By Carl Smith for Governing.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

On an 81 degree day last September, environmental city planner Sharon Danks went onto the playground at a California elementary school with an infrared camera. Grassy areas in full sun measured 83 degrees, but unshaded asphalt was 107 and rubber surfaces under an exposed play structure came in at 135. Asphalt shaded by tree canopy was more than 30 degrees cooler.

Danks, the author of Asphalt to Ecosystems, a book published more than a decade ago to guide the transformation of schoolyards, wasn't surprised at what she found. She and her colleagues had made similar measurements many times over.

But shade itself had gained heat that September with the announcement that $150 million had been set aside in the California state budget for a two-year program to fund school forests and green schoolyards at K-12 schools. The decision was driven by the need to protect the health of students as average temperatures in the state continue to rise.

The September 2022 heat wave in the West was the worst on record; temperatures soared above 110 degrees in multiple cities in California. In announcing the funding for schoolyards, Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, noted that average temperatures across the state were projected to rise 6 degrees by mid-century.

As bad as things might look for Californians, warming trends are projected to be even more dramatic in other parts of the country. According to a peer-reviewed model published last year, by 2053 more than 100 million Americans will live in an "extreme heat belt" extending from Northern Texas and Louisiana borders to Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, with temperatures exceeding 125 degrees.

Most of the daylight hours that children spend outside are on school grounds. The simple act of planting trees on campuses is a powerful way to shield them from heat-related health problems.

"Twenty-two percent of the population of California is under 18," Danks observes. "I'm not saying they need 22 percent of the budget for climate mitigation, but a substantial portion needs to go to those who are too young to vote to make sure they are protected from the effects."

A Network of Forest Makers

Last summer, the nonprofit that Danks founded, Green Schoolyards America, announced the launch of the California Schoolyard Forest System^SM, a partnership with the California Department of Education, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) and Ten Strands, a nonprofit devoted to improving environmental literacy.

During the pandemic, Ten Strands and Green Schoolyards helped develop a National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiativeto build a community of practice around outdoor learning and to create an extensive learning library encompassing case histories, design ideas, curriculum, policy and funding guidance and more.

The schoolyard forest work will be a multi-decade effort, Danks says, and will have its own community of practice and online library. It got off the ground with a state grant to evaluate the need on campuses and the best strategies to move things forward.

Preliminary research suggests that more than 4.2 million of the students in California public schools are on campuses with less than 10 percent tree canopy. More than half of the campuses have less than 5 percent canopy coverage.

"The question we're asking is how do you get 10,000 schools on 8,600 campuses with 6 million children to have shade," Danks says. The immediate goal is to plant enough trees by 2030 to cover at least 30 percent of the areas of school property that children use during the day.

California will be the first state in a National Schoolyard Forest System^SM. Green Schoolyards America will use the coalition-building experience from the COVID-19 initiative to seed a network of forest makers throughout the country.

Shade and Health

Children are more susceptible to heat-related illnesses than adults. Their bodies don't produce sweat as rapidly, and because water is a larger percentage of their body weight, they are more prone to dehydration. Younger children are less likely to recognize that they need to remove clothing or hydrate.

According to research by the U.S. Forest Service, increasing urban tree cover by even 10 percent can have a significant impact on heat-related mortality. California school campuses have much lower tree canopy than the communities that surround them, says Walter Passmore, the California state urban forester. As a result, students can be exposed to both extreme heat and pollution.

Passmore works for CAL FIRE, which is administering the $150 million grant program. Application guidelines were released this month. The bulk of the funding, $117 million, will be awarded in the first year. Passmore expects about half of the grants to be planning grants and half to be grants for project implementation; funds come with a 75/25 matching requirement.

Schools in disadvantaged communities will be grant priorities. It's not unusual for applicants from these sectors to lack the resources to put a competitive proposal together. The CAL FIRE finance department has provided funding for time-limited staff to help guide schools through the process of compiling a proposal that meets its guidelines.

The idea, Passmore says, is for those who submit planning grants to engage with parents, teachers, adjacent communities and design professionals in preparing their proposals. "That way, they have a project that is ready for implementation if funding becomes available."

California has 10,000 K-12 campuses, and Passmore expects CAL FIRE's $150 million will be enough for 50 planning grants and 50 implementation grants. "We're not getting there with grants alone," he says. "Grants will start the process, and we hope that a lot of our partners are going to be as excited about this initiative as we are."

There are already signs it's happening. In September the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest in the nation, passed a resolution adopting a standard with a minimum of 30 percent green space on campuses, directing the superintendent to find funding that will make it possible to achieve this goal by 2035.

The Miyawaki Method

The school forest on the campus of Washington Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif., planted by children in the 1970s, is believed to be the oldest of its kind. It was the work of landscape architect Robin Moore, whose Washington Environmental Yard involved tearing out asphalt to make room not just for woods, but for meadows, streams and fishing ponds.

Fifteen years later, the district reclaimed about half of that space for blacktop, says Stephen Collins, manager of buildings, grounds and sustainability for the Berkeley Unified School District. About a third of the original forest remains, populated by redwoods, oaks and other species.

Surprisingly, not everyone in the district is aware of the existence of the forest and its role in outdoor play and teaching at the school. Visitors leave inspired, wanting to replicate what they have seen in some way, says Sofia Peltz, the district's sustainability program coordinator.

One of the science teachers in the district introduced Collins and Peltz to the Miyawaki method of urban forest planting, an approach that combines dense planting and high biodiversity in spaces as small as 30 square feet. According to the nonprofit SUGi, which plants these pocket forests in communities around the world, Miyawaki forests grow 10 times faster and are 100 times more biodiverse.

The Miyawaki approach is well suited to foresting at Berkeley schools, which are on small sites in tightly packed urban neighborhoods. Four have been planted in the district already, Collins says.

Pushback from facility managers who say they don't have staff to maintain newly planted trees is not uncommon. At some schools, parents have stepped up to help with green schoolyards, strengthening the school community.

Collins and Danks both stress that if a tree is well cared for in its first few years, it is largely maintenance-free from that point forward. "One of the solutions we've talked about is when you apply for the grant for these kinds of projects, you include the first three years of maintenance by the contractor," says Collins.

Social and Behavioral Benefits

Marci Raney's research focuses on health and well-being in urban environments, specifically low-income neighborhoods. From her position as a member of the kinesiology faculty at Occidental College in Los Angeles, she conducted a long-term observational study of differences in recess behavior at two elementary schools with lower-income student populations.

The schools were in similar neighborhoods, with similar demographics. But one had an asphalt schoolyard and the other, LAUSD's Eagle Rock Elementary, had a newly renovated green schoolyard.

Raney was particularly interested in finding out whether outdoor spaces had benefits for younger school children. Students tend to establish lifetime physical activity behaviors by about the fourth grade, she says. "If we don't make sure that they have an opportunity to engage in physical activity that they find fulfilling and fun, they're probably going to end up being sedentary adults with increased risk for chronic disease."

The findings were striking. The introduction of a schoolyard forest was associated with more moderate to vigorous physical activity during recess and lunch periods. Standing inactively against a building to hug its shade is detrimental to both cognitive development and brain function, Raney says.

"When we introduce trees, logs, stumps, nature, we see students engaging in creative, collaborative, moderate to vigorous physical activity play," says Raney. Moreover, she found, the gap between the physical activity levels of boys and girls decreases. Girls likely to be intimidated by, or not interested in, ball games or competitive sports on asphalt surfaces were seen balancing on or hopping between stumps, rocks or other features in outdoor classrooms.

Anti-social behavior was less frequent in the schoolyard in which green features were interspersed with asphalt areas. "The amount of bullying that happens in these asphalt schoolyards from boredom is quite phenomenal," Raney says. Pro-social verbal and physical behavior became more common in outdoor spaces with trees, stumps and plants, which present opportunities to work together to build things or solve tasks.

Benefits were observed immediately post-renovation (in 2016) and have been sustained since then. In subsequent work involving five Title I LAUSD elementary schools, Raney concluded that adding green space alone is not enough to achieve the greatest benefits from schoolyard renovation, highlighting the importance of incorporating unique, diverse and distinct play areas.

Raney left her faculty position at Occidental and is now serving as senior manager in the office of well-being at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. She's bringing her experience to adults who care for children, hoping to incorporate rejuvenation spaces with views of nature and to optimize use of the hospital's healing garden.

Changing a System

For more than a decade, Ten Strands has been helping develop environmental literacy standards and curriculum in California. The organization was founded by a science educator to support environment-based teaching and learning. School grounds weren't a main feature of its work before it became a co-founder of the outdoor learning initiative, says Andra Yeghoian, chief innovation officer for Ten Strands.

As more and more teachers moved their classrooms outdoors as a last-resort measure to preserve in-person connection to their students, more and more realized there were good reasons to continue the practice. For Ten Strands, it prompted a deeper appreciation of the ways school grounds and buildings are part of the educational system it is working to transform, according to Yeghoian.

Using outdoor learning spaces to create unique opportunities for teaching about the environment is not a new idea, but California's infusion of tens of millions of dollars to bring green features and trees to schools in disadvantaged communities is significant, as is the alignment of educational and public health missions in school forest projects.

"What this is really about is how we can be resilient enough to maintain our health and safety through climate change," says Yeghoian.

There's no reason environmental education can't be effective in the absence of school ground features designed to support it. But if the current movement results in more opportunities to make lessons stick, that's only to the good.

School, Yeghoian observes, is the only required cultural element in our society, the only chance to at least try to give every citizen analytical tools that help them keep their bearings in the face of environmental challenges.

Tipping Point

Sharon Danks has used design, research, teaching and writing to raise awareness of the ways green schoolyards can benefit students, teachers and communities for more than two decades. The combination of COVID-19 forcing education into the outdoors and a relentless series of climate and weather-induced disasters brought things to a tipping point, she says.

"The questions we're getting from districts are no longer, 'Why should we do this?' but 'How do we do this?'"

It may be safe for educators to return to their indoor spaces, but many resolved to double down, if not "triple down" on the things they gained from being outdoors with their students, Yeghoian says.

Access to green space is a component of health equity, and it's not uncommon for schools to allow the public to use school grounds after school hours. According to analysis by American Forests, tree canopy is 25 percent less in communities where low-income residents are in the majority than in communities where the poor are in the minority. Passmore says that the CAL FIRE grant guidelines encourage joint use agreements.

Danks paints the situation simply. "If we want children to be able to have PE outside in 20 or 40 years, they'll need a place that's shaded to do it."

Carl Smith wrote this article for Governing.


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Teachers' unions say they're at an impasse in bargaining with two Oregon school districts. After four intense mediation sessions, Albany teachers walked out of class for the first time in nearly 40 years, primarily over workload and class size limits. Similar concerns are being raised in Beaverton - where, after nine months of negotiations, the teachers union and district are headed to mediation. Beaverton teachers rallied with hundreds of supporters outside a school board meeting, while Albany teachers formed picket lines across the district.

Max Nazarian, Albany union vice president, said spirits are high.

"It was almost constant - cars honking, people waving - our community is behind us. They know who the people are that come in every day caring for their kids, and it's not those dozen people in the central office," he said.

Albany Superintendent Andy Gardner said the district has responded to all the union's requests, including offering a 15% raise over the next three years. He added it's more important to focus on behavior rather than class size, and that the district has proposed an improved process to handle larger classes.

Nazarian said hundreds of teachers have described being unable to give students the support they need, including those with state-mandated education plans, and that teachers feel powerless.

"It's still the end game is the same - that teachers don't really have a say," he continued.

In Beaverton, the state's third-largest district, teachers have collected nearly 5,000 signatures in support of changes similar to Albany: stronger safety measures, better pay and smaller class sizes.

Lindsay Ray, Beaverton Education Association president, said educators across the state are continually asked to do more with less, and added that the solidarity between districts is empowering.

"It's heartening to have other folks who are working for those same things kind of all over the state, because I think that leads to a greater understanding from our communities about what we're doing and what we're working for," Ray said.

The Beaverton School District said the union's proposal would result in a $161 million deficit, while the district's offer would mean a $29 million deficit.


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Gov. Jared Polis has designated seven Colorado colleges and universities as Career Connected Campuses for their work getting more students from all parts of the state and backgrounds ready for high-demand, good-paying jobs driving the state's economy.

Gillian McKnight-Tutein, senior educational equity officer for the Colorado Department of Higher Education, said the schools have prioritized practical skills for students.

"They are committed to the professional development and career readiness, while those students are in the classroom," McKnight-Tutein explained.

In Colorado, 75% of all jobs, and 94% of top jobs paying enough to sustain a family, require some form of education beyond high school. But just 50% of high school grads are pursuing postsecondary education. The schools receiving the first-ever designation are Colorado College, Colorado School of Mines, the online Colorado State University Global, Pueblo Community College, Regis University, Colorado University-Denver, and the University of Denver.

The state has been working to remove cost as a barrier for students and many certificate and degree programs are zero-tuition. McKnight-Tutein pointed out more schools are helping students who cannot afford to take time off work by helping them get jobs that also count toward academic requirements.

"There are scholarships. The costs are defrayed, but for the apprenticeship situation, those jobs actually pay," McKnight-Tutein noted. "They're actually making money before graduation."

The new designation reinforces the agency's Social Determinants of Student Success initiative which, as McKnight-Tutein added, works to ensure that students' basic needs such as food, shelter and health care are met, so students can stay in school.

"Because we know that it's not just about them getting there," McKnight-Tutein stressed. "It's about them being able to sustain their lives. Financially, they have families that they need to take care of sometimes. So we want to make sure that all those supports are around them."


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As winter break approaches, Alabama's Summer Adventures in Learning program is encouraging parents to think ahead to summer, particularly as quality summer learning options continue to shrink across the nation.

SAIL emphasized access to strong summer programs can have a meaningful effect on students, especially in preventing learning setbacks.

Suzy Harris, program manager for Summer Adventures in Learning, said early planning could help families secure a spot in programs designed to support students' academic and social growth over the summer.

"Under-resourced youths in particular are affected by summer learning loss at a higher degree," Harris explained. "Because they don't have the access to going on trips or going to minicamp at a museum, or going to the library regularly."

In Alabama, SAIL programs provided reading and math instruction to more than 2,300 students this past summer, combining academics with recreational activities to keep students engaged. For many families, the programs also addressed gaps in summer resources when it comes to meals and access to other educational opportunities.

Harris noted the program benefits teachers too, giving them the freedom to be creative and adapt lessons to meet students' specific needs. The flexibility creates a more engaging and effective learning environment over the summer.

"Teachers have the opportunity to experiment with how they're teaching and with new lesson plans," Harris pointed out. "They don't have the burden of all the extra paperwork and they can have fun in how they're doing lessons."

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly half of public schools offer summer school programs, primarily aimed at helping students with remedial learning or credit recovery. However, fewer schools, around 20 %, provide broader summer recreation programs, which include activities such as sports, games and youth development.

Among schools providing summer classes, 23% report staffing shortages, limiting their ability to accommodate all interested or at-risk students.


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