The spotlight
When Lois Brink’s children were in elementary school, she remembers being struck by how uninviting their school yard was. She described it as “scorched earth” — little more than a dirt field covered in “I don’t know how many decades of weed retardant” and some outdated playground equipment. But Brink, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Colorado Denver, didn’t just see a problem. She saw fertile ground for a solution. Over the next dozen years, she helped lead a transformation of nearly 100 elementary school grounds across Denver into more vibrant, greener spaces, called “Learning Landscapes.”
Public schools only cover about 2 million hectares of land in the U.S. Although comprehensive data is hard to come by, the “scorched earth” that Brink saw is the norm in many places—according to the Trust for Public Land, about 36 percent of the nation’s public school students attend school in what would be considered a heat island. And as written large with green spacesa lack of schoolyard trees and other vegetation tends to be most common in lower-income areas and Black and brown neighborhoods.
“It really makes sense to think about how those spaces can serve well-being, development, learning and social cohesion — and also environmental justice and resilience goals that can help a community thrive,” said Priya Cook, director of green school farms and communities. at Children and Nature Networkone organization working to further this goal. The org recently published a report looking at how the benefits of green school farms translate into economic valuefocusing on Denver as a case study and using data from Brink’s work.
A before and after image of McGlone Elementary in Denver, one of the Learning Landscapes schools. Courtesy of Lois Brink
By including factors such as school attendance and academic scores, carbon sequestration and rainwater retention, and overall community health and public safety, the report estimated that communities could realize a return of more than $3 for every $1 invested in green school farms.
In Denver, Learning Landscapes schools saw increases in math and writing scores and overall school performance (a measure that combines factors such as academic scores and graduation, dropout and participation rates). And while this research is not definitive, the study said that “if green school farms can improve student achievement in elementary school, it likely has a positive impact on high school graduation rates.” This in turn leads to improved employment outcomes and increased tax revenue. The study also concluded that benefits are enhanced if green school farms are made available to the public. For example, previous research has shown that property values increase by as much as 5 percent when the properties are within 500 feet of a park.
For Cook, turning the benefits of greening school farms into a monetary value is about more than helping schools think about how to spend their limited budgets – it’s about opening up new funding avenues. “School districts are notoriously underfunded,” Cook noted. “And this is a strategy that benefits the whole society. And so the funding has to come from organizations in community development, economic development, public health — these sectors that think about the whole child, the whole community, community-level outcomes.
After Brink’s aha moment at her own children’s school, she decided to get her postgraduate students at the university involved in designing a better alternative. Realizing that the school district didn’t have the money to implement their vision, they raised the funds themselves to install a pilot at Bromwell Elementary, the school her children attended. “Then we realized that when you raise the money for something, the district is much more willing to maybe do things unconventionally and rethink what a schoolyard can look like as a civic space,” said Brink.
That approach got the school district on board to expand the initiative to other schools. In 2000, Brink founded the Learning Landscape Alliance, a public-private partnership with support from the city, local nonprofits and contractors willing to donate pro bono services to keep costs down. Over the next three years, they worked with communities to design and transform 22 school sites in Denver’s industrial sickle.
“What we tried to convince the district of is that every schoolyard must be a total transformation,” said Brink. Each project was unique, both in its design and in the process it took to implement it. For example, Brink recalls at one school, many of the parents happened to work in the landscaping industry, so they volunteered their time with the contractors, irrigating and laying sod. At another school that served primarily Latino students, Brink said, the team designed raised planters that mimic Aztec geometry.
In 2003, and then again in 2008, the Denver Public School Board proposed a ballot measure, and voters passed citywide to set aside funding to expand the conversions throughout the city. “You had a city where 60 percent of the voters did not have children. And yet it passed overwhelmingly every time,” said Brink. “It was really, really great to see that kind of engagement.”
Before and after photos of Schmitt Primary School in 2011. Courtesy of Lois Brink
All told, between 2000 and 2012, the Learning Landscapes initiative transformed every single public elementary school campus in Denver into a green schoolyard, 306 acres in all.
And all the while Brink was collecting data. In December last year, she produced a report for Children & Nature Network analyze some of the key takeaways from Learning Landscapes (which formed the basis of his study on the economic benefits of green school farms more broadly). Among other things, the report noted a 7 percent reduction in student mobility (the rate at which students transfer in and out of a school), a $1.3 million boost in state funding thanks to increased student enrollment, and 1,284 tons of carbon which is sequestered every year. over all the green schoolyards.
With all the benefits of green school farms, for students, communities and the environment, this may seem like a simple solution. Still, there are barriers to turning every schoolyard into a green space — a vision Children & Nature Network hopes to help realize by 2050, Priya Cook said.
Cost is one obvious one. But even more than the actual dollars, Cook said, it’s often the initiative needed to bring diverse stakeholders together to make a project happen — which Brink and her students did when they scraped together the resources to build their vision in Denver, through a combination of volunteer labor, pro bono services, and public and nonprofit dollars.
Ironically, Cook noted, a significant obstacle to finding the funding for green school farms lies in one of their greatest strengths: it’s a multi-faceted solution. “Markets tend to underinvest in strategies that have broad societal benefits,” she said. For example, if a school, nonprofit, or other funder wants to make changes to prioritize student mental health, it might invest its limited money in counseling programs or other targeted interventions, rather than thinking about something like nature access—although access to nature improve mental healthin addition to other benefits.
“We need to think differently about choosing multi-solvent interventions,” Cook said.
Still, she is hopeful that the growing body of research on green school farms will continue to bring more stakeholders to the fold.
“I think there’s definitely more hunger for it,” she said, “and people are doing it in very ingenious ways. Some places have multimillion dollar investments in a single site, and some places find small grants and they do a lot of surface installations that change children’s experience every day.”
– Claire Elise Thompson
More exposure
A parting shot
Areti Bushaw, a former student of Brink’s, now runs a non-profit organization called ReGeneration Now who helps manage the garden at Ellis Elementary, one of the most diverse elementary schools in all of Colorado. The garden also serves the wider community, working in particular with the International Rescue Committee, or IRC, a humanitarian aid and refugee resettlement organisation, which has an office nearby. Some plots are reserved for resettled families, and the team distributes free produce to newly arrived refugee families as well as students at the school. “We really took what Learning Landscapes started and built on it,” Bushaw said. In this photo from an activity day with IRC, youth participants were invited to touch and smell “sensory plants”.
