Big Sandbox - Renovated Playgrounds Improving Education
The Play(ground)'s the Thing
Landscape architect Lois Brink turned Denver schoolhouse yards into customs parks. Can she do the aforementioned in Philly?
Jan. 06, 2016
Mayor Jim Kenney, forth with other city and school officials, have announced their intention to create community schools—neighborhood centers that combine bookish and social services to improve both classroom learning and the wellness of a neighborhood. Inherent in the thought is that a schoolhouse community is more than simply a building filled with students and teachers—it's a neighborhood working together to larn, heal and grow. To landscape architect Lois Brink, creating a school customs begins outside—by inviting the community into the schoolyard.
A Philadelphia native and a professor of Mural Architecture at University of Colorado, Brink has spent the last 25 years turning Denver's 96 public unproblematic schoolyards into "learning landscapes" that serve a dual purpose: During school hours, the yards provide students with a safety space for structured and unstructured play, allow them to learn by exploring nature, aid increase concrete activity. During off-hours, the schoolyards are open to local families. The new playgrounds, designed individually with and for neighborhoods, turned what used to be asphalt wastelands into green gathering spaces that have transformed the manner neighbors interact with each other.
Now Brink has brought her project, called Big Sandbox, to Philadelphia—a metropolis whose complicated schoolhouse governance structure had until recently given it a reputation for being closed to new ideas.
"Information technology was the behemoth that everyone said just couldn't be done," Brink says. "Only we don't take the luxury anymore to say that schools are for school children and parks are for the general public . . . I think anybody realizes now, there aren't the dollars out there to practice that."
Brink first thought about schoolyards in 1992, when her daughter enrolled in Denver's Bromwell Unproblematic Schoolhouse. She was horrified to see that the playground her kid would use at recess was a dilapidated "sea of pea gravel and asphalt," with a few pieces of 50 year-old equipment. Every bit she learned, this was the norm at public elementary schools throughout Denver—and around the country, including Philly. "At some bespeak l years ago, we only stopped investing in these spaces," says Brink.
It took Brink six years to turn her daughter's schoolyard into "an outdoor area that supports physical action, learning and improved social interaction," and 3 more years to finish a second Denver school. In 2001, she formed a public-private partnership called the Learning Landscapes Brotherhood, which over the next 3 years raised $x.6 1000000, allowing information technology to redevelop 22 boosted schoolyards. (Brink took up the proper noun The Big Sandbox when she moved her efforts to Philadelphia.) By 2003, every school in the district wanted one of Brink'due south Learning Landscapes . And Denver voters complied, approval two separate bond measures in 2003 and 2008 that immune Brink and the Denver Public Schools to renovate every single elementary schoolyard past 2012.
Improving the schoolyard—the most visible and public part of the schoolhouse itself— reconnects communities with their schools, something badly needed in this city.
A former Denver Councilwoman noted that the success of the schoolyard remodels was Brink'due south utilize of the community to design the parks. "To say 'no' to the 2008 bail measure to complete Learning Landscapes across the city would have been to say 'no' to citizen appointment," she told the American Order of Landscape Architects .
Ane study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and some other funded by the NIH found that students used Learning Landscape playgrounds significantly more ofttimes than older, unimproved playgrounds—sometimes past 300 percent more than— with a sizable subtract in sedentary children. They besides establish that these differences were consistent for newly constructed Learning Mural playgrounds, equally well as ones that were built at the kickoff of the procedure, proving that the new playgrounds provided lasting changes.
Other cities have followed suit. In 2013 Boston completed it's urban center-broad redesign of every public school playground in the city. A similar initiative has been completed in Houston, and Chicago has started a similar program. Brink, who grew up in Mt. Airy, and went to Penn, started looking at her hometown at the urging of a former graduate student who lives here, just every bit she finished the last schoolyard in Denver.
In Philadelphia, Brink began working with a handful of schools that already take partnered with the Philadelphia H2o Department to supersede their asphalt with a dark-green surface that reduces the amount of stormwater pollution entering the waterways. (The partnerships help PWD meet its goal of reducing stormwater runoff by 85 per centum, and provide schools with soft play areas.)
Main Todd Kimmel of Horatio B. Hackett in Kensington says he hopes to plow his schoolyard into a reflection of the good work going on inside the school and to be a welcoming beacon for neighbors. "When you look at it from the exterior, it's all concrete and blacktop and has very small windows," Kimmel says. "Information technology doesn't really convey what'due south going on within of the edifice. We have great teachers, great families that already go to this school, neat kids. This project could be a transformational piece for people to see a beautiful space and also attach it with Hackett."
In other words, improving the schoolyard—the nearly visible and public part of the school itself— reconnects communities with their schools, something desperately needed in this urban center.
At South Philly's George W. Nebinger Unproblematic as at Hackett, creating a new schoolyard is a community attempt. Over the last yr, Brink and her "mighty just tiny grouping" have been working with the students, faculty, parents, and surrounding community to design a schoolyard that works for their particular needs. The master wants a space that tin be incorporated into the curriculum, using green areas to teach students about science and nature. But then there are other considerations, such every bit historic period-appropriate play equipment and areas for parents to sit while their kids apply the playground during off-hours.
"We've already got this great geographic distribution of elementary schools," Brink says. "They are this perfect patchwork within a city, that if they were redeveloped, would not just help children during the day, only would besides aid the children before schoolhouse and after schoolhouse, would aid their community before school and subsequently school and over the weekends."
The school and the community together need to raise 2 to 6 percent (2 percent in greenbacks and the remainder can be in kind) of the more than $500,000 necessary to build these spaces. (The residuum comes from grants, donors or—every bit in the instance of Denver—the urban center.) This increases the sense of ownership that the local community feels towards the schoolyard, without which the connected budget of the schoolyard is unsustainable. (Similar to the fashion the Mural Arts Plan uses community input to design a mural.) To raise excitement (and money) about the project, The Big Sandbox held a launch event at Nebinger where they invited the neighborhood and students to paint the aspects of the new plan on the existing space. These types of events are fundamental to sustaining enthusiasm almost a procedure that tin can accept years to implement.
"Nosotros've already got this not bad geographic distribution of unproblematic schools," Brink says. "They are this perfect patchwork within a urban center, that if they were redeveloped, would non only help children during the day, merely would as well help the children before school and afterwards school, would assist their community earlier school and after school and over the weekends."
Merely as in Denver, the outset few schoolyards are going to have the well-nigh fourth dimension, because Brink and her squad accept to not only change the play equipment, but a metropolis-wide perception of schoolyards. Over time, Brink says Denverites grew to see playgrounds as part of their parks organisation, rather than school entities, and as economic development generators, like how a grocery store or a hotel increases neighborhood investment. That helped generate excitement about the projects citywide. "That change in perspective in terms of the uppercase improvements and their value, that piece hasn't happened yet in Philadelphia," Brink says.
What the Big Sandbox is trying to do in Philadelphia is not just build a schoolyard, simply build a movement. "It's about starting an avalanche and when y'all do that you are setting off charges hither and at that place and here and in that location," Brink says. "We are trying to get as many people excited about this as we tin in different ways, and and then endeavor to provide back up in whatever mode, shape or form that nosotros can."
Header Photo past Timothy Stevens (via The Big Sandbox)
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/big-sandbox/
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