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Schools

Los Altos Hills Resident, Jan Tuttle, is a Star Adviser

Mills High School teacher brings home state award for how she inspires students through cooking and organic gardening.

When teacher Jan Tuttle started an FHA-HERO chapter at Mills High School five years ago, only a couple students had any interest and it was hard convincing students and parents to attend a two-day leadership meeting.

Maybe the old-school description of a national home economics career technical student organization didn’t sound like the coolest thing. On the other hand, perhaps this will:

This past April, Tuttle took 16 students to the state’s leadership meeting in Fresno and her kids brought home top honors from among the 800 students from across the state. It's all about the food. And where it comes from. Some of her foodie kids over the years have gone to culinary schools.

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That wasn’t the half of it. Tuttle received the star advisor teacher of the year award for FHA-HERO.

“It was a big deal for our whole school,” said Tuttle. “Out of the 135 chapters they selected seven regional star advisors, and then from that group they selected the star advisor.”

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Tuttle’s students took first place in nutrition education for a presentation on obesity and first place in energy conservation for a presentation on going green and green roofs. The chapter also was recognized as an honor chapter for its organizational activities and its leadership activities available to students.

The national competitions, to be held in Anaheim, will be Tuttle’s first national meeting where she will take seven students.

After that first sparse year for the HERO program, her students took a leap of faith, embracing the program and helping it to blossom.“On holidays and things when other people are relaxing and going skiing and doing other things she’s traveling with her students and taking them to competitions to give them opportunities that they may not otherwise have,” said Carol Webster Millie, a longtime friend whose children went to school with Tuttle’s children at in Los Altos Hills, where Tuttle also served as PTA president.

Tuttle grew up on a farm in Minnesota with cooks all around her. Her mother was a great cook, her grandmother was a great baker and her grandfather always had a vegetable garden. These experiences and qualities carried over to her life as a mother and a teacher.

It’s no surprise that Tuttle not only has been a home economics teacher at Mills High School for 16 years, teaching a nutrition class as well as a culinary arts class, but also used a $500 grant to bring to fruition her vision of creating an organic garden at the school.

As a teacher at high school, Tuttle’s classes teach students how to prepare food, where their food comes from and how to make wise food choices. “They’re all at the point where they can start making decisions of what they’re eating,” Tuttle said.

“And so I think the more that they know about their food selection and how to read labels and be aware of food content, the nutritional content of things, they can start making wise choices.”

The organic garden that Tuttle incorporates into her classes features eight large, waist-high planting beds that help students understand where their food comes from. The garden also is completely wheelchair accessible with decomposed granite walkways and 12 fruit trees that bear mandarin oranges, naval oranges, lemons, limes, pear and apricot. Students are required to spend at least one hour in the garden per semester, although they typically spend longer. Spending time in the garden helps them see food from beginning to end, planting to harvesting.

In Tuttle’s culinary arts class, students learn different cooking techniques as well as how to prepare healthy snacks and quick dinners that they can make now or when they go to college.

One of Tuttle students was considering dropping out of high school, when he found his way into her class. “He felt at home and it’s been a real turnaround for him,” Tuttle said. “He found direction and he wants to go to culinary school.”

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