Finding Sanctuary
School life can be chaotic. Leona Vrbanac thinks there should be grace.
Leona Vrbanac teaches Family Consumer Sciences, or what used to be called Home Ec, at Newark High School. She has been using a unique approach, one that includes keeping a garden. Her hope was that this garden would help ground and center her students. Instead, it almost drove her to her breaking point. Until it didn't. Listen to the story here.
“Hot! Hot! Hot!”
Leona Vrbanac is pulling a pizza out of an oven spilling out smoke. A gaggle of boys are hunching over, trying to get a glimpse of their pie. Most of her students — high schoolers at Newark High School — are standing around her. The remaining few are a couple yards away in a hammock.
The November breeze whips the lone hammock around. The cold is as uncertain as these teenagers.
A few feet away from Leona, two students are giggling to themselves. A girl in a black hoodie, Mariah, and her sidekick are standing in the corner. They’re leaning into each other with their hands protecting their secrets.
“Where did my pepperoni go?”
One of the boys steps up next to Leona, replacing his friend who wasn’t asking enough questions. It looks like their pepperoni had fallen off. Or worse, burned off. Leona tells them to go make another one.
The boys are back to the drawing board. The girls begin to put their plan into place. Mariah is leading Grace to Leona, while Grace keeps her head faced toward the ground. Once they get to Leona, they stand around for a second, feeling out the energy.
Mariah brushes her black hair out of her face and fixes her glasses. Leona swings her lanyard full of keys over her shoulder, as she carefully slides in the boys’ fresh pizza.
“Ms. Vrbanac,” Mariah says, “can I go to the bathroom?”
Leona is focused on the pizza. The boys are standing beside her. They’re crossing their fingers that their pizza can support pepperoni this time. She holds her finger up, pausing. She gives the girls that teacher look. The group falls silent. Then she’s steadily sliding the pizza into the oven. Slowly, to make sure absolutely no pepperoni falls off. She’s standing back up right now.
She processes what the girls said.
“Yes,” she says, “but you can’t go alone.”
Mariah squeezes Grace’s hand. Grace starts smirking. Everything’s going according to plan. Leona starts to reach for her lanyard. Grace gets out her phone and starts typing vigorously. Leona is handing Mariah the keys, while she smiles innocently.
The girls turn around and lock arms. They start skipping toward the school, with the lanyard swinging between them.
Leona turns back to the miniature pizza oven and peers in. Everything looks good so far. The boys haven’t taken their eyes off the pizza.
There’s a swarm of students around the pizza oven, which Leona said was surprising. Maybe it was the smell of fresh pizza. Maybe it was because school on Halloween is extra jittery.
On a normal day in the garden, the students would rather sit on the tables in the pavilion and chat. They talk about dreading going to practice after class because coach was going to make them run laps.
Others would take turns on the wooden swing set that students built in a bed of flowers. Pink and yellow flowers sprout around the base of the wooden frame. A moment of peace and quiet.
It was certainly Ronald’s favorite spot. The bright green seat boldly contrasted his purple button-up that was almost as royal as the throne he claimed.
The wind was howling today. Leona said this is probably why the boys’ pepperoni didn’t hold up the first time around. The wind was pushing the smoke out of the pizza oven and into the garden, carrying the delightful scent of baking bread over to the hammocks. One of the students gets up from the hammock and makes his way over to the pavilion. His name is Ben. He’s sitting on a bench that faces the swing set where Ronald is. I can hear them talking about the pea plants they planted the week before. Ben is worried that it’s going to get too cold for them to sprout over the winter. Ronald reassures him that the garden knows the best time to bloom.
Fall never really came in 2024. A dry spell in Ohio caused the year's harvest for The Sanctuary to be mainly woody herbs. Thyme, oregano, basil and lavender were plentiful. Leona says that’s why her class has been making so many breads and sauces. And tea. Leona and her students try to make a new, unique blend of tea using their own herbs everyday.
Earlier in the year, her students made their own grain mill so they could make baked goods during class time. Throughout the year, they’ve made cookies, focaccia, and cakes. Leona brings in her own tomatoes from her home garden and what’s left of the tomatoes from the school garden. Some classes were spent preparing the sauces for days like today: A day where they can taste the fruits of their labor. Before coming outside, the classroom filled with the smell of sautéed garlic and tomatoes, something these students rarely experience.
The sun is peeking through the orange leaves. The wind blows in gusts. Students have begun to put the gardens to bed.
“I think you guys just made the best looking pizza all year,” Leona says to the group of boys still by her side.
The boys all lean in to grab a look at the same time, blocking Leona from placing the pizza on the table next to the oven. They’re studying their pizza, relieved to see all their pepperoni remains.
It’s beginning to rain now. The sky quickly turned gray and made up its mind. It was time to go back inside.
“Class, class!”
This is Leona’s attention getter.
“Yes, yes.”
The students respond much less enthusiastically. The boys, still by the pizza oven, begin dragging their feet to their makeshift cooking station set up outside. The rest of the class is dispersed among the garden. In hammocks, on swings, or sitting on table tops– they’re soaking in the last bit of the class time outside.
Ronald gets up from the swing. A sunflower falls out of his pocket and onto the ground. He bends down to pick it up, brushing it off before sticking it back in his pocket. The sky is getting darker and soon enough Ronald’s sunflower is the only speckle of light around.
The class is cleaning up from their day outside. Hammocks are folded. Shovels are hung up. The pizza oven is still smoking, but that’s a problem for Leona after school. Once their clean-up tasks are done, the students migrate back to their classroom.
The class is always filled with chatter, but after a day outside, Leona says it’s slightly too quiet. Leona is at one of the sinks, scrubbing a jar that was used for sauce. She dries it and hangs an embroidered rag back onto the dishwasher. Walking over to her desk, she’s surveying the class, doing a headcount.
She realizes she’s missing two students. She checks the pantry, no extra kids there. Back at her desk, she picks up her clipboard. She gives me a look. I meet her at her desk and she points out on her paper the missing students. Mariah and Grace.
“Do you mind watching the class for just a minute?”
I shake my head. She grabs her lanyard. Leona moves fast, her apron swishing around her as she whisks out of the room.
Shortly after, Leona is walking in with Mariah and Grace trailing behind her. “They were in the bathroom,” Leona says to me, clearly frustrated. I shrug to avoid getting in the middle of it. Before Leona could walk any further into her classroom, Ben meets her at the door.
“Ms. Vrbanac, do you know where Ronald put our pizza?”
She says no and asks if Ben asked Ronald. Ben said he couldn’t find Ronald.
“What do you mean you can’t find Ronald?”
Ben says he assigned himself the task of putting the tools back into the shed while Ronald put the weeds from the garden beds into compost. Ben assumed Ronald just went back inside after he was done with the compost.
There’s three loud knocks at the door adjacent to the building. Through the glass, a purple orb stands. Leona walks to the door and opens it for Ronald.
“Ms. Vrbanac! You have to see this!”
Ronald hands his phone over to Leona. I walk around to her side so I can get a glance too.
Through his cracked screen, he shows us an upclose picture of a monarch butterfly gently resting atop one of the flowers from the garden bed he’d been tending. Its intricate patterns are painted on the screen.
“I’ve never seen anything like this! We were just sittin’ there together,” Ronald says, proud to have caught this moment of peace, even if just for a moment.
Chaos in the Garden
Every day in the garden looks different. Some days look like moving pounds of mulch to flower beds, planting new seeds for next harvest, or returning to school after a month-long expulsion. Experience one day in autumn, 2024, in this observational documentary.
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