Benjamin Franklin and Horace Mann elementaries to use green grants

Two Glendale schools will embark on bidding farewell to their asphalt-dominated playgrounds next year to make way for more trees and shade using greening grants that each school received.

At Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, nearly 50 trees and 600 shrubs will replace a large portion of more than 30,000 square feet of asphalt.

Along Randall Street, on the back end of the campus, crews will install a bioswale with about 400 native plants, which will help mitigate pollution from water runoff. There will also be an amphitheater built out of river rock in the center of the campus.

The organization that will install the plants, trees and amphitheater is Los Angeles-based North East Trees. The nonprofit partnered with the Benjamin Franklin Elementary Foundation to secure $1 million in state funds last year that were available through Proposition 84, passed in 2006 to spend more than $5.3 billion in in general-obligation bonds to fund projects related to safe drinking water, water quality and supply, flood control, waterway and natural-resource protection, water pollution and contamination control, state and local park improvements, public access to natural resources and water conservation.

The money was available under the Urban Greening for Sustainable Communities program.

The work at Franklin elementary, a magnet school where students attend French, Italian, German and Spanish dual-language classes, will begin in May with tree and shrub plantings, followed by the installation of meandering pathways and irrigation.

The project is expected to be complete by October 2017.

The Glendale school board approved a memorandum of understanding with the school’s foundation regarding the design and construction of the project last week.

Meanwhile, North East Trees secured $250,000 from Los Angeles County to remove roughly 10,000 square feet of asphalt at Horace Mann Elementary and plant large canopy shade trees, shrubs and possibly a vegetable garden.

The design for Horace Mann is not yet complete. The Glendale Unified School Board approved the agreement with North East Trees to oversee the project last week.

Representatives from North East Trees approached Glendale Unified with an offer to transform Horace Mann Elementary after surveying schools in the area made up of large swaths of asphalt and hardly any access to public park space nearby.

“Here is where the kids are on the daily basis. They should be able to have access to green. They should be able to have access to trees,” said Simran Sikand, development officer for North East Trees, in a phone interview on Monday. “We went there in the summer months. You see hot air rising from that asphalt.”

Now that the school board has approved the agreement, the nonprofit will soon draw up plans for replacing the asphalt and get to work making the changes when school lets out this summer, she said.

Sikand said she is hopeful the project will be complete by the time students begin the 2016-17 school year.

--

Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @kellymcorrigan