Dear Board Members:

We want to thank you for the tremendous efforts several of you have made to transform our District’s school facilities. As the Los Angeles Living Schoolyards Coalition (LSYC), it is our mission to advocate for, facilitate, and create equitable access to nature and healthy school environments that support instruction, physical and mental health, and climate resilience for Los Angeles County’s public school students and communities. Our organizations have collectively transformed at least 57 LAUSD schoolyards and are actively working with 10 LAUSD schools on projects worth over $6,450,000. We want to expedite these types of projects to help the District achieve large-scale and equitable nature-filled schoolyards that are open to the community.

In advance of the September 27th hearing on Board President Gonez’s Resolution “Green Schools for All”, we respectfully ask you to consider several important factors impacting environmental and social equity in Los Angeles schoolyards that are not directly addressed in the resolution. The proposed resolution must address specific metrics and strategies to ensure greening will directly benefit students while addressing barriers to implementation. These are outlined below:

1). Include rigorous and specific greening metrics that more clearly define the extent of the required shading and asphalt removal and how and where the improvements will take place. Language in the resolution should ensure, for example, that greening takes place “where students spend time.” This puts the focus of improvements where it will most benefit students, rather than around the perimeter of a school or in parking lots.

• Integrate greening improvements into any planned repairs. Any maintenance work or asphalt removal projects taking place on campuses should include the addition of new shade trees and natural surfaces. Ensure the shade and greening elements include shade trees, natural surfaces including mulch and decomposed granite.

• Update district design guidelines to include landscape-based guidelines that support comprehensive school greening. Guidelines should build on efforts taking place at the State level and should include rigorous standards for increased tree shade canopy, natural and soft surfaces, and outdoor classrooms while also incorporating opportunities for evidence-based learning with native/drought-tolerant plant material.

• Track progress towards greening goals. Develop a publicly accessible tracking system for campus greening. Work with stakeholders including school greening advocates, parents, and students to develop and track metrics for school greening projects that include heat reduction/shade, drought-tolerant planting, stormwater capture, and square feet of soft surfaces and planting on the campus spaces “where students spend time.”

2). Streamline and remove current barriers to greening and access. To successfully achieve large-scale expansion of green spaces the District must address the complexity of the process of approving and facilitating design and construction projects. Despite decades of experience bringing these projects to the District, non-profit development partners and interested parent groups continue to face the same challenges project after project. Creating a new centralized governance structure for policy and funding related to green school yards and climate reliance will support:

• Limiting pass-through costs to District partners. Non-profit partners are charged a percentage of grant-funded projects to cover the District’s administrative costs to conduct site assessments and review plans. These costs are often upwards of $100,000/project and significantly reduce the ability to transform campus environments for the benefit of students, teachers, and community members.

• Pay for necessary facility code upgrades with District dollars. When a grant-funded project goes through the DSA plan check, the District often requires the non-profit partner to fix problems that come up (such as accessibility, fire lane access, or drinking water access) with the grant funds, rather than using District funds, such as infrastructure Bond dollars, to address these deferred maintenance issues.

• Increase staff capacity to support schoolyard transformations. The District lacks sufficient staff with expertise specific to the environmental goals inherent to green schoolyard initiatives to support timely and effective transformative projects. Partners often wade through circular communication and bottlenecks in the approval process that severely delay and degrade the quality of work that can be done.

• Actively engage partners, community members and other stakeholders in the planning and design process for school greening. The new Greening Index uses two primary factors (proximity to parks and amount of green space on a school campus) and appears to leave out critical considerations such as CalEnviroScreen’s social and environmental burden factors and the current availability and use of green space on campuses. Had the District engaged partners in the development of the Greening Index, these key considerations would have been baked into the analysis thereby ensuring a well-rounded approach to equitable planning and saving the District dollars due to a false start.

• Streamline the permitting process through which school community members can access school playgrounds during non-school hours. This mechanism should go beyond LAUSD’s participation in the City’s Community School Parks program by offering an alternative permitting route, one with fewer administrative and staffing hurdles than the current Civic Center permit process.

Green schoolyards lead to higher academic achievement in students through increased focus, positive health outcomes through increased play and activity levels, and a reduction in negative health impacts resulting from air pollution and urban heat islands. The challenges outlined above make the process of bringing projects to the District financially and logistically difficult, even for organizations with decades of experience transforming schoolyards.

The Los Angeles Living Schoolyards Coalition is a group of nonprofit organizations, educators, and community members who create and advocate for equitable and healthy school environments to support: physical and mental health, social and emotional well-being, safe outdoor education, access to nature, and climate resilience for Los Angeles County’s public-school students and communities. Our Coalition includes community-based organizations who represent and support historically marginalized communities across the District and are experts on climate-appropriate planning and design. We welcome the opportunity to work with this Board and District staff to create equitable access to nature and healthy school environments.

We look forward to working with the LA Unified School District Board of Education, staff and other partners to ensure a strong greening policy is in place.

Sincerely,

The Los Angeles Living Schoolyards Coalition