On a cool Friday morning, Joy Carter made her way into Richard N. Fickett Elementary School in the Ben Hill section neighborhood and down a hall towards a classroom full of students. Under her arm was a box of praying mantises, which were going to be hand-delivered to a garden on the school grounds. That’s if they didn’t find their way out of the box first.
Carter, an Atlanta native and former educator in the Atlanta Public School system for 20 years, and the owner and operator of Bee Free Farm, planned to use the insects to help keep away some of the pests that feed on crops.
“I love it, I love seeing them exploring and learning,” Carter said as the students watched the mantises crawl out of the box and onto the pants below. Other students made their way to the chicken coop to see if there were any eggs that had been laid, while another kid used his laptop to look up the best environment for the mantises. Jr., a brown-skinned boy wearing a thin gold chain, finished his research and learned bushes are the best place for mantises to hide and better be able to eat all of the flies and grubs they can handle.
Directing traffic in the school’s greenspace between the building and the playground, a smile creeps across Carter’s face. She spent decades educating Black children like these and continues to do so in a different way these days.
“My farm is now my classroom,” said Carter, a mother of five who wears her natural hair in curls, and can often be seen in overalls and yellow rubber boots. “I still enjoy seeing the kids want to learn. They get excited about learning to grow things.”
Photo by Donnell Suggs/The Atlanta Voice
Carter started…
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