The Nature of School Grounds

“Los Angeles is no place to raise children,” my classmate said. It was 2005 and I had just rented a house in Los Angeles while finishing my final year of graduate school in the eastern LA County city of Pomona.

“How can that be?” I asked and then quickly followed up with the obvious, “There are so many people raising children here.” 

For parents who have a choice, the quality of schools is an overarching reason to decide where to live. A child’s school plays a major role in shaping the way they feel about themselves, their future and their neighbourhoods. During my 15 years working in landscape architecture and living in Los Angeles, I’ve visited, studied and helped to design landscapes for at least two dozen Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) public schools. For 12 years, my children attended LAUSD schools. As they reached high school, like so many of their peers, they suffered from stress, anxiety, addiction, depression and bullying. While planned and designed with the best intentions, the design of their schools – both inside and out – failed to support their mental health and well-being. They, and all of our teenagers, needed and deserved high schools that would guide them into adulthood and the community with empathy, support and love.

Urban communities are beset by air pollution, light pollution and noise. Environmental conditions are worse in disadvantaged neighbourhoods where parents often don’t have options to relocate. These communities and the schools that serve them often lack parks, trees, gardens and sheltered respites. LAUSD Director of Mental Health, Pia Escudora, wrote in her 2016 report that 50 percent of the district’s students suffer moderate to severe post-traumatic stress disorder. These students, along with the growing number of students diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, sensory integration disorders and on the autism spectrum, are often more sensitive to noise and light than their peers. Designing school grounds to mitigate these disturbances will help all who study, teach and work there.

The conditions of Los Angeles’ schools and communities are similar to those in so many of our cities. 

As the world’s people continue moving to urban areas, we must find ways to support our children and teenagers to become the thoughtful and creative community leaders that our future needs. School landscapes provide a strong platform to do just that.

For the past eight months, with support from the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Fellowship in Innovation and Leadership, I’ve researched opportunities to leverage LAUSD high school outdoor environments to support students’ mental health and well-being. In studying one of the largest school districts in the United States, I’ve found solutions from schools and communities around the world that can be applied to urban schools anywhere.

Background of Los Angeles Schools

California once boasted the best schools in the nation academically. A state-wide tax code change in 1978 that drastically cut school funding resulted in the famously bureaucratic, over-crowded and underfunded schools of the LAUSD. Despite continued population growth, not a single new school was built for three decades. 

Campuses that were once planned and designed with elegant and welcoming entries, generous courtyards and large gardens were slowly eroded by pressures of school population growth, auto-centric planning and shrinking maintenance budgets. In the early 2000s, voters were concerned enough to pass three local school bonds to fund new schools and renovations.

Last year, LAUSD finished a $250 billion effort to build 131 new schools to end overcrowding, bussing and year-round school schedules. The district is building 12 community wellness centres providing medical, dental and mental health services to students and communities. And it offers grants to schools seeking greener grounds. But many more campuses remain physical manifestations of decades of neglect. After the bond-funded build-out, the district lacks funds to renovate and maintain all of its school buildings and landscaped grounds. 

Los Angeles’ disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods are cut-through and surrounded by freeways, lack parks and tree cover and suffer more crime and violence than more advantaged communities. Less affluent communities have higher rates of childhood obesity and asthma than in more affluent neighbourhoods. Of the nearly 650,000 students attending Los Angeles public schools, 79 percent qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches. LAUSD students live with urban and financial stressors in a city with skyrocketing costs of living. It is no wonder that half suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder.

LAUSD’s annual School Experience Survey, started in 2008, asks students, parents and staff questions about educational goals, supports and expectations. The only questions about a school’s physical environment relates to feelings of safety in school and its surrounding neighbourhood. The graph depicts high school student answers in green, parent answers in pink and school staff answers in blue. The orange lines represent rates of property and violent crime from the Los Angeles Times’ Mapping LA project.

Notably, parents and staff levels of perceived safety in the neighbourhoods surrounding schools parallel each other. But student rates of perceived neighbourhood safety were between 10 and 30 percentage points lower than those of parents and staff. And while 85 to 97 percent of parents felt their children were ‘safe’ or ‘very safe’ on school grounds, the students’ ratings for this same question ranged from 47 to 81 percent. It’s startling that teens feel less safe in their school neighbourhoods than do the adults in their lives, and they likely bring those feelings with them to school. Schools can help this problem with better design and programming to make students feel safe.

A district policy that requires high schools to conduct random checks for weapons and firearms, while intended to increase the sense of safety, has the opposite effect. The United Teachers Los Angeles and grassroots community groups like Schools LA Students Deserve and Students Not Suspects, are working to replace that policy with positive behaviour interventions and restorative justice (which replaces punitive discipline with an approach for building relationships and righting wrongs). Additionally, more schools have increased their health and human services, college counselors and services for students in need.

While design of buildings and landscapes isn’t mentioned as part of the solution, good design can support these policies and programmes by providing comfortable communal spaces, of all sizes inside and out, where students can come to build relationships with one another and with school staff, teachers, community volunteers, counselors and mental health professionals. 

Unlike programmes that rely on teachers or staff to identify students in need of help, physical school improvements provide equal opportunity to help everyone who uses the school grounds. This idea, that landscapes can improve the quality of life, is not new, but it is rarely included in discussions on how to improve the lives of teens in particular and everyone in general.

Attention Restoration Theory

Fifty years ago, psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began working on Attention Restoration Theory, positing that the restful attention paid to leaves moving in a breeze, sun glinting off water, birds singing from a tree or other natural scenes reduces heart rate and stress and restores attention. For the past three decades, research by University of Illinois landscape architecture professors William Sullivan, Frances Kuo, Andrea Faber-Taylor and their graduate students have furthered the theory by relating access to nature in public high schools and housing projects with improved test scores, social cohesion, self-esteem and sense of community and reduced criminal behaviour.

Ten years ago, Rodney Matsuoka’s University of Michigan doctoral study built off from attention restoration theory to focus on the correlation between landscape characteristics and student behaviour and educational outcomes in Michigan high schools. He found that larger classroom windows and higher activity levels on the street in front of schools are associated with fewer criminal behaviours and an open campus policy, larger classroom windows and natural features adjacent to school buildings associate with high percentage of students going on to four-year colleges. These findings build on the previous research correlating green views and access to nature with fewer teen pregnancies, stronger social cohesion and faster recovery times in hospital rooms with views of trees.

Despite decades of knowledge pointing to the importance of access to nature and free movement on the mental health and well-being of children and adults, there are few exemplary models of schools built with this in mind.

Dr. William Sullivan said over a phone call, “If [parents] knew that green views were roughly equivalent to a dose of Ritalin, even for students without ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), they would demand that districts get rid of classrooms without windows and put in gardens at every school.”

Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods popularised the term ‘nature deficit disorder,’ or the impacts of children lacking free time outdoors. The Children and Nature Network has launched a green schoolyards initiative to bring nature to the places children and adolescents spend most of their time. A school or district could make an enormous impact on students’ lives, as well as those of teachers and staff, by creating restorative landscapes — those that restore attention and reduce stress and heart rate — on school grounds where students can access them between classes, during lunch, before and after school and by viewing them through classroom windows.

Restorative Justice

Restorative justice is about righting wrongs and talking through long-time misunderstandings to redirect hostilities into empathy. David Yusem is the Restorative Justice Director for the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). What began 10 years ago as a disciplinary approach to reduce the number of students being suspended or expelled from school, became a method of building relationships in the community. 

The purpose of restorative justice is to create a foundation of community connections to support students and their families going through difficult times. LAUSD initiated a restorative justice pilot programme a few years ago and is building up trained counselors and teachers in its district schools. 

While neither district has yet reached a full programme (and OUSD just cut the budget for its programme), the possibilities are promising. “Teachers can use talking circles over months to build trust,” Yusem said. “It has become a way to talk about the things we need to talk about.”

Talking circles helped Oakland students process the murder of unarmed Oscar Grant by a BART officer and are now used city-wide to establish open dialogues during difficult times. While restorative justice can happen anywhere, including in prisons where the practice began, school design that builds community and provides comfortable places for conversation will best support dialogue and heal struggling relationships. 

Outdoor classrooms and school gardens can serve to restore students’ attention every day and serve as places for restorative talking circles to take place.

Integrated Design

As more cities plan to become resilient in the face of climate change and shifting weather patterns, designing schools to manage stormwater can provide opportunities to connect students to nature and educate them about natural systems and processes. Last fall I toured preschool, elementary, middle and high schools at the Schoolyard Diversity conference in Berlin, Germany. Grun Macht Schule, a government agency in Berlin, has led the design and implementation of green schoolyards for the past two decades. The most striking differences between these schools and those in Los Angeles are the number of small and medium-sized gathering spots amid trees and gardens. Where most Los Angeles schools maintain open schoolyards to allow easy supervision of students, the Berlin schoolyards were full of woods and plants that gave students plenty of small sheltered places where they could sit alone or with friends, the ideal setting for respite or talking circles.

The green schoolyards do the hard and critical work of absorbing and cleaning urban runoff, contributing to the mental and social health of students and the school community. Rather than structured play, schoolyards encourage nature play, which fosters social skills, cooperation and creativity. The gardens support science and arts education as well. Berlin’s schools boasted bee hives and a honey processing shed, little food gardens, vine mazes, mosaic-covered sculpted benches and small shaded seats for small groups of students. This ‘school in a garden’ model is achieved with students and the community helping to plan and maintain the gardens and with local artists who engage students to create art for the schoolyards. Integrating stormwater and climate-resilient design as natural schoolyards where students can interact and learn achieves multiple objectives.

Community Mental Health

In the same country that made ‘forest bathing’ a part of its national health programme, Psychiatrist Layla McCay founded the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health to bridge the abyss between design and mental health. In a 2017 interview with CityLab’s Mimi Kirk, McCay gave four ways her firm in Tokyo, Japan, works to support mental health in sensory-overloaded cities. Her list builds off on the Attention Restoration Theory to include: green spaces to reduce anxiety, active spaces to support physical health and mental health (because exercise is a natural antidepressant), social spaces to encourage people to sit and interact with each other, and safe spaces for pedestrians and people of all ages and physical and mental abilities. McCay’s goals and approaches align with research findings of Kaplan and those studying attention restoration theory. 

These principles connect people to the restorative qualities of nature and active, safe, social places apply to urban spaces of all scales, from the smallest courtyard or plaza to an entire city. 

Conclusion: Transforming Teen-dom 

Cities lack high-quality natural features that often bring respite to those in more rural areas. In densely populated urban communities, as everywhere, teenagers experience the most stress. Neuroscientist Dr. Frances Jensen writes in The Teenage Brain that the same hormone released in adult brains to calm stress actually increases stress in teenagers. So, the same stressors that impact all people living in urban neighbourhoods — mainly associated with sensory overload — are more troublesome to teens. The emotional trauma of poverty, divorce, parental addiction or gang violence experienced by many Los Angeles students makes it difficult to deny the need for school environments that can calm teenagers’ nerves and build mental and community health.

Teens can also participate in the design process to create schoolyards that better serve them. Social justice planner Monique Lopez specialises in participatory processes to correct environmental and social injustices. While the typical school design process includes school district personnel and a design team, she stressed the importance of including the student body and school community. She warns against starting community involvement with design options because by then it is too late for meaningful engagement:“If you ask people if they want a carrot or an apple, they might need an iron,” Lopez says. “As a process, be bigger and broader, don’t start with one premise.”

What would a high school, or any public space, designed by teenagers look like? Too often, we think about troubled teens only after an overwhelming crisis such as a school shooting, violence or assault, or suicide. Teenagers are uniquely vulnerable to urban stresses. A public high school is the last chance to build trust, hope and community before young people become independent adults.

Inclusive design processes, restorative school environments and design, and programmes that build community and responsibility will spill into the greater public realm. Transforming the way we treat our teenagers will transform the way they think of themselves and the way they interact with the people and neighbourhoods around them. Restorative high school landscapes can invite and build a broad community around our adolescents; improve the environmental quality of the neighbourhood; reduce teenagers’ anxiety and aggression; and improve academic, social, and mental health outcomes. Imagine giving all teenagers nurturing, supportive, restorative high school environments that build self-esteem and encouraging them to respect themselves, each other and the natural world around them. This is the atmosphere that teenagers deserve. This is the environment that we need to provide to nurture the future stewards of our public realm and our planet.

Design Recommendations for Restorative School Environments:
•Use a participatory process to engage students, teachers and the broader school community in the planning and design process of schools and grounds.
•Plan campuses with formal entries along a main street, preferably with adjacent businesses and offices that will generate foot traffic and eyes on the street.
•Design campuses with buildings along the perimeter and if fenced perimeters are absolutely necessary make them beautiful and context appropriate.
•Establish an open campus where middle and high school students are allowed to leave the school grounds for lunch and open periods, building trust and encouraging relationships with the greater community.
• Design all classrooms, laboratories, cafeterias and offices with large windows that look out onto trees or gardens.
• Design windows with awnings or deep eaves to prevent glare so that teachers can leave windows unobstructed year-round.
• For existing schools with window-less classrooms, reduce the amount of visual clutter on the walls, and hang large posters or paint murals with nature scenes.
• Design school grounds with accessible gardens, outdoor classrooms and small gathering spaces that students can use during free times and can see from classroom windows.
• Integrate stormwater design and climate resilience into school grounds where students can interact with and learn from natural systems and processes.