Green Schoolyards America partners with school districts, public agencies, and other colleagues to develop city- and state-wide living school ground initiatives. We also support and build the green schoolyard movement by offering public presentations, professional development, and publications.
School District and Public Agency Partnerships
The collaborative planning team from Green Schoolyards America, The Trust for Public Land, and Oakland Unified School District visit a school site in Oakland to discuss the potential for greening school grounds. Photo by Green Schoolyards America.
Participants in Green Schoolyards America’s Principals’ Institute visit a colleague’s school in Alameda, California on a field trip for our program. Photo by Green Schoolyards America.
Renowned landscape architect, Birgit Teichmann, shares her expertise in stormwater schoolyard design with participants in the stormwater schoolyard technical training seminar that Green schoolyards America created in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and San Francisco Unified school district.
Support and Guidance
Green Schoolyards America helps school districts develop comprehensive, sustainable, district-wide green schoolyard programs with strong connections to local sustainable-city planning efforts, regional ecosystems, educational standards, and children’s health. We work with school districts and other partners to develop site-specific school board policies, operational strategies, and professional development programs to help districts adopt and sustain living school grounds.
Professional Development
Green Schoolyards America’s Principals’ Institute supports and strengthens our collaborative work with school district partners by providing professional development to school principals and district-level administrators. The Principals’ Institute program is currently offered in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Region. Click here for more information about our Principals’ Institute programs in 2019 and 2020.
We also collaborate with partners to offer professional development for facilities department and public agency staff, engineers, landscape architects, and architects to improve green schoolyard design, operations, and management practices.
collaborative projects
Living Schoolyards for Oakland
We are currently working with Oakland Unified School District and the Trust for Public Land to develop a school board policy and funding and implementation strategies to create Living Schoolyards for Oakland. Click here for more information about our partnership and read about it on our blog.
Stormwater Schoolyards
We worked with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, San Francisco Unified School District, and Teichmann Landscape Architects to provide training for city agencies, landscape architects, and engineers about how to design school grounds that successfully meet stormwater management goals while also optimizing the landscape for child development, outdoor learning, and play.
Stormwater design for children’s spaces is in its infancy in the United States, but has been more widely implemented in parts of Europe, including Germany. It is a complex undertaking to balance the technical needs of green infrastructure management with effectively designed, flexible and interactive children’s landscapes. In order to learn from experiences across the world, renowned architect Birgit Teichmann was invited to San Francisco to share her expertise about living schoolyard design for stormwater management.
The resources below, developed as a result of this collaboration, include videos of the technical training seminar and written summaries of the workshop. They document best practices and ideas on how to actualize Berlin’s design principles in San Francisco.
Training videos: Presentation #1 and Presentation #2
Written summary of audience discussion’s about how to adopt Berlin-style green schoolyards in California’s context
Please contact us
for more information
If your school district or public agency would like to create living schoolyards across your city or region, please contact us for more information about beginning a collaborative project.