Rochester schoolyard remade to reduce impacts of climate change
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At recess time at Franklin Elementary School in Rochester, students scamper around a new playground area covered with soft woodchips, weaving in and out and around wooden play structures, with some of the kids climbing and swinging from ropes. This redesigned schoolyard is generating a lot of excitement. The kids call it “the best” and say they love it.
What was once a plain expanse of grass next to the playground is being remade into natural prairie land with newly seeded native plants. The yard is also dotted with newly planted trees that are scrawny saplings now but in time will provide large canopies of shade on hotter days.
"There's a rain garden right along the fence line right over there, and then we have a pollinator garden near the parking lot. And so that will allow us to create educational opportunities for kids,” said Sam Pearson, Franklin’s principal. “There's an outdoor classroom right here, which is also a climbing structure. But all of this is new."
Franklin Elementary is one of five Minnesota schools getting an eco-friendly schoolyard makeover to help mitigate the effects of climate change. The school unveiled the revamped play space in mid-September.
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The project was completed in partnership with the national environmental organization Trust for Public Land, which works to better connect the public to the benefits of the outdoors.
“We're increasingly seeing more intense rain events,” said Sophie Vorhoff, the group’s Minnesota director. “We're seeing hotter summers … So these spaces can sometimes bake in the heat, or they get really, really wet and puddly and turn into mud with this increasing intensity of climate. And so these school yards, once we invest in them, have climate superpowers.”
Funding for the projects comes from the school districts, private donors and a special fund set up by the state in the 1990s called the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund. It takes a portion of revenue from the Minnesota State Lottery to fund environmental preservation projects.
Since 1991, that state fund has doled out more than $1 billion to hundreds of projects across the state, including $1.4 million so far to the schoolyard redesigns.
Four other schools applied for and received this funding to completely reimagine their schoolyards as green spaces that are more environmentally friendly and nurturing than the typical grass and asphalt playgrounds: Brooklyn Center Elementary in Brooklyn Center, FAIR School in Crystal, Maxfield Elementary in St. Paul, and the Endazhi-Nitaawiging Charter School in Red Lake.
Vorhoff said the group draws up each school yard differently, basing the design on community input.
"At the Red Lake community school yard, that school yard, Endazhi-Nitaawiging, is a tribal school yard. So there's going to be a hide tanning station, because that's really important for connection to Ojibwe culture,” Vorhoff said. “We know at the school yard here at Franklin, it was really important to have an outdoor classroom so that students could bring the learning outside."
And it’s not just for the students. The yards remain open after school hours and all year round, adding more natural public green space in communities like Rochester to accommodate recreation for a growing population in a cost-efficient way. Vorhoff said when people live closer to nature, there are all sorts of benefits.
“We believe that everyone should live within a 10-minute walk of a high quality park or green space,” Vorhoff said. “We know that for students and for kids, this is absolutely essential to our health, to our well being, to learning. Yet many kids and families are disconnected just based on where we live.”
The Rochester schoolyard isn’t totally open to the public yet. Areas are blocked off to protect seedlings from getting trampled. But Pearson expects they’ll be able to open the entire yard to the public in the coming months.
Trust for Public Land is hoping to secure more funding from the state next year to revamp even more school yards into green spaces. Pearson said the application process was lengthy, but worth it. He hopes other Minnesota schools will apply.
“Any time you're encouraging students to get outside, to be active, to be playing in the landscape, is really good for kids,” Pearson said.
