s important to me that we have the time for everyone to feel heard and seen and really take time with the ingredients.

[00:08:33] So my classes are probably 16 learners or less, which feels like a good number for me because we divide into four groups of four and it’s just, it just works really well. But I would say about $25 to $40 is the price range, just depending on how involved the lessons are and the materials.

[00:08:55] Mike Goldstein: Yeah, a couple quick comments, just even on what you’re saying, which I find so interesting. One is, there’s all these debates about class size and an amazing thing about what you and so many other educators are doing when you create your own offering. The obvious part is you’re playing to your strengths.

[00:09:13] Like you know exactly what you’re doing and you’re providing this really memorable experience that kids are going to remember 20 years later. I went over to this lady’s house, and this is what we did, and we made the granola, and we did this stuff. So that’s cool. That’s specialization. But there’s this other piece, which is, you’re controlling the environment.

[00:09:32] So you get to say, 16 kids feels right to me. Another teacher might say, that the number for me personally is 6 kids or 40 kids. It’s sort of, you’re playing to your own classroom management and how you run a class. I think that’s an exciting part of the, the kinds of opportunities that homeschool families are getting, right?

[00:09:58] Because they get educators who get to create an offering that’s just right for them as a teacher. And there’s a lot of good that comes with that, that you don’t have to try to have a one size fits all where every kid inside the school is getting roughly the same thing from each of the second grade teachers.

[00:10:17] Alicia Garcia: Absolutely. And then when the educator is set up for success, ultimately it pours over into the students and the lesson.

[00:10:25] Mike Goldstein: Yeah, I love it. And so now what part of Florida are you in?

[00:10:31] Alicia Garcia: I am in Deerfield Beach, which is a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. So, I’m in South Florida.

[00:10:38] Mike Goldstein: Got it. Okay. And so there you are. And you are part of this larger ecosystem where Florida has these education savings accounts, and it means that some families that are homeschooling are essentially getting up to about $8,000 a year. That they can use towards the education of their kids, including to pay for the kind of wonderful class that you’re offering.

And so, a common question that comes up, it’s really easy for most businesspeople when people pay them the normal way. Here’s my website, hit the button, put your credit card in, it all works. Or they write you a check or whatever it is.

In this case, however, some families are paying you with their scholarship (instead of just writing a check). What is that like as a provider? Is that easy? Is it a pain in the neck? What’s your experience been so far?

[00:11:38] Alicia Garcia: I mean, everything new that you implement comes with challenges. So, it has definitely been a challenge to onboard and just figure out that process and what it looks like for me, what it looks like for the parents on their end as well.

But ultimately, it’s a gift to be able to access more children who sometimes necessarily wouldn’t have been privy to the homeschool community. at all because it wasn’t something that was accessible for their family, but it now is because of this scholarship. So that’s huge.

[00:12:11] Mike Goldstein: That’s huge. And if I were a parent sending my student to your class, would I be first paying and then I’m filing to get the reimbursement? Or is there a button somehow I push, where then as a parent, I don’t even pay at all and the government, the state essentially send you a check directly?

[00:12:34] Alicia Garcia: Correct. So, I’m working towards that. Right now, parents simply register and pay on my website when they’re invoiced or when they get confirmation it comes with an invoice and then they will take that invoice and submit it to the state via their email portal, like through Step Up, and they can get reimbursement.

I was a little apprehensive to become a provider initially when that offering first became available, just because I had spoken to so many peers who were really struggling with getting reimbursement from the state. And just because I’m working with perishable goods, I just don’t have the luxury of waiting.

[00:13:15] They are very much learning what works and what didn’t work, and it’s become a lot more efficient of a system.

And it is something that I am working towards because I would love to be able to incorporate in that capacity. Because I know there are some families who can’t just pay out of pocket.

[00:13:32] And it is a lot easier for parents to just be on their portal and have me as an approved provider and submit payment that way where it just comes directly from the state to me. So now that the state’s kind of making it a more streamlined process, it is definitely something that I will participate in rather than having families wait to be reimbursed.

[00:13:53] Mike Goldstein: Gotcha on that. What’s interesting because I could imagine where philanthropy at some point could come in and say, “Hey, look. If there’s a delay here, we could make it easy for a small entrepreneur like you to say, hey, you got to go buy materials. That’s all guaranteed by us, the philanthropy. We’ll sort of absorb all of the risk of the business, the education person.”

[00:14:17] Because you’re saying, down the road, I’m waiting for a reimbursement, but I’ve had to pay cash to buy the granola, right? And buy the materials. And depends on what’s in the bank account, how easy that is for any particular educator to float that money?

This might be an interesting opportunity for a philanthropy to work with one of the nonprofits in Florida that’s enabling this type of student choice and activating great teachers like you.

[00:14:54] Alicia Garcia: Absolutely. We, myself included, as well as some other colleagues have definitely been able to take advantage of grant funding homeschool entrepreneurs. And that’s been wonderful about closing some gaps. So yeah, we welcome more opportunities like that, for sure, because it makes a huge difference.

[00:15:15] Mike Goldstein: Yeah, well, the wonderful Ron Matus at SUFS has written about (educators like you) – doing all the cool stuff everybody always wished was happening in regular schools.  How do we unlock these people to serve a lot more kids and just unleash more of this really memorable, wow moments from a kid’s point of view?  Where the amazing detail and craft that you’re able to put into your type of home economics, versus what I remember from years ago in school, like I made a pillow, and it was orange.

So that’s what one thing that’s so exciting to me about what you and other edupreneurs are doing.

[00:16:13] Alicia Garcia: Right. And we’re not over capacity, which seems to be the norm in nutritional school settings. It’s really nice to just play to your strengths and really hone your craft to the benefits of your learners.

[00:16:27] Mike Goldstein: So, Alicia, tell us, you have four kids, four foodie kids.  Did you partly or fully homeschool them? What, what’s their education experience been like for you as a mom?

[00:16:43] Alicia Garcia: It has been very eclectic. We have done different things to serve each child at different stages in their life based on what they need. I have. Two kiddos that have IEPs that learn differently. Some are more visual. I have some tinkerers. I have some who are really rambunctious and need to be outside. And so we’ve been really eclectic in incorporating a variety of things that kind of speak to everybody’s strengths and revisiting and re-evaluating and changing whenever they needed it.

[00:17:19] Mike Goldstein: And you, I think you, on your website, you mentioned you also have a chef hubby. So, are your kids all into cooking? And what’s that experience been like for you?

[00:17:42] Alicia Garcia: They are very much all in the kitchen. They have grown up in the kitchen professionally, and then just, of course, just a love of food in our household. We, my husband and I, met in culinary arts school, so this is just like, a love language for us from day one.

And then as our family grew, the demands of being in a traditional food service industry don’t really correlate with family life.  Like it’s nights, weekends, and holidays. And so, my husband took a job the food service for a prestigious private school. And that’s what got us into the world of like food and education, if you will. He then had an opportunity to leave and go to another private school that had special needs children, so they really needed clean food.  The CFO of the school that he was at was moving and asked if he would come with and develop a program.

And he’s, well, I’m great at the food piece, not so great at talking to parents. I’m at home managing my kiddos at this point who are pretty young. And I was like, okay, I can manage the front of house and like the community engagement piece, if you could manage the back of house piece.

[00:18:57] Long story short, we started this, a school lunch catering business off of that because one school was like, well, our kids are special needs, but we want great food too.

And so, we just built this network of schools that we were doing this wonderful food program for, but we had some, push back from the kids because it was healthy foods, which really worked in our household just because we had introduced that from day one, but that’s not necessarily what’s going on in everybody else’s household.

[00:19:24] So that was where the education piece came in. And I said, well, let me start visiting the classrooms and engaging these kids with just like these food for thought. Experiences where we would introduce seasonal ingredients and it’s just no different than I was doing with my kids at home. And when they had that emotional buy-in and were able to taste ingredients and learn a little bit more about it and Hep agency and how they were appreciating it and made all of the difference.

[00:19:51] And I knew that just because that’s what we were doing in our household. And so, it really just blossomed and grew from there. And I was like, let me just continue to bring this to more people because food affects how you feel. It affects your mood. It affects your ability to learn. It affects all of these things that I was able to just see and implement and know for my own household and was like, if we can continue to teach and model, we can bring this to a lot more children.

[00:20:19] My kids are all, they all have a specialty. Two are really into baking. One is really into sandwiches and breakfast things. And one is really into kind of like savory, heavy. Kind of dinner dishes. So, everybody definitely has their skill set. In the kitchen, for sure.

[00:20:38] Mike Goldstein: It sounds like yours is the house everybody wants to go to Thanksgiving for.

[00:20:45] Alicia Garcia: It is indeed.

[00:20:47] Mike Goldstein: No, that’s so cool because one of the arcs here, one of the larger stories, as you know, is there’s 60 million or so school kids in the U.S., most are going to a traditional school of some type.

And in those schools, I would say most kids would describe the food as bad for a whole bunch of reasons.

And there’s all kinds of cross pressures on cost and then the weird politics of school nutrition and all these kinds of things. The result being kids generally it’s like, all right, I’ll put up with the school lunch, but I have the alternative to pack or something like that. So that’s at one end.

[00:21:29] And then there’s…a very bland type of nutrition education.  Anchors on “this is a carbohydrate” and it’s a little bit overly technical and it doesn’t go right into your kind of day by day school experience.

It doesn’t say what are you really eating for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, what is a chicken nugget that you eat a billion of, what is mac and cheese that you’re eating four times a week, what are these choices….and you have this path to get to a place where I think.

[00:22:16] A lot of parents would love for their kids to get to a better place on nutrition. And I think, like you mentioned, in the school that you and your husband went to, kids start so early on the heavily processed stuff. Right. It’s hard to pivot without incurring some pain along the way, and so, I don’t know how, when you look at the larger context, I’m so glad you’re able to do what you do, but do you have any path or advice on how to improve what schools are doing outside of the homeschool context?

[00:22:58] Alicia Garcia: It’s so loaded. And yes, I became obsessed with the connection between as I was onboarding different school accounts just across the board. It was so loaded just at how underwhelming the choices were and how underwhelming the education was around it. I can see why kids are so uninterested. And as far as a path forward, it really requires community advocacy.

[00:23:30] Even if you’re in If you’re in a homeschool collective, if you’re in a private school scenario or in a public school and you’re part of your PTA, you can still make an impact. You should still have a school garden. You should be, even if it’s not enough to supplement anything that’s happening in that cafeteria, it’s still showing the process.

[00:23:55] It’s showing the patience in the process of what slow food looks like. And even if it’s just a sampling to say we grew these tomatoes and have those kids understand the difference of what those tomatoes taste like from the garden versus the grocery store and why. Yes. You’re making an impact. You’re making an impact.

[00:24:16] You engage food Probably more than most things that you learn about in a school day. You engage food at least five times a day. It, it holds a lot of weight and it should. Parents can definitely be part of the process beyond a community garden. If that’s not, it’s still about food literacy. Maybe it’s about the celebration of local resources.

[00:24:43] And that could be just like A school wide potluck, or a specific day or an event, and it could be a Friendsgiving feast that’s close to a holiday celebration that the schools have already budgeted and held space and resources for, that you can then infuse, I don’t know, meatless dishes and talk about the impact of plant forward eating. So, there are definitely ways to do it, but you have to it has to be tangible. You can’t just talk about it. You have to taste it and you have to be in it.

[00:25:15] Mike Goldstein: Yeah. No, it’s fascinating. It also hits on one of the interesting third rails of these education savings accounts because a parent could reasonably argue (but I don’t think this would be approved in Florida, Arizona, West Virginia, and so forth)….they could say, “A normal public school is providing lunch with their tax dollars. I would like to use my education savings account to provide a high quality or lunch for my kid.”

I don’t think food is usually in that context allowable under the ESA state laws. I’m not 100 percent sure if that’s correct.

[00:25:52] Alicia Garcia: I don’t believe so. And I know like even there were some schools that we chose not to work with because there were state guidelines and stipulations about what our meals had to include. And if I didn’t want to include cow’s milk, it was a problem because it was part of the approved composition of what the meal needed to include every day. It’s so much.

[00:26:16] Mike Goldstein: It’s so much. It’s because at some level, I operated a school. There’s so much regulation. It’s just like thousands of pages across every possible thing that you do. And what it does is, of course, it just depletes the kind of organic connection that you’re able to get by going right to the kid.

So, one last sort of train of questions I’m just curious about with your four kids, and I don’t know the timing of the education savings account.

Were you, as a parent, have you been at all able to use these ESAs for your own children?

[00:26:53] Alicia Garcia: Yes, my kids are 19, 18, 12, and 10. So, my biggies, not so much. But my little ones now, yes, and it’s been wonderful, it’s been really wonderful.

[00:27:09] Mike Goldstein: Alicia, just walk through real quick, here are three or four things that I’m buying with the Education Savings Account, whether those are services and experiences, or whether those are materials, what’s some of the stuff?

[00:27:22] Alicia Garcia: So yeah, classes for sure. Surf State Science is a wonderful STEM, are you familiar?

[00:27:29] Mike Goldstein: Yes. I know Toni and Uli, yeah, love them.

[00:27:34] Alicia Garcia: So wonderful programming like that is just again, speaks to our philosophy of just really hands on tangible learning. That’s like a wonderful thing to be able to have my kids be a part of, as well as musical theater programs in our community…

[00:28:04] Mike Goldstein: Go a little deeper on that.  Who provides it? What does it cost? What is your kid cast in a show? What’s it like, the musical theater stuff?

[00:28:15] Alicia Garcia: Right. So, I have a bookworm who needs to be forced to interact and engage a little more and stories have been a beautiful way for him to do that.

And so, for him to kind of audition for a homeschool musical theater program, we have a wonderful provider that’s local to South Florida, Miss Marie. She works with a wonderful selection of different homeschool groups here locally.

And we’ll put on a production. We will audition, we will be assigned different roles, we will help with everything from, obviously, on doing this wonderful performance, but even like the stage production, and like, Building the set. So, it’s really cool for these kids to be a part of it. And it’s really gotten my Gabriel out of his comfort zone completely.

[00:29:08] And just really able to connect with community in a different way and bring something that he loves out of him and just engage community and find peers and others that are just like minded. And that’s something that we. Probably couldn’t necessarily afford to maintain or do on a regular basis without access to this scholarship funding.

[00:29:28] And also just the bandwidth to be able to do it. Life is busy for kids is a lot. So being able to do that during kind of unconventional school hours as instead of like the weekends or the evenings when you also have a million other things to do and you just want to have some downtime with your family has been a beautiful thing to be able to do.

[00:29:48] for him to participate in because of the scholarship. Um, so aside from programming, like supplies has been huge too. Um, you know, a food family like ours, it’s been really cool to buy different things that you can use in the kitchen that he necessarily, my little one Penelope as well, like a pasta maker and just different utensils and things outside that we treat like art supplies, but we just use for kind of food labs.

[00:30:16] So, it’s been wonderful to be able to have access to all of those things, uh, additional to like. Curriculums that, and books that go deeper into the movement of food and people throughout time that we’ve now are incorporating to our social studies lessons and then making, I don’t know, arepas because we’ve now broken down this corn that we’ve learned about.

[00:30:39] Mike Goldstein: I love it. So I hope Penelope and Gabriel have an awesome coming school year as we, we launch into the new year. I just love what you’re doing! It’s just so great! You’re meeting people where they are, you’re bringing something you’re passionate about, you’re building an experience that, like, perfectly fits the way you want to roll.

And I like that this scholarship is unlocking some families that otherwise could not have found this experience for their kids. And I think loosely my 25 years in education, I do think some kids do traditional schools pretty well. It just works for them.

But a big chunk of kids, I don’t know, my personal estimates like 40%, traditional school is just not a great fit.  And you got the rambunctious one over here, the severe introvert over here. It’s just not the right thing for everybody.

And so I always admired homeschoolers. As, that’s it, it’s not working for you, mama’s coming in, that sort of mama bear, “I’m getting you out of this thing that’s not working.” But I was always daunted by how much then the parent, like, wow, you gotta provide so much.

[00:31:55] Alicia Garcia: Right.

[00:31:55] Mike Goldstein: And with the ESA, I’m hearing these stories where about what your week-to-week life as a parent can now include. The same kinds of stuff that my wife and I are buying for our kids without an education savings account, so we’re like buying these things, and it’s these things that our kids seem to remember so much, five years later, ten years later, and so, I’m gratified to hear of your journey and really appreciate you, you sharing it with us today.

[00:32:28] Alicia Garcia: Thank you so much. And if you think about like nostalgic memories, food plays a huge part of it. So, it’s just a great gateway to so much. And to so much, yeah.

[00:32:41] Mike Goldstein: It is. Project Flourish Community will put a link to your wonderful website. And people can learn more there who followed along with the story. And Alicia, thank you, and I hope you have a great afternoon.

[00:32:56] Alicia Garcia: You as well. Thank you so much for having me.