In Brief:
- Millions of students spend their days on campuses with heat-absorbing surfaces and little tree canopy.
- A school forest system in California is working to bring cooling shade to these campuses, and to foster nature-based educational opportunities.
- Rialto USD has planted citrus groves and forests on 19 campuses since 2016. This work has had a surprising range of benefits, including environmental, educational and health impacts.
The tract homes, strip malls and shopping centers surrounding the Rialto, Calif., school district offer no hint that this land once gave life to a thriving citrus industry. An “Orange Empire” was ripped from this soil in the middle of the 20th century to make room for people.
Since 2016, the district has been reclaiming this history, planting citrus groves and forests on 19 campuses, bringing new life and new educational possibilities.
Things began to change in 2015 when the district’s grounds maintenance supervisor, Brian Montez, attended a green schools conference. Montez had been asked to reduce water use at the district’s schools, but he was resistant — he preferred grass to native plants. Juanita Chan, director of science and career programs for the district, sent him to the conference hoping it might help him embrace drought-tolerant landscaping.
The strategy worked better than she could have hoped. “I was transformed from the ‘Grim Reaper of Gardens’ to someone I did not know,” he told Kids Gardening.
Montez had found his way to a session led by Sharon Danks, author of Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation, an influential guide to converting school hardscape to green space.
Danks put forward the idea of planting orchards on school grounds. Montez hadn’t been enthusiastic about requests for school gardens, but this was something different.
A State Forest on Schoolyards
Rialto USD is a member of the California Schoolyard Forest System, founded in 2022 in partnership with the California Department of Education; CAL FIRE, the state forestry and fire protection agency; and the environmental literacy nonprofit Ten Strands.
The initiative currently encompasses 11 districts that manage more than 1,000 schools, says Danks, who is also executive director of Green Schoolyards America, a nonprofit that promotes school forests.
The program’s goal is to reduce heat dangers on campus and provide an enriched learning experience for students via dedicated outdoor spaces where they can garden and play.
Temperatures in already-hot California communities are going up a degree Fahrenheit or more each year. Children need regular time outdoors during the school day, but they are especially vulnerable to heat-related illnesses. Nearly 6 million children attend California schools, almost half on school grounds with less than 5 percent tree canopy.
Danks has measured temperatures on asphalt and rubber play surfaces that are as much as 50 degrees higher than the air temperature. Her goal is to plant enough trees by 2030 to bring every California campus up to 30 percent tree canopy.
Earlier in her career, Danks might have had to spend a long time convincing a school they needed more trees. That began to change after the pandemic raised interest in getting students and teachers outside. “Then when they were outside, they realized it was hot outside and that shade was needed,” she says.
Green Schoolyards has created an online library that encompasses a wide range of resources for schools that includes case studies, design guidance, sample lessons, a lecture series and regular meetings of school practitioners. These resources offer schools and districts a template for creating curriculum and outdoor learning opportunities around their trees.
Heritage Groves
Montez’s first inspiration in Rialto was to remove turf and plant “heritage citrus groves” on campuses. Signs placed outside them read, “Building a foundation of higher learning on the footprint of the pioneers of the city of Rialto, CA.”
Planting began in 2016, and now about five-and-a-half acres of playground or grass space have been converted into gardens and groves on 19 campuses, Chan says. The new green spaces include carbon sequestration forests, outdoor classrooms and vegetable patches.
The district has created science, nutrition and sustainability curriculum around the groves and gardens. Social studies lessons teach students local history that’s been erased by population growth.
Gardens and orchards also offer real-world learning experiences. Students help harvest fruit that is served with their school lunches.
“A fifth grader told me that a bundle of leaves ball together really tight, and that’s how fruit is made,” Chan says. “I think everybody assumed the kids were more connected than that.”
The district has implemented programs at every level — elementary, middle and high school.
Ready to Learn
Tami Butler, the principal at Charlotte N. Werner Elementary School, says that first and foremost, the trees are vital resources for social and emotional learning. This vital aspect of elementary education disappeared during the pandemic.
“When kids are having a bad time, we take them out here to walk,” Butler says. Even elementary students are subjected to a lot of trauma, she says. Rialto USD is a Title I district; nearly 9 in 10 students are “socioeconomically disadvantaged” according to state metrics.
“We’re not going to have kids that learn unless they’re psychologically safe,” Butler says. “They’re not going to be receptive to learning, or be able to learn, until you meet those emotional needs.”
A 44-tree carbon sequestration forest was planted next to the citrus grove on her campus to exemplify the role trees play in capturing atmospheric carbon and mitigating heat islands. It also serves as a classroom, a reading room and a popular space for parent meetings.
The Unit of Change
Staci Okuno, a science teacher at Rialto Middle School, worked at the district for nearly a decade before tree planting and the garden programs that developed around it.
She’s seen changes in students arriving from elementary schools. For one thing, they have different attitudes toward food. “They know that if food is fresh or homegrown, it’s tastier, it’s better,” she says.
Some have made home gardens. She makes a three-by-three foot plot available to her students, where they can grow food for their families.
Students who have had hands-on experience in groves and gardens at the elementary level have deeper levels of observation and inquiry, she says. Like Chan, she has seen a significant growth in student interest in careers in fields such as environmental law and environmental science.
It’s not uncommon for a campus forest to be the first forest students have seen. This underscores Chan’s belief that schools are the fundamental “unit of change” to improve environmental stewardship.
