The best school playgrounds can feel a lot like parks. But many of them offer little more than crumbling asphalt—hardly an enticement to exercise or explore. To help get kids moving again, The Trust for Public Land partners with schools to transform these barren lots into vibrant green spaces that can serve the whole community once school’s out.
Apart from expanding community access to green space, converting schoolyards can help cities manage runoff. Before its big makeover, the asphalt lot at Philadelphia’s William Dick Elementary often held a puddle so large that students called it “the pond.”
“There was a great opportunity to use this land that no one else was using outside of school, to make it something that both students and people in the neighborhood could use every day,” says Mary Alice Lee, director of The Trust for Public Land’s playgrounds program in New York City. This double-duty model demands coordination between the school, the city, and the neighborhood. Their needs may differ, but they share responsibility for keeping playgrounds clean and safe—which is why
The Trust for Public Land uses a participatory design process that gets everyone involved from the very beginning. “Every neighborhood is different,” says Lee. “We spend three to four months talking to students, custodians, teachers, neighbors, and parents to find out what they want to see.” Incorporating the design work into the classroom curriculum is a teaching opportunity for mathematics and measurement as well as communication and compromise. What’s more, student involvement can lead to one-of-a-kind park
features the professionals might not have considered. “Because of the kids,” Lee says, “we’ve created murals and mosaics, a hair- braiding area, a jump-rope zone, performance stages, outdoor classrooms, and bowling lanes.”
44 · LAND&PEOPLE · SPRING/SUMMER 2015
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