How Milwaukee Public Schools are transforming the learning environment with “Green Schoolyards”

Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is the largest school district in the state of Wisconsin, with 156 schools serving 67,500 students pre-K through 12. The student body is racially and economically diverse—50% of students are Black, 28% are Hispanic or Latino, 82% of students are considered economically disadvantaged (on free or reduced lunch), and 20% are classified as having special needs. Many of the historically disadvantaged communities in the MPS catchment area deal with disproportionately lower amounts of neighborhood green space and higher climate impacts, including higher heat and flooding risks.

To tackle the unsafe and environmentally harmful impacts of aging schoolyard asphalt, MPS, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, the City of Milwaukee, and Reflo began partnering in 2015 to launch Green and Healthy Schools to replace the asphalt with green learning and play environments that improve overall student and community well-being.

This piece will explore the MPS schoolyard greening process that has been co-creating spaces with community members—including some of its youngest members—to tackle and remove for themselves some of the longstanding elements of the built environment that have disproportionately affected low-income urban communities of color.

Green infrastructure provides environmental, educational, and health benefits

A top priority of Green and Healthy Schools is to reduce stormwater runoff, replenish groundwater resources, increase safe habitats for pollinators and to ultimately transform the asphalt into inviting and productive green spaces, minimizing the school’s ecological footprint while also maximizing benefits to both people and planet.

To accomplish this feat, Reflo and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) launched a three-year inclusive engagement process in 2016 designed to reach a broad spectrum of schoolyard users, including pre-K through high school students, teachers, staff, MPS leadership, parents, and the broader neighborhood community. In its first year, this process consists of monthly meetings between Reflo staff, UWM architecture students, program partners, and school students and staff to gather input and participate in design sessions.

During the first year of engagement, students participate in interactive design workshops and surveys and received new training on and exposure to career paths like architecture, engineering, and environmental management, while also learning how to help keep Lake Michigan and Milwaukee’s rivers clean. As a result of this process, UWM architecture students and Green Teams then co-create transformational design renderings and present them at broader neighborhood events to gather input from parents and community members.

In the second year of the program, Reflo—in partnership with public agencies like the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District and the City of Milwaukee’s Department of Public Works—seeks to make these renderings a reality through fundraising, detailed design, and permitting. In the first couple of years of the program, schoolyard projects included one or two greening elements, costing approximately $1 million per school, but as funding increased the scale of the transformations expanded to cover the entire schoolyard, particularly as the scope of funders grew to include both private and nonprofit sources such as the Milwaukee Public Schools Foundation, Fund for Lake Michigan, and government grants.

In the third and final year, construction occurs over the summer and, once opened, the transformed schoolyards remain publicly accessible after school hours to ensure broad-based community benefit. Revitalized schoolyards are also used to host outdoor classroom sessions, experiential learning, culturally relevant public art, and new opportunities for outdoor unstructured play (such as loose stumps and logs to build with, benches and picnic benches for small group discussions or individual reading, musical instruments, and raised garden beds).

For the 12,000 students and nearly 20,000 community members who regularly come into contact with the schoolyards, they now have new opportunities for enrichment and outdoor activity as well as some relief from the flooding and heat caused by the outdated asphalt lots.

Moreover, as a result of its early successes, MPS has integrated the Green and Healthy Schools Program into its regular operations, creating and staffing a Sustainability Team to ensure ongoing stewardship of the green schoolyards and future expansion of the schoolyard greening process to more schools.

New green spaces have transformational impacts on students

As of spring 2024, Reflo has successfully designed 41 schoolyards, built 26, and is constructing five more throughout the summer of 2024. In the years since implementing the first schoolyard revitalizations in 2016, the Medical College of Wisconsin researchers have been evaluating the program as part of a study to show the impact of the schoolyards on student health, behavior, and learning. 

Thus far, through our own data collection and discussions with students and staff, we’ve found that the program reduced urban heat island effects, improved students’ mental and physical well-being, and provided new opportunities for creativity and exploration that are key to students’ learning and development. Moreover, teachers reported that students are more curious and engaged in science classes, attendance has increased, and disciplinary referrals have decreased.

Through focusing initiatives at the level of schools and engaging public and nonprofit partners in depaving and replanting schoolyards, the Green and Healthy Schools project supports student and community learning and well-being while simultaneously countering the environmental harms that have resulted from decades of disinvestment.