Spotlight
When Lois Brink’s children were in elementary school, she remembers being struck by how uninviting their schoolyards were. She described them as “scorched earth” — fields of dirt that had been sprayed with herbicide for decades, and a few outdated playground equipment. But instead of seeing only problems, Brink, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Colorado Denver, saw fertile ground for solutions. Over the next 12 years, she led an effort to transform nearly 100 elementary school yards across Denver into more vibrant, green spaces she called “learning landscapes.”
Only in public schools Approximately 2 million acres of land While comprehensive data is hard to come by in the United States, the scorched earth phenomenon Brink witnessed is the norm in many places; about 36% of public school students nationwide attend school in areas considered heat islands, according to the Trust for Public Land. Expanding green spaceA lack of trees and other plants in schoolyards tends to be more prevalent in low-income and Black and Brown neighborhoods.
“It really makes sense to think about how these spaces can serve environmental justice and resiliency goals that benefit well-being, development, learning, social cohesion and communities thrive,” said Priya Cook, director of Green Schoolyards and Communities. Children and Nature NetworkOne organization working to advance this goal is the The benefits of green schoolyards translate into economic valueWe focus on Denver as a case study and use data from Brink’s research.
Before and after images of McGlone Elementary School in Denver, one of the Learning Landscape Schools. Courtesy of Lois Brink
Incorporating factors such as school attendance and academic achievement, carbon sequestration and stormwater retention, as well as overall community health and public safety, the report estimated that communities could see more than $3 in benefits for every dollar invested in green schoolyards.
In Denver, schools that implemented learning landscapes saw improvements in math and writing scores, as well as overall school performance (a measure that combines factors such as grades, graduation rates, dropout rates, and participation rates). The study is not conclusive. But the study notes that “if green schoolyards can improve student achievement in elementary school, they are likely to have a positive impact on high school graduation rates as well,” resulting in better employment outcomes and increased tax revenue. The study also concludes that opening green schoolyards to the public can further increase the benefits. Previous studies, for example, have shown that property values within 500 feet of a park can increase by up to 5 percent.
For Cook, putting a monetary value on the benefits of greening school yards does more than help schools think about how to spend their limited budgets. It opens up new avenues for fundraising. “School districts are notoriously underfunded,” Cook points out. “And this is a strategy that benefits the whole of society. So the funding has to come from organizations in sectors like community development, economic development, public health, that are thinking about whole-child, whole-community, societal-level outcomes.”
After a “light bulb” moment at his own children’s school, Brink enlisted graduate students to help design a better alternative. Realizing the school district didn’t have the funds to execute their idea, they raised the money themselves and piloted it at his children’s Bromwell Elementary School. “We realized that if you raise money for something, the district is probably much more willing to do something different and rethink what a schoolyard is as a public space,” Brink said.
This approach convinced the district to expand the effort to other schools. In 2000, Brink formed the Learning Landscape Alliance, a public-private partnership with help from the city, local nonprofits, and contractors who provided their services pro bono to keep costs down. Over the next three years, they worked with the community to design and remodel 22 schoolyards in Denver’s industrial area.
“What we were trying to convince the district was that they needed to completely transform each schoolyard,” Brink said. Each project was unique in both design and implementation process. At one school, for example, many of the parents happened to work in the landscaping industry, so they volunteered with contractors to install irrigation and sod. At another school that serves a predominantly Latino student body, the team designed raised planters that mimicked Aztec geometric patterns, Brink said.
In 2003 and 2008, the Denver Public Schools Board proposed and citywide voters passed ballot measures to secure funding for expanded renovations throughout the city. “Sixty percent of the voters in our city are child-free, and yet the measure passed overwhelmingly every time,” Brink says. “It was really great to see that level of engagement.”
Before and after photos of Schmidt Elementary School in 2011. Courtesy of Lois Brink
After all, between 2000 and 2012, the Learning Landscapes Initiative transformed every public elementary school site in Denver, a total of 306 acres, into green schoolyards.
And all the while, Brink kept collecting data. Last December, she produced a report for the Children & Nature Network. Analyzing key takeaways from the learning landscape (This formed the basis for a study on the economic benefits of green schoolyards more broadly.) Other impacts noted in the report included a 7 percent reduction in student mobility (the rate at which students transfer between schools), a $1.3 million increase in state funding due to increased student enrollment, and 1,284 tons of carbon sequestered annually across the green schoolyards.
Green schoolyards may seem like an obvious solution, with so many benefits for students, communities and the environment, but there are barriers to turning every schoolyard into a green space, a vision the Children & Nature Network hopes to achieve by 2050, said Priya Cook.
Cost is one obvious factor, but Cook says that often more important than the actual dollar amount is the initiative taken to bring together diverse stakeholders to make the project a reality. Brink and her students scraped together the resources to make their vision a reality in Denver, using a combination of volunteer labor, pro bono services, and public and nonprofit funding.
Ironically, Cook noted, a major barrier to finding funding for green schoolyards lies in one of their greatest strengths: multifaceted solutions. “The market tends to underinvest in strategies that have broad benefits to society,” she said. For example, if a school, nonprofit, or other funder wants to make changes to prioritize students’ mental health, they’re likely to invest their limited funds in counseling programs and other targeted interventions, and never think of something like access to nature. Improve your mental healthIn addition to other perks,
“Selecting multiple problem-solving interventions requires thinking differently,” Cook said.
Still, she hopes to see more research on green schoolyards and get more stakeholders involved.
“I think there’s definitely more people asking for it,” she says, “and people are doing it in really creative ways. Some places are investing millions of dollars in one location, and some places are getting small grants and doing a lot of ground-level installations that are changing kids’ experiences every day.”
— Claire Elise Thompson
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A former student of Brink’s, Areti Buschow, now runs a nonprofit organization. Play Now The organization, which helps manage the garden at Ellis Elementary School, one of Colorado’s most diverse elementary schools, also serves the broader community, notably working with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a humanitarian aid and refugee resettlement organization that has an office nearby. Some plots are set aside for resettled families, and the team distributes produce free of charge to students at the school as well as newly arrived refugee families. “We’ve really taken what Learning Landscapes started and built on it,” Buschow says. In this photo from an activity day with the IRC, youth participants touch and smell the “sensory plants.”
