The Greening of L.A. Schools

Quietly, over the past year, a few horticultural commandos have been working with the giant Los Angeles Unified School District to set in motion what could be the most dramatic public landscaping project ever in the city.

Their mission is to tear out thousands of acres of asphalt at hundreds of campuses and replace it with grass and trees.

As fanciful as that may sound, the greening is already underway, with each school developing its own landscaping plan. The district has about $190 million to pay for it, partly from a 1997 school construction bond and partly from the Department of Water and Power’s Cool Schools program.

But dreamers wouldn’t be dreamers if they stuck within the bounds of possibility. So the school district’s greening team has also come up with a couple of projects to demonstrate just what could be done if money were no object.

The projects are called sustainable schools, a term meant to suggest that a campus could make its own energy, collect its own water and feed its own students--in the abstract, at least.

In more practical terms, it means that schools, like people who recycle, could become less of a drag on public resources.

Planting shade trees to cut air-conditioning costs is just the starting point.

How about solar panels on rooftops to generate electricity? Or cisterns to capture rainwater for irrigation? Or strawberry trellises to cool schools and put nutritious food on cafeteria trays?

Or, if you want to really dream, tunnels under classrooms to bathe them in air cooled to the constant 55-degree underground temperature?

These ideas come from the sketchbooks of Scott Wilson, an Eagle Rock landscape architect and environmental visionary who keeps his feet on the ground and keeps calluses on his hands.

Wilson is the founder of North East Trees, an organization that has planted thousands of trees across the Arroyo Seco basin in the last decade.

His group is now preparing the landscape plan for Multnomah Elementary School in El Sereno, one of the two proposed sustainable schools.

The DWP put up $500,000 for the demonstration projects. North East Trees is teaming up with the Hollywood Beautification Project at Multnomah. The Los Angeles Conservation Corps and Tree People are working at Broadous Elementary School in Pacoima to create greening and water recycling proposals for a sandy environment.

In designing the Multnomah plan, Wilson has pushed the limits of budgets and of bureaucratic imagination. He has also grappled with problems imposed by Mother Nature.

Multnomah’s hard clay soil doesn’t absorb much water. So Wilson decided to put grassy fields atop huge cisterns that would be covered by his own soil concoction--a mixture of gardener’s vermiculite and shredded tires.

Some of Wilson’s ideas were far too ambitious--and expensive. The cooling tunnels fell by the wayside, as did a giant cistern under a soccer field. But for about $35,000, Wilson was able to include a smaller cistern under a kindergarten tricycle track. It will have a solar panel and pump water into a watering system for that area.

School district maintenance officials at first frowned on a proposed orchard to show children where food comes from and to improve their nutrition.

They had visions of students lobbing oranges and apricots through classroom windows or into the neighborhood. A compromise was reached by placing all the fruit trees behind a fence.

But Wilson had to scrap an animal farm and power-generating windmills to avoid haggling with the district.

“We found that the more things we put in here that were subject to debate, the more it delayed the process,” he said. “We tried to go with the slam-dunk items as much as we could, but we’re trying to change the district’s way of thinking.”

But he was obstinate about irrigation. In the final plan submitted to the school district last week, he included a drip system to conserve water and reduce weeds, an important goal because the Board of Education has ordered a halt to the use of herbicides for weed control.

He knows that district officials favor a system with underground pipes and sprinkler heads.

Guillermo Aguilar, the district’s greening coordinator, is concerned that schoolchildren will make a nightmare out of a drip system, which consists of small hoses laid across the surface.

Because Multnomah is a demonstration project, he may relent.

“We’re willing to try it out,” said Aguilar.

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“Sustainable” Schools

Multnomah Elementary School in El Sereno is one of two schools that have received funds to demonstrate “sustainable” building and landscaping techniques that reduce water and energy use. Ideas that prove feasible in the field tests may be employed at other schools as the Los Angeles Unified School District moves ahead with plans to replace asphalt with trees and grass at about 440 schools. Proposals to conserve resources range from the simple to the elaborate. Some of those illustrated below are in the plans for Multnomah. Others were scrapped as too costly or unsuitable for an environment filled with children.