Community Consolidated School District 46 includes nine schools that educate 3,679 PK-8 students. Located in Grayslake, Illinois in central Lake County, the District serves parts of seven local villages. The District’s foray into outdoor learning has emerged from a regional context that supports sustainability at the municipal and grassroots levels, and reflects the collaboration of school and district leaders, principals, teachers, parents, and students.

During the 2020-21 school year, Community Consolidated School District 46 used outdoor learning spaces to enhance food security, provide opportunities for improved well-being, and support the creation of a community engagement strategy.

INTERVIEWS WITH MEMBERS OF
THE SCHOOL DISTRICT’S COMMUNITY 

A Community Consolidated School District 46’s school board member interviewed the superintendent, school principals, fellow school board members, and parent volunteers about their work to green the school district’s long-term practices and bring learning outdoors in response to the pandemic. The interviewees include district superintendent Dr. Lynn Glickman, school principals Laura Morgan, Vince Murray, and Cathy Santelle; school board members Stephen Mack and Kristy Miller, and parent volunteers Abbie Pietruszynski and Jessica Albert. Their responses have been combined and are included below.

OUTDOOR LEARNING
PRIOR TO THE PANDEMIC

Community Consolidated School District 46 has been developing outdoor classrooms and educational features across the seven campuses for the last 15 years. The District added its first outdoor classroom at an elementary school in 2004, and has expanded over time to include hands-on study areas that showcase local ecosystems, edible gardens that are used to teach horticulture and nutrition, and elements that help the District reduce its environmental footprint. Students engage in project-based learning experiences that develop their capacity to examine their environment, think critically about natural systems, and co-create informed solutions to the challenges and opportunities they identify. The outdoor learning programs also establish healthy relationships with organizations and individuals outside the traditional school system. Those relationships strengthen the social fabric that undergirds the community and the district.

District Education Data

• 7 school buildings and 9 schools

• 3,679 PK-8 students

• 27.3% qualify for free/reduced lunch 

• Funded at 64% of Illinois’s Adequacy Target

• 17.1% English Learners

• School district stewards approximately 102 acres of land

• District website

Location

• Northern Illinois, in central Lake County, approximately 14 miles west of Lake Michigan and 40 miles north of Chicago

• The village of Grayslake has a population of 20,720. (2019)

Climate

• Mild fall temperatures: 48°F - 77°F

• Cold, snowy winters with average daily high temperatures below 40°F for more than 3 months. Daytime temperatures are often: 20°F - 34°F

• Chilly, rainy spring weather, often: 32°F - 60°F

• Precipitation: 120 days per year

• Rainfall: 36” per year

• Snow: 43” per year

Q. What inspired you to invest time, money, and energy into the outdoor learning spaces in the district before the pandemic? What key resources and relationships moved your work forward? How did you overcome significant challenges?

School Board Members: Prior to the pandemic, administrators committed to building a robust professional learning community internally which guided the development of the District's technology plan, and the Board of Education agreed to invest in more robust external partnerships as well. Informed by Juanita Brown's book The World Cafe and Peter Block's book Community, the Board of Education agreed to develop a vehicle for creating and monitoring a community-wide dialogue, ensuring that the entire community was both well-informed and well-represented. Disparate groups of residents had been independently advocating for more time outdoors, environmental literacy, equity, and better financial stewardship. They needed more than public comment in regular meetings to contribute their expertise to the District.

School Principals: The District spent many years focused on technology and needed to develop a more balanced educational experience, especially for kids who don't have access to outdoor space in their own yards. Learning outdoors emerged as a way to balance this focus on technology, and to integrate hands-on lessons from Next Generation Science Standards. Exploring outdoor learning began with these questions:

• "How might we look at the academic standards and make concrete experiences for kids to explore science?"  

• "What does current research teach us about how kids' brains learn?" 

• “Some of our schools had gobs and gobs of land; why are we not doing more with that land?” 

Teacher-led study-groups read Boys and Girls Learn Differently by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens as well as Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. Focusing on brain research and Nature Deficit Disorder resulted in prioritizing immersive learning experiences. Embedded in existing learning, outdoor learning was not an extra project. Rather it extended current instructional practices. Building the outdoor classroom focused on embracing sustainable solutions that were independent from any one group or person. If a single person moved on, the project didn't expire. Partnerships with experts from Lake County Forest Preserve, the high school garden club, local community members, and especially our PTOs offered expertise, funding, time, and enthusiasm. Those partnerships helped guide and shape the Woodland Project and edible schoolyards at schools across our District.

Parent Volunteers: An interconnected web of people, books, and experiences revealed that outdoor learning is important not only for our children's future but also for the future of humanity in general. Last Child in the Woods convinced parents that getting kids outside at a plastic playground or in a typical suburban grass yard wasn't enough—kids need actual nature and patches of wildness to play and explore.

Key relationships and resources included experts from local public gardens, a local farm, a charter school, the forest preserve district, and the community college as well as Wild Ones and Openlands. Relationships and direct communication channels with key staff members included custodians who facilitated access to water and the District's webmaster who helped document and publish students' experiences and nurtured progress. Relationships with former parent volunteers who financed the outdoor classrooms, as well as passionate friends and neighbors with experience in fundraising, marketing, teaching, systems, organizations, and leadership conveyed institutional knowledge about the outdoor classroom. Small amounts of the school's discretionary funds were also used to support the edible schoolyards, and a parent committee helped maintain the outdoor spaces to avoid overburdening teachers and staff.

This timeline and visual history document the Woodland Project, and this history and overview documents the edible schoolyard's transformation, field trips, a garden club, and school-wide celebrations as well as the Sprouts Curriculum.

4th graders learn that non-native species threaten woodland ecosystems while participating in buckthorn removal in their schoolyard.

Designer Mary Klees coordinated the construction of a schoolyard shed to house gardening supplies. Lumber and stained-glass windows were harvested from a house that was torn down and were re-purposed to build the shed which now houses class sets of spades, gloves, pots, and other supplies.

Overview of Meadowview’s Outdoor Classroom and Woodland Project

2004 Outdoor Classroom is built

2013 Meadowview Sprouts, a sustainability-themed
after-school club, forms

2015-2016 First year of the Woodland Project

2016, April Arbor Day Tree Tagging and Planting

2017, April Building a Resilient Future conference
at the College of Lake County

2018, Fall Recognition of Community Synergy:
Horace Mann/Illinois Principals Association
Reaching Out and Building Bridges Award 

2019, March State Recognition: 2019 Green Ribbon School
Award Illinois Nominee 

2019, Sept. National Recognition: 2019 U.S. Department of
Education Green Ribbon School Award Recipient

2020, Feb. County Recognition: Lake County 2019
Stormwater Education, Outreach and 
Media Award 

Throughout Community Context and Additional Information

Click on the image to view the interactive History of Meadowview’s Outdoor Classroom & Woodland Project.

School board member listens intently to a district student describe her ideas at our first Community Café.

Donated seeds and seedlings were planted in edible schoolyards. Produce was harvested and distributed during the pandemic for families interested in improving nutrition and building immunity to COVID-19.

OUTDOOR LEARNING IN RESPONSE TO THE PANDEMIC

Q: As a result of COVID, how did your work shift? How did the existing outdoor learning spaces add value to the District in the past year?

School Board Members: At the start of the pandemic, superintendent Dr. Lynn Glickman invited the school board to partner with her in developing a community-focused response to COVID. Two board members, in turn, asked these questions:

• “What might we do to help our community flourish in the next 2-4 weeks? 4-8 weeks? 9-20 weeks?”

• “What can we do with what we already have in place to build our community's immunity to COVID?”

From there, the District’s Community Engagement Committee leapt to life. Already familiar with Martin Seligman's well-being framework PERMA™, board members could see that the outdoor classrooms, edible schoolyards, and building overhangs provided well-ventilated spaces for students, teachers, and families to engage in meaningful work. These spaces offered opportunities to develop positive relationships that mitigated fear and inspired hope, and to craft solutions that supported a sense of agency at a time when so many residents felt helpless. Board members also suspected that these outdoor spaces could support a community culture of what Adam Grant calls 'givers' in his book Givers and Takers. Because all the information from the CDC and the local county health department pointed to ventilation as an effective mitigation strategy, committee members held strategy meetings in the outdoor classrooms where, masked, they could safely discuss educational aspirations and desires.

Food security emerged as the focal point of the Community Engagement Committee’s work. The school gardens were a valuable, pragmatic resource because they allowed community members to sustain their own well-being while supplementing the federally funded Grab-n-Go meal distribution with produce grown in the raised beds. The committee also coordinated support for a local food pantry, and a Dine-n-Share program—an effort to pair local restaurants with individual school communities who, in turn, ordered meals on a given day. Board members listened and learned with volunteers and supported them with leadership development training, specifically Brene Brown's Dare to Lead certification course. The outdoor classrooms, school gardens and an extensive forest preserve trail system—where board members walked with and listened to frustrated parents—set the stage for a productive public engagement strategy during the pandemic.

School Principals: Early in the pandemic, standard sign-up systems and work-days were no longer viable tools for connecting families to the gardens. School principals needed time to assess the school community’s comfort working together in outdoor spaces. Each of the schools re-examined local resources, parent support, and green infrastructure. Educators at one school used an existing bike path to create an outdoor, experiential lesson for students who were studying the novel, A Long Walk to Water. Another school partnered with the nearby forest preserve that invited students to explore nature in their own backyards. A third school encouraged teachers who wanted to use their schoolyard as an outdoor classroom, to substitute outdoor spaces for their usual indoor classroom locations for academic instruction. The raised garden beds in two schools shifted from instructional spaces to community gardens that focused on improving nutrition for families. Band and physical education teachers also found ways to use outdoor spaces for effective student engagement with reduced virus transmission risk. However, using outdoors spaces was tricky because the school district was running a hybrid program, with some students learning remotely and others in-person.

Parent Volunteers: As soon as school was closed in March 2020, parents tried to determine how the raised beds in the school district’s edible gardens should be planted and maintained in the absence of classes. Volunteers secured seed donations from a local business, and a group of residents and Girl and Boy Scouts planted and maintained the raised beds. Students and their families harvested over 150 pounds of fruits and vegetables which were shared at Grab-n-Go distribution sites. Because the playgrounds were off-limits due to public health concerns, families looking for new activities met in the school gardens to weed, spread mulch, and water the plants. Neighbors discovered that one garden’s cistern wasn't filling up and remedied the obstruction. A local Boy Scout troop held part of its summer day camp in the schoolyard to help with the gardens and plant popcorn. The natural areas, especially in the Woodland Project, provided peaceful outdoor spaces to mentally recharge and decompress.

In the fall, the focus shifted to seed saving. From vegetables to fruits to native plants, students and adults harvested and distributed seeds in packets through a repurposed Little Free Library named the “Little Seed Library.” Informal training sessions about seed harvesting maintained momentum for the raised beds at a time when people still needed connection to others. 

At most school buildings, roof overhangs sheltered food donations for health-care providers and for a local food pantry. One parent organization partnered with teachers who encouraged students to write letters of encouragement to health care workers, fire fighters, and police officers. Those letters were also collected in these sheltered spaces at the schools. Teacher appreciation lunches were distributed at card tables under overhangs at another building.

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

Q: How has your thinking about outdoor classrooms/school gardens shifted as a result of COVID? What new assumptions, attitudes, wisdom will inform the use of outdoor learning/spaces in the future?

School Board Members: COVID-19 has been an exquisite challenge. Working in the edible gardens, biking to the Woodland Classroom, strategizing under the shelters, and watching food and letters of encouragement accumulate under school roofs kept despair at bay during the pandemic. More conspicuous than ever is the school district’s role as a land manager. In addition to tax dollars, board members steward over 100 acres of land—a community asset that requires intention. Despite the pandemic, Community Consolidated School District 46 committed to a strategic planning process. The new mission statement emphasizes “cultivating community”. The vision statement emphasizes learning “beyond our classroom walls” and goals include creating a facilities master plan and a master technology plan that recognize sustainability and equity. The reality that access to the outdoors is a privilege not all students enjoy has become more conspicuous as a result of COVID as well.

Learning outdoors is an opportunity to enhance instruction by individualizing lessons. Because outdoor instruction immerses students physically and cognitively, lessons are more easily tailored to each student’s cognitive and social-emotional development. Perhaps, even more importantly, learning outside reminds the school community of its roots and context because, during COVID, it has asked us to slow down and really see the District’s surroundings.

Future challenges will be aligning the District’s budget with the policies and practices that support the District's commitment to learning “outside the walls of our classrooms”. Our technology and facilities plans that support learning will need to reflect the community's commitment to land stewardship. We will need to craft community engagement strategies that cultivate dialogue about environmental literacy and sustainable resource distribution. We will also need to develop intentional strategies that ensure consistent and equitable student-access to the outdoors.

School Principals: COVID has solidified the importance of immersing kids in the outdoors. The immediate goal is to expand outdoor time in May 2021 and in fall 2021. One school is planning to expand their Woodland Days program to a full week of instruction that is entirely outdoors. Their classes will convene on their outdoor seating wall and in their picnic area. Another school is planning additional lessons in their raised garden beds. A third school is interested in adding ADA-compliant, wheelchair accessible raised beds and a sensory garden for special needs students as well as planting native flowers. 

Research consistently confirms that the risk of COVID-19 virus transmission is enormously reduced in outside spaces. Instruction will be easier to manage—no need to drag the computers outside—and commitment to balancing screen time with hands-on learning experiences creates a better, well-rounded academic experience for students. Teachers are learning that some of our students have never been able to plant anything prior to coming to school. When they work in the gardens or take field trips to natural areas, students are filled with wonder and awe. The community is beginning to consider the importance of providing all students with access to the outdoors, in a manner that is similar to their approach to the arts and technology.

Parent Volunteers: Even though the pandemic has been one of the most challenging events in this generation, it has pushed so many people into appreciating the outdoors. Experiencing awe and calm has an effect on our mental and physical health. Dr. Frances Ming Kuo, Associate Professor at University of Illinois-Champaign, has done a lot of research on the impact of natural spaces on mental health. People were (and still are) craving activities to do outdoors. People need one another, and they need the natural spaces around them, most of all to spend time together safely. This year, the community has used schoolyards to help feed neighbors, lift each other up, and provide hope. It is hard to put into words, but outdoor spaces have contributed to a sense of community, interconnectedness to nature, and overall well-being. The value of these District spaces is infinite. No price adequately reflects their value. We need to urgently take advantage of this time to build up programs and outdoor spaces at our schools so that learning can happen outside and so that the District can support the environmental stewards who emerge, ready to take their places in society.

The school's overhang sheltered the letters of encouragement students wrote during Thankful Thursdays as well as food donations collected for essential workers.

Boy Scouts converged in the edible schoolyard for summer camp.