Marin teacher Dana Swisher certainly has a green thumb. The 2025 Marin “Teacher of the Year” has grown school gardens and she has helped her students grow a love for gardening and a greater awareness about our environment.
Her work has also grown numerous honors and grants, the latest a $300,000 state grant to turn a quarter-acre section of vacant space at Corte Madera Town Park into a native plant garden. The grant expands work that Swisher has already started at the park. Bare ground will soon be growing milkweed, coffeeberry shrubs, flowering buckwheat and manzanita.
Many Marin schools have student-tended gardens, often focusing on raising native plants that benefit local insects and birds. It’s a place where students learn how plants grow and their role in the local ecology, from bees and butterflies to hummingbirds and their feathered friends that feed off seeds and berries.
Swisher has taken that work up a notch. Her work and leadership earned her a prestigious 2022 Presidential Innovation Award for Environmental Education from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
She and her students at Neil Cummins Elementary School in Corte Madera have created a campus garden – Hawks’ Garden – a place where the second-grade teacher says she sees a “a growing awareness of and appreciation for environmental sustainability.” Kindergartners through fifth-graders – and parent volunteers – work together to grow a garden filled with fruit trees, vegetables, herbs and native grasses, bushes and shrubs. While growing plants, the work also includes lesson plans, organizing monthly work days, sustainable gardening practices and donating food to community groups.
Her latest gardens build on that success.
That includes turning land in front of Hall Middle School in Larkspur into a native garden and another on a half-acre next to Larkspur’s new library, which is under construction. Planting milkweed and other plants favored by monarch butterflies will be one of the focuses, creating “waystations” for migrating monarchs, whose numbers have declined in recent years.
Students from Hall and nearby Redwood High School would be involved in designing and tending the gardens.
Swisher is also working on plans to create a community garden at Cove Park in Corte Madera and a garden on the San Rafael campus of Dominican University of California.
Her work has been teaching youngsters and adults, alike.
The state grant was awarded by the California Wildlife Conservation Board to the Petaluma-based conservation nonprofit Point Blue and Refugia Marin, Swisher’s nonprofit.
Swisher is a terrific pick for Marin “Teacher of the Year,” a selection made by Jim Carroll, Marin’s superintendent of schools. There are many terrific teachers across Marin to choose from.
Dana Swisher’s accomplishments make her a natural – pun well-intended.
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