A year and two months after its original deadline, Los Angeles Unified School District leaders have released their official plan to upgrade more than 600 schools to create more green space and add shade on campus.
The 188-paged Green Schoolyards For All Plan details what it will take to achieve this goal by 2035, and finds it could cost $3 billion, or more, to get there.
“Certainly, the delay has been disappointing, because I think there is a lot of momentum around this topic,” said school board member Kelly Gonez, who originally authored a resolution in 2022 to try and get the green school yard plan going. “There's no time to waste because there is a lot of work to do, and so much is needed.”
Defining a schoolyard
The plan includes new definitions for what qualifies as a schoolyard and what qualifies as a green/natural area, which helps designate what parts of a school campus should be upgraded and what tools can be used. For example, a green space is defined as “exterior areas within a schoolyard which are of recreational and/or ecological value,” which can serve the following purposes:
- Provide locations for recreation and play
- Provide opportunities for the interactive educational observation of natural systems
- Protect areas of both typical and unique plant and animal communities
- Provide areas of natural interest and beauty within the school campuses for students and staff
Materials that can be used in creating these spaces include: plants/trees, grass/lawn/natural turf/other turf materials, dirt/mulch, decomposed granite, permeable pavers. But, according to the document, synthetic turf and cool coating are not considered “green elements.”
In previous school district surveys and conversations with parents about the best approach for greening schools, there was some concern over an over reliance on technology like cool pavement. A majority of people surveyed expressed a desire for “natural” materials like trees and plants.
Parent advocates like Angelenos for Green Schools co-founder Aleigh Lewis argue that natural spaces should be prioritized.
She understands the need for pavement for sports and other play, but believes trees, grass and other natural surfaces should be prioritized over repaving surfaces with a reflective coating.
“You have all this money and you could do so much more for every school and cool them down,” Lewis said.
The Green Schoolyards Index
One of the new parts of the plan is an updated list (starting on page 72 in the PDF file) of 205 elementary school campuses. They're ranked in order of the most heavily polluted areas within vulnerable communities, which get high heat temperatures on campus and are in need of green spaces.
District leaders have identified 634 schools that need natural spaces into three categories — Category 1 includes the 205 elementary schools that have the schoolyards with less than 10% green/natural space. Category 2 is for elementary schools that have 11% or more green/natural space and all of the secondary schools. Category 3 will also include secondary schools. The priority list for Category 2 and 3 are not included in the index.
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The challenge
District leaders say that in order to complete all of the projects by 2035, they would have to have about “60 medium-to-large scale projects” started every year over the next eight years. Every year, they would have to have an allocation of $350 million to $400 million.
But, in the plan, district officials state that completing the listed amount of large projects in that time period may not be possible because of the lack of funding, workers and resources. Experts, parents and community members have argued the district could do more with less money.
Right now, the district is using various ways to fund campus greening projects, like lease financing agreements, repurposing bond funding, state funding and partnership grants.
Gonez said the district has already invested $100 million in greening since the resolution passed because they’ve been creative of making their campuses at least 30% green. But there’s still a long way to go.
“There's a big challenge ahead of us, which is how to meet that overall $3 billion number in the next 11 years,” Gonez said. “I want us to dive more deeply into that gap about what we can do right now and how to reach that overall goal so that we can work with our external partners and advocate with the state and federal governments to be able to get the funding that we need for green space.”
Why it matters
A majority of LAUSD school campuses are covered in asphalt, which absorbs heat. Temperatures on asphalt schoolyards in the summer in places like the San Fernando Valley can register up to 142 degrees on the surface. Schools everywhere in L.A. are feeling the impacts of rising heat.
Experts say hot weather could stretch further into the first months of the school year, raising temperatures. V. Kelly Turner, associate professor of urban planning and geography at UCLA and associate director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, said that’s how it’s going to be in the future.
Turner and her colleagues have studied extreme heat and the role design plays in how people experience it. They found that “schools are some of the hottest places in communities” as a result of how they’ve been built.
The background
In June 2022, district leaders allocated $58 million to outdoor education initiatives, including greening of campuses. A few months later, Gonez, who was president of the board at the time, called on Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and his team to develop a plan to ensure campuses were at least 30% green by 2035.
District officials say they have partnered with local nonprofits like Tree People and Trust For Public Land to help plant trees and create more shade on school grounds through the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection grant. There are eight LAUSD nonprofit partnerships that have received Cal Fire grants in the 2022-23 grant period. There are other grants, and other funding proposals that are in process.
Meanwhile, the Greening Schools and Climate Resilience Committee meeting that was originally scheduled for May 15 has been pushed to June 5.
