A Grass-Roots Movement That’s Welcome in Schools

You just can’t play Red Rover on asphalt.

So when Beckford Elementary principal Isabelle Wiefel was given the chance to replace four kickball fields on her asphalt playground with a giant patch of grass, she grabbed it.

“I remember growing up back East, we always had grass,” Wiefel recalled. “We could play games like Red Rover, where someone was always falling down. And on nice days the teacher would put a blanket out and we’d have our lessons outside, sitting on the grass, listening to the birds in the trees. Those are some of my best memories.”

Now her Northridge campus has become one of hundreds of Los Angeles Unified schools getting playground face lifts that will make grass and trees part of their students’ school memories.

It’s a turnabout for the nation’s second-largest school district, known for its cookie-cutter campuses: a sprawling classroom complex, with a tiny patch of grass out front and a giant blacktop playground, ringed by a chain-link fence.

And though it’s happening quietly, under the radar for most of us, architects and environmentalists describe it as the most dramatic public landscaping project the city of Los Angeles has ever seen.

I don’t have any proof that grass on a campus helps children learn. I don’t know if test scores will go up at schools that add grass, flowers and trees. But I remember my first visit to Beckford 10 years ago, and the one question asked by my 5-year-old, who was about to start kindergarten there.

We had met the teacher, toured the classroom, surveyed the playground and its equipment. My daughter wasn’t impressed by the picnic tables, jungle gym, sandbox piled high with climbing tires. Instead, she asked, “Mommy, where’s the grass?”

She had come from a preschool that had not only swings and slides, but acres of grass and trees. She hated to give that up, and so, I realized, did I. But every suggestion parents made to add campus greenery was turned away by a district preoccupied with such basics as keeping classrooms clean and toilets functioning.

So we could hardly believe our eyes last month when my daughters and I drove by and saw giant green carpets of grass being unfurled on the schoolyard, and kids lined up to watch, wide-eyed.

Beckford’s new field is part of a package of improvements funded by Proposition BB, the 1997 bond issue that provided $1.2 billion to upgrade L.A. Unified’s aging campuses. Most of the money is going to improve plumbing, install air-conditioning, paint classrooms and repair broken fixtures. But each campus also got to choose from a list of landscape and playground options, and grass was high on most every list.

For decades, Los Angeles district officials have been resistant to the idea of grass on playgrounds. “Too expensive to maintain,” principal Gary Domnitz was told when he first inquired about adding a grassy field to the yard at Loyola Village Elementary in southwest Los Angeles.

“The reason they had blacktop was that it doesn’t require mowing,” Domnitz said. He was told that if the district planted grass, the campus would have to provide the money or hire gardeners to maintain it.

But three things happened over the past few years to make the “greening” of Los Angeles schools a reality: Research now shows that the addition of grass and trees to a campus can produce energy benefits that will save the district money. The pot of money to pay for such additions has grown tremendously, thanks to corporate efforts and private foundations and the pool of money from Proposition BB. And there is a growing awareness that the aesthetics of a school contribute to its efficiency and its value to the community.

“We’re emphasizing the landscape today because we realize that landscaping is very important,” said Bob Timme, professor and dean of the architecture program at USC. “With the proper landscaping, grass instead of asphalt, trees shading the south sides of buildings, we can reduce the long-term costs to run a school. We discovered that the energy costs of a campus actually are higher than the cost of its construction, over the life of a school.”

Timme heads Los Angeles Unified’s Design Advisory Council, which is helping to oversee an ambitious campaign to construct 85 schools and expand 75 others over the next five years to accommodate the district’s growing student body. Landscape designs were on the agenda Friday at a symposium for school architects at the Getty Center.

Landscape concerns are more than a matter of dollars or environmental issues, Timme said. “The idea of running on asphalt is so bad for kids’ developing bodies. Yes, there’s more maintenance involved with grass. You have to water it, fertilize it, replace it. But it really adds to the quality of the total school experience.”

And Timme said he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that greening a campus does improve its students’ achievement. “These things are not often a straight line,” he says. But there is research that shows that environment affects performance. “The idea that we’re going to stick a tree outside a window and test scores are going to go up ... well, that might not be that far off.”

Domnitz, the principal at Loyola Village, has already seen the impact his school’s green fields have had on attitudes. “People have told me they enjoy coming to work, the environment is so refreshing. And the kids are just so excited. They can play soccer now; they never could before.”

The school made $100,000 in landscaping improvements, funded by the Anne and Kirk Douglas Foundation, which gives grants to schools for playground improvements; Proposition BB funds; and more than $25,000 raised by parents and the booster club. There is new playground equipment, a grass field, flower gardens and trees, and two 50-foot circles of grass--outdoor classrooms, they call them--surrounded by curving concrete benches so that children can meet with their teachers outside, in the shade of trees.

Loyola’s students may not realize that their school is saving energy, helping promote an architectural renaissance and protecting ecology. They just know they can play soccer at recess, turn cartwheels after lunch, take their shoes off while their teacher reads and feel grass beneath their feet. And learn to play a running game like Red Rover without anybody worrying about skinned knees.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sunday and Tuesday. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.