Green Schoolyards America
Green Schoolyards America hosts monthly online meetings featuring engaging presentations from school district colleagues, invited guest speakers, and technical experts who share their work on schoolyard forests.
Texas
Fort Worth Report - July 3, 2025
The dirt was soft in Kimberly Fermin’s hands. Shouting for attention, the third grader scooped it haphazardly, packing it around a pink flower under the watch of her teacher, Jennifer Egan. “LOOK! LOOK!” the little girl exclaimed. “It smells good!” On a spring afternoon at Trinity Basin Preparatory’s Pafford campus, special education students took part…
Nebraska
KLKNTV.com - June 25, 2025
At a Lincoln Public Schools board public forum Wednesday night, one teenager raised her budgetary concerns. Bailey Braden, 15, suggested the board include more money for LPS schoolyards in the upcoming budget. The board went over its budget plans for 2025-26 and detailed how much it plans to spend and why. But Bailey laid out…
New York
Gothamist - June 11, 2025
New York City kids could soon have more space to play outdoors. The City Council is set to approve a bill later this month aimed at keeping public school playgrounds open outside of school hours — part of a broader push by lawmakers to expand access to parks and recreational areas. The bill, sponsored by…
Case Study/Exemplar
Green Schoolyards America
This website hosts registration information for regular online discussion forums as well as the links to past webinar recordings from the Community of Practice for Schoolyard Forests. Each forum features real world examples of how to plan for, create, and care for schoolyard forests.
Washington
MSN.com - May 23, 2025
As part of an effort to increase access to parks for Tacoma residents, two elementary schools in Tacoma saw new schoolyards open on May 19. The new schoolyards at Whitman and Mann elementary schools will be accessible to students during the school day and open to the public as a park after school hours and…
Resource Hub
Green Schoolyards America
The national Schoolyard Forest System®'s online Resource Library is a collection of free, practical tools and resources designed to support schools and school districts as they plan, develop, use, and manage schoolyard forests.
Alabama
Governing.com - April 24, 2025
Seventy percent of Alabama is forested. But when Chris Erwin asked a bus full of Alabama students to raise a hand if they’d ever been in one, only a single hand went up. And that was 20 years ago, before devices and screens became inescapable. Today, as executive vice president of the Alabama Forestry Foundation,…
Pennsylvania
WHYY - March 13, 2025
At West Philly’s Overbrook Elementary School, a group of third graders recently spent part of the morning outside in their asphalt schoolyard. Split into groups and holding printed maps of the space, they wandered around and brainstormed about how the space is used — and what it could become.“ Y’all, we could put a basketball…
California
Village News - February 8, 2025
La Paloma teachers, staff, and local UC Master Gardeners came together to set up 16 corrugated metal raised garden beds on the campus of La Paloma Elementary School, along with the forming Fallbrook Ranch Lions Club, Saturday, Jan. 18. The garden beds will be used in a school gardening program for La Paloma K-6 students…