"The Final Straw": A Yorkville School Says Its Kids' Garden Has Been Targeted for Months

c/o Mis Amiguitos

For five years, a family-run Yorkville preschool has used the bare tree bed outside its front door as an outdoor classroom. This year, somebody started tearing it apart. The school says it spent more than $1,000 on barriers to protect the plot, and the barriers vanished overnight. Flowers were stomped and pulled out by the roots. Then, on Monday morning, the kids arrived to find that what they’d been growing since April had been cut off at the base and thrown in the trash.

It was corn, several feet tall and about a month from harvest.

The school is Mis Amiguitos, a Spanish immersion Montessori program near 84th Street and York Avenue that enrolls children as young as three. Staff told FOX 5 the students planted the corn in April and spent the summer watering it and watching it climb, with plans to paint some of it for fall decorations and cook the rest into tamales together. Neighbors had taken to stopping on the sidewalk to admire it and photograph it. A school assistant was in tears when she found the stalks stuffed into a nearby trash receptacle.

The tree bed had been empty for years before the kids got to it. By the school’s account, a delivery truck uprooted the shade tree that once stood there and NYC Parks never put in a replacement. Rather than let the space become a dog litter box, staff and students planted it themselves, first with pumpkins, then sunflowers, and this year with corn.

In an Instagram post published Monday, the school called the loss of the corn “the final straw” and said it was heartbroken, devastated and angry, describing the damage as children’s work being deliberately targeted. The post asked followers to tag local news outlets, NYC Parks, precinct representatives and city officials in the comments, and said the school was filing a police report and trying to secure camera footage.

The NYPD responded to the scene and filed a report, according to the FOX 5 report. The Parks Department told the station it had no role in removing the plants, and that growing crops in a city tree bed is entirely legal and something the city actively encourages.

No one has been identified. It also isn’t clear whether the person or people who cut down the corn are the same ones behind the missing barriers and the ripped-out flowers earlier this season, or whether the earlier incidents were reported to police at the time.

The school says it isn’t giving up on the bed.

UPDATE: After the initial reports surfaced, Fox 5 NY obtained surveillance footage of a man getting off a Citi Bike and ripping off the cornstalks. Here’s the video (and we’re embedding it below).