For parents and guardians

What your student does on the farm crew, and what you decide.

Your student brought home a packet from the Sustainable Gardens farm at their school. Here's what they'd do, what the app keeps, and what's up to you. The first pilot farms are planned to start in January 2027.

Run at your school by Sustainable Support Team, a 501(c)(3) public charity.

What your student does

Students grow lettuce, kale, and herbs on towers at school, outside class time, and give what's fit to donate to a local food pantry.
They train in the app, then at a real tower, before they do any task on their own.
After training, students do daily tower care with no adult present. That includes adding plant food and a diluted pH solution the coordinator prepares. They wear the gloves and eye protection we supply for that step, and every supply station has an eyewash bottle. Students 15 and under don't add plant food or pH solution.
Their coordinator, the adult at school who runs the farm, checks every tower each week.

What you decide

Your student can't take a duty until you sign the parent packet, on paper. It describes every task and includes an emergency and medical form. Your school can add its own forms.
You can say no to dosing in the packet. Then your student won't add plant food or pH solution.
There's no parent account. Your student adds one emergency contact, a name and a phone number, for their coordinator to use.

Notes and notifications

There's no messaging between students. Students can leave notes about a tower for their farm crew. Each note is checked before it posts, anyone can report one, and the coordinator can remove it.
Your student's phone asks before the app can send notifications, and none are sent between 9 pm and 7 am. Notifications never carry streaks, rewards, or "come back" messages.

What the app keeps

Your district's data office signs a student data agreement with us before any student joins.
The app keeps what a service record needs: your student's full name, personal email, school, and graduation year, plus their birth month and year (never the day), which it uses only for the age rules, such as the one on dosing.
It also keeps the times they're free to work, their shifts, tower readings, a photo of the tower each visit, and a short reflection after each shift, spoken or typed. We keep the text and delete the recording.
A tower photo with a person in it is never shown to the farm crew, and it's deleted.
When your student checks in, the phone works out whether they're at the garden and sends us only that answer, never their location.
The app contains no analytics or advertising code from other companies.
Some features use AI services, such as turning a spoken reflection into text and helping draft a recommendation letter with your student's name taken out. The app asks your student before anything of theirs first goes to an AI service, and typing is always offered instead of speaking.
Your student can download everything the app holds about them, or delete their account, at any time. A few records stay after deletion, such as the farm's harvest weights and anonymous hour totals. The app's privacy notice will list them.

The app's privacy notice will list everything the app keeps, who can see each part, and every company that handles student data for us, including the AI services. We'll publish it on this site before any student joins.

What your student gets

A signed record of every shift: the date, the work done, and the adult who attested it. Your school, or a scholarship program, decides what the hours count toward.

Questions?

Ask your student's coordinator, or email support@sustainablegardens.com.

Read the page for students

Last updated October 2026.

Sustainable Gardens is a program of Sustainable Support Team, Inc. (SST). In this notice, "we" means SST.

This website sets no cookies, runs no scripts, and shows no advertising. Everything on it comes from this site, and it loads nothing from any other website. There's no account, and it doesn't build a profile of you or follow you around the web. Your Light or Dark choice is never sent to us.

Like every website, this one is delivered by a web host, Cloudflare. To deliver pages and block attacks, it processes each visitor's IP address and basic request details, such as the page requested and the browser used. We use that information only to keep the site secure, never to identify or follow visitors.

If you email support@sustainablegardens.com, we use what you send to answer you and to follow up on what you asked about. Your email is delivered by Google Workspace, our email provider, and read by the company that builds and runs Sustainable Gardens for SST. We never sell it or use it for marketing. To ask us to delete what you've sent, email support@sustainablegardens.com, and we'll delete it unless the law requires us to keep it.

If you use the school enquiry form, we collect your name, your email address, your role, your school's name, city, and state, and when you'd like to start, plus your school district and anything else you write, if you give them. Your enquiry is saved first in a database that Convex runs for us. Then our web host, Cloudflare, emails it to the company that builds and runs Sustainable Gardens for SST, which reads it and replies to you. That email is delivered by Google Workspace, our email provider.

Our web host limits how many enquiries one internet connection can send in a minute, to stop abuse. Your IP address isn't saved with your enquiry or sent to the database.

We keep saved enquiries, and the emails about them, as SST's record of which schools have asked about Sustainable Gardens. We don't delete them on a schedule. Enquiries our spam check flags are never emailed, and once a day we delete any that are more than 14 days old. If a student sends us the form, we reply once to ask them to have a teacher contact us, and then we delete what they sent. A deleted enquiry can stay in the database company's own records for a short time before it's erased for good.

We use your enquiry to reply to you and, if your school goes ahead, to set your school up in the Sustainable Gardens app. We never sell it or use it for marketing. To ask us to delete your enquiry, email support@sustainablegardens.com, and we'll delete it from our database and our mailboxes unless the law requires us to keep it.

This notice covers this website only. The Sustainable Gardens app will have its own privacy notice, saying what the app keeps and who can see it. We'll publish it on this site before any student joins.

This site isn't meant for children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their information. Questions about privacy? Email support@sustainablegardens.com.

What your student does on the farm crew, and what you decide.