In Brief:
- Asphalt surfaces and increasing numbers of extreme heat days have made it harder for students to comfortably spend time outdoors.
- Planting trees on school grounds can help cool them. School forests have also been found to improve learning outcomes and student well-being.
- With support from the U.S. Forest Service, a project is underway in Alabama that aims to bring thousands of trees to schoolyards around the state.
Seventy percent of Alabama is forested. But when Chris Erwin asked a bus full of Alabama students to raise a hand if they’d ever been in one, only a single hand went up. And that was 20 years ago, before devices and screens became inescapable.
Today, as executive vice president of the Alabama Forestry Foundation, Erwin is bringing thousands of trees to school campuses. This “schoolyard forest” work is funded by the U.S. Forest Service, with partners including Alabama’s department of education, forestry commission and local governments.
The point of the planting, Erwin says, is to give students a life activity. “Take a shovel, plant a tree, care for that tree, learn how to nurture that tree — that’s going to build a sense of responsibility to the community over the long term,” he says.
Erwin’s relationship with forests runs deep. His father was a sharecropper, born into a sharecropping family. A job in a paper mill enabled him to lift his family out of poverty and send his wife and three of his children to college.
The GI bill covered Erwin’s college costs. When he left the Air Force, he chose a career in forestry because of his father’s affiliation with the industry. He’s worked for several nonprofits and as a conservation forester across the Southeast, helping private landowners enhance biodiversity on their lands. At the Alabama Forestry Foundation, he leads programs that encompass environmental education, conservation on private lands and forest certification.
The school project began with a goal of planting at least 1,000 trees on 40 campuses, but a recent visit to just one nursery yielded Erwin a donation of 4,000. “The support and the excitement to do this is out there,” Erwin says. “We’re putting our stake in the ground and saying we’re going to be the go-to for establishing schoolyard forests in Alabama.”
Alabama isn’t the only place where parents, educators and students want to see more trees on school property. A national schoolyard forest movement has been gaining momentum for years.
Heat and Shade
Hotter weather is creating a particular problem for schools given the prevalence of asphalt-heavy playgrounds. Shade is more and more necessary for students to be able to spend time outdoors. Research by the nonprofit Green Schoolyards America has found that on a 90-degree day, unshaded asphalt can be as hot as 140 degrees. Rubber surfaces, used to reduce the risk of injury on playgrounds, can reach 165 degrees.
On top of the climate benefits, a growing body of evidence links schoolyard forests with improvements in academic achievement and students’ mental and physical health. They create outdoor learning environments and foster engagement with parents and the community.
Awareness of this work has grown steadily over the past 25 years, says Sharon Danks, founder of Green Schoolyards America. “It feels like an exponential increase in the schoolground field of people wanting to have green environments and shade,” she says.
Funding from the California Department of Education and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection helped the nonprofit establish a framework for creating a forest on school grounds.
The online resource library it has created since includes case histories, design guidelines, lessons and activities for pre-K through high school students, a lecture series and more, all available for free. Erwin has used these materials to adapt his forest experience to school settings.
Not Just Planting
The Alabama Forestry Foundation’s programs don’t stop at planting trees; they include crucial grade-appropriate curriculum on forests and teacher education on bringing these subjects to their classrooms.
The teacher workshops provided by the foundation include nature hikes and field trips to forest plantings and paper mills. A “Learning to Burn” project that Erwin created takes students to the forest before and after a prescribed burn. Landowners come to classrooms to talk about their conservation practices and then take them into their forests.
“The next iteration is we’re going to put the forest in the schoolyard, so a student can be responsible and care for it while they are in that school,” Erwin says.
This will involve building relationships with natural resource professionals, soil and water professionals, forestry commission staff, county commissioners and school districts in the jurisdictions where plantings take place, says Ashley Smith, education program director for the foundation. “We will be working to develop teams of people around those schools, to make sure the planting is done well and to carry the forest forward as it grows on that campus,” she says.
Shane Haws, a science specialist with the Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative within the state department of education, expects the projects on these campuses to help students master the state’s content standards. “In addition, they support the emotional, mental and social well-being of the whole child,” he says.
Not for Everyone
Not every teacher wants to take on yet another classroom task. Erwin assumed it would be a slam dunk to bring a forest to the campus of his alma mater, but after school officials met and talked about it, they told him it wasn’t going to work for them. He’s never learned why.
Schools might not always have the capacity, bandwidth or local support for a campus forest, Erwin says. “Sometimes I’ve had a schoolteacher say, ‘We’re just trying to survive. What you’re promoting sounds fantastic, but we’re just trying to make sure we’ve got kids in seats that are safe — come back to us in a couple of years.'"
