Your school campus is most likely designed for and by adults, so it may be no surprise that the children don’t feel comfortable in its spaces.

I laugh every time I go to the grade school parent/teacher conference and sit in his/her seat and find my knees close to my chin as I try to have a serious conversation with my child’s teacher.

The same scale of that furniture should be applied to the campus outdoor spaces.  Here are four ways that your campus can comply with the needs of its children, and a fifth point for a learning exercise.

1. Make steps smaller. A typical indoor staircase has a 7-inch height riser, and outdoors, risers are usually 6-inches.  Reduce outdoor risers to a  5-inches, and slightly lengthen the treads to make more foot room (children rarely walk across campus – they dash!)  You would be amazed how enjoyable it is to take a stair with a smaller riser, even as an adult. Take a ruler with you as you go through campus and measure a few of the treads and the risers. See if you also agree with the idea that a 5-inch riser is more comfortable.  I love the ones I designed to my home’s porch. (extra credit: use the risers and treads as a multiplication exercise: how many total inches of rise and run?)
   

   These stone walls are 18-inches in height, perfect for the scale of an elementary school student.

2. Scale seating appropriately.  Rest places on campus should be designed with the measure of a child. Allow children seating that is  18″ – 20″ above the ground for elementary school children.  Adults prefer 24″ – 28” seats heights but that is simply too tall for little bodies. Check out these pictures of our newly completed amphitheater at St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Virginia.   Those stone walls are 18” off the grass, perfect for children from Kindergarten to fifth grade.
3. Allow spontaneity.  Seating does not necessarily have to be a bench or wall, but it can be the edge of a wall, or a staircase or an inclined lawn.  Remember that children stop and rest exactly when they want to: they rarely find their way to a pair of benches across the field.   Children can find places to sit and chat comfortably, and it may not need be an item specified from a furnishings catalogue. A grassy slope at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden had more children on it than any bench or structure in the adjacent Children’s Garden!
4. Watch the heights of signs and message boards. Signs that are at eye level of a motorist might also be exactly at the face level of a first grader, and could pose an injury or hazard. This applied to banners as well.  Make them high enough, or low enough, so that children passing by signs can’t be injured as they run.  Avoid having sign posts stand out in walkways of physical education areas.  I am amazed how  children rarely take the designated route, but go their own way, so don’t assume they will stay on the walks!
5. Make the child’s personal dimensions part of a class lesson.As a good exercise in class, lay out a length of the classroom or hallway at 30 feet long.  Ask each child to start with their heel against the zero-foot mark and see how many full strides they take along the tape. Divide 30 into the number of strides and that gives the length of the child’s stride. Use this numeral to measure the length of their classroom, the cafeteria, a playing field, or sport court by using simple multiplication.
   

   Children were all over these slopes, while benches in the "Children's Garden" remained empty.

Test your campus today and see who is being served . Make it an exercise to “test” the stairs, benches, and walls on your campus to see how they work with the hands and feet of the students, the measure of all things on your campus.  Send a picture to us of good or bad examples, and we will share it here.

Most school campuses are expected to contain lawn.  Children play kick ball on it, parents hold festivals and parties on it, teachers watch little ones romp on it, and everyone treads over it between classes.  So, are you shirking environmental responsibility for having expanses of lawn at your campus?  Should you rip out the lawn altogether and plant a forest in its place?

A Black Gum at The Potomac School in Fairfax County, Virginia, spreads an amazing canopy of shade near the soccer and softball fields.

I wouldn’t remove all the lawn area, but I would stop wasting energy, resources, and staff time watering and tending enormous swaths of lawn.  With limited grounds staff on most campuses I visit, a considerable percentage of grounds budget and time is spent mowing, fertilizing, raking, and watering lawn.  As a result,  other more important and more beneficial things do not happen, such as the purchase and planting of shade trees, planting groundcovers to slow erosion, or installation of rain gardens to control storwmater runoff.

PlaceMatters offers you Five Ways to Tackle Lawn On Campus to direct you towards a more sustainable approach to the campus landscape.  Perhaps Fairfax County, Virginia will learn a few things from your school’s example and the cows will slowly find their way back.

5 Ways to Tackle Lawn on Campus

1.  Start planting trees on a regular basis.  Trees’ long-term benefits to your campus far outweigh time spent eliminating lawn areas.  You will reduce surface temperatures, increase wildlife habitat, cool adjacent buildings, and build a canopy for the future decades.  As the trees spread, turf grass will stop thriving below their shade canopy (reduces mowing!)  and eventually, the trees will become campus icons.

2.  Establish a Tree Master Plan to identify the species you would love to see on your campus, and areas that need new or revived vegetation. Perhaps there are also areas that need to be screened from view. We have done this for several schools and they are on task with incremental tree planting.

3.  Limit lawn areas in any new project proposed on campus. For some reason, most new campus building projects ooze with lawn areas and parking.  Instead, establish tree groves or native groundcover beds, and thereby eliminate the need for water, fertilizer, and most importantly, staff resources on such an unproductive landscape element!  And don’t be fed the line: too much maintenance! Lawn mowing wastes more time and staff attention than any other campus maintenance task and the price of fertilization and weed control products are soaring.

4.  Discontinue blanket fertilization and weed eradication with poisonous chemicals. Nitrogen runoff from fertilizer contributes to the demise of the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay.  Rather than fertilize, aerate the lawn areas, spread a sifting of  compost over it.  Spot treat weeds if you must, but only in target areas.  You will start healing the earth, and improve the health of waterways near your campus.  Do you really want your students to carry lawn fertilizers and chemicals into your classrooms on their shoes? (They never come out of the carpets, by the way).

5.  Use the reduction of lawn areas for geometry class:  a) Measure one lawn area on campus to calculate the square footage. b)  Allow students to determine measurable units before they calculate it (rectangles, triangles, trapezoids, ellipses, etc), to calculate the square feet of existing lawn. c) Propose a  canopy of tree cover on the measured area and calculate its 20-year coverage if trees are planted 25-feet on center with mature canopies of 30-foot diameter. (Get a scaled map from your campus facilities director, or from Google Earth and it may assist you in this part of the exercise)  d) Compare the benefits of the tree canopy to the existing conditions, noting how many new square feet of canopy will exist in one generation.

Those who revel in shade and wildlife will be thanking you in 10 years for your efforts!

P.S. Read Brian’s  2009 post on “Lawn Diets” to learn about easy-going lawn care, without poisonous chemicals.

Have you proposed an “alternative” to lawn at your campus?  Tell us more and share a photo.  We can help you create a new beginning!