Green Schoolyards America connects ecological innovation with education, equity, and community engagement.
What are we growing in our garden?” Wanda Stewart asks a class of third graders at Hoover Elementary School in Oakland, California. The room erupts with a garden medley: “Watermelon!” “Cherries!” “Spinach!” “Eggplant!” Then someone yells, “Mangoes!” and Stewart, Hoover’s gardening teacher, holds up her hand. “Can we grow mangoes in California?” she asks. “Mangoes need to grow in a really hot place, like Central America or Mexico.” Someone else yells, “Sacramento!” and Stewart pauses. “Maybe in Sacramento,” she considers.
Hoover may not grow mangoes, but it devotes 5,600 square feet to the cultivation of at least 50 different kinds of fruits, vegetables, herbs, bushes, and fruit trees. Even though it’s a cash-strapped inner-city school, its garden yields enough organic produce to merit inclusion in West Oakland’s farmers’ market.
Sharon Danks looks to Hoover as a model for other K-12 schools. Danks is the founder and executive director of Green Schoolyards America, a Berkeley, California-based, nonprofit that seeks to expand and strengthen the green schoolyard movement currently flourishing in cities such as Tokyo and Berlin and beginning to take root in the United States. The idea is to transform schoolyards from a 1940s-era asphalt-and-grass model to ecologically diverse landscapes that connect nature and environmental sustainability with place-based, hands-on learning while building community and democratic participation.
“The goal of Green Schoolyards America is to use school land to improve the well-being of children and the environment at the same time,” Danks explains. “We’re equally interested in outcomes for children’s learning and health and social-emotional well-being as we are in watersheds, habitats, air quality, and climate change.” Ultimately, the green schoolyards movement is about modeling ecologically rich cities of the future that we might like to live in and, in the process, restoring our relationship with the natural world.
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