Gregg Masters 00:06
This episode of PopHealth Week is brought to you by Health Innovation Media. Health Innovation Media brings your brand narrative alive both on the ground and in the virtual space for major trade show conferences and innovation summits via our signature pop-up studio. Connect with us at www.popupstudio.productions. Hello everyone. I’m Gregg Masters, Managing Director of Health Innovation Media and the producer and co-host PopHealth Week. Joining me in the virtual studio is my colleague co-founder and principal co-host at PopHealth Week Fred Goldstein President of Accountable Health, LLC. Our guest today is Sharon Danks, the founder and executive director of Green Schoolyards America, a 
national nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, Green Schoolyards America’s mission is to inspire and enable communities to enrich their school grounds and use them to improve children’s well-being learning and play while contributing to the ecological health and resilience of their cities. Since 1999, Sharon’s professional work and passion have focused on transforming school grounds into vibrant public spaces that reflect and enhance locally ecology, engage the community, and nurture children as they learn and play. Her work is now focused on scaling up the green schoolyard movement and integrating school ground design, management, and use with green urban infrastructure and accomplished schoolyard designer, researcher, and speaker Sharon has traveled the world to study hundreds of school grounds and share best practices. She is the author of Asphalt Ecosystems, design ideas for schoolyard transformation, and co-founder of the International School Grounds Alliance and Bay Tree Design. Sharon has served on California’s statewide environmental literacy Task Force and was honored to become an Ashoka fellow in 2017. She holds master’s degrees in landscape architecture and city planning from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. And with that introduction, Fred over to you help us get to know Sharon’s work at Green Schoolyards, America.
Fred Goldstein 02:21
Thanks so much, Greg and Sharon. Welcome to PopHealth Week.
Sharon Danks 02:24
Thanks so much for having me.
Fred Goldstein 02:25
Yeah, it’s really a pleasure to get you on. I’ve gotten to know you a little while the last couple of months as we worked together on some of the fantastic work you and your group are doing. So why don’t we start with giving our audience a little sense of your background?
Sharon Danks 02:37
Sure. Um, I am the Executive Director of a nonprofit organization called Green Schoolyards America. I’m an environmental city planner by training. And this year, we’ve been working on the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative. But in normal times, Green Schoolyards America collaborates with school districts to help them transform their asphalt-covered grounds into more parklike green spaces that we are using to improve children’s well-being and their learning and play variety, while also contributing to the ecological health and resilience of our cities. And we’re working on on systems change overall, and trying to change the standard way that school grounds are designed, managed, and used so that all children will have access to the natural world and the places that they already visit every day.
Fred Goldstein 03:26
So in essence, this group takes a look at your schoolyards or recommends doing doing things to enhance it put trees in gardens, things like that. Is that really where it goes?
Sharon Danks 03:36
Yeah, that, I did that type of work. I’ve been I’ve been in the green schoolyard field over 20 years. And that was a part of the work that I used to do. And I had a design firm. But what Green Schoolyards America does now is we work with district staff at city-wide. And we work on city-wide and statewide projects to help public agencies and school districts think about think as land managers and think about what they want from the hundreds of acres that they manage. And we help them set up long-term programs that are systemic, that look at shifting hundreds of acres from pavement into ecosystems.
Fred Goldstein 04:10
Oh Fantastic. So as we think about this COVID shows up. And now we’ve got this whole issue with schools. How did you get involved with that? And who are some of the other members of the group that got involved with that?
Sharon Danks 04:22
Sure. Well, in in we’ve been working a long time with school districts. So we could see that that there was a need coming when everyone had shut down and last spring and it was just a it was it was so it was so com, such a complicated time. And so we were brainstorming with school district partners about how we could help them and they said, you know, we really need to go outside. And so we put together started putting together some plans that would help them do that. And I gathered a an initial coalition to create to create an initiative and so Green Schoolyards America partnered with the Lawrence Hall of Science, the San Mateo County Office of Education and a nonprofit organization called Ten Strands. And we together held a kickoff session on June 4, a webinar where we propose that schools around the country could use their grounds for outdoor learning as a way to address the way to reopen during the pandemic while reducing transmission risk. And we based this on the idea that we had seen in old photos from 100 years ago, where kids all over the world and their classes went outside during the tuberculosis and Spanish Flu pandemics. And, and so all they did was pick up their chairs from inside and go outside. And we, we said, you know, we don’t need to overthink it, we can do the same thing. We have all this land, and it gives us space to spread out. So so the webinar was the kickoff, we had an initial document that was spread around and the outpouring of interest was amazing.
Fred Goldstein 05:55
So the next step was sort of to pull these various groups together. And I know ultimately, there were hundreds of people involved. So how did that happen?
Sharon Danks 06:05
So our initial idea, when we saw we had 1000 people who signed up for the webinar, and many more who asked questions afterward, we thought we would create a simple, a fairly simple how-to guide on our website, to, to make it so that school districts didn’t have to reinvent the wheel to be able to do it, they could use some materials that others put together. And so we, we created about 10 working groups. And, and we’re thrilled to have you participating in our health guidance group, thank you so much for your, your contributions there. We so we gathered people from, from many different sectors into different areas that could focus these how-to materials on on the areas that they knew best. And we asked everyone to write what they thought that schools would need to, to use to be able to go outside. And this modest, original modest project turned into a gigantic undertaking, and we’ve produced a library instead of a How-To Guide, which I’m really excited about. And I think it has a lot of great resources that we’ve been hearing from school districts have been very helpful in helping them get outside.
Fred Goldstein 07:13
Yeah, I thought it was fantastic. I mean, the first group I got involved with was, I got on this call from these people who were all experts in landscape architecture and making these outdoor spaces really cool and fun and interactive and safe. And I was just kind of blown away, I think there may have been 70 people in that one group on the call I was on. And I quickly realized that that group was not quite where my expertise lay. And so I said, Okay, I’m gonna do get involved somehow and got involved with the Health Group. So who were these different committees? And what did they work on? What were some of the key areas, because obviously, that’s a pretty big endeavor to say, we’re gonna move ourselves outside and conduct classrooms outside.
Sharon Danks 07:51
Yeah and it does take a takes a whole range of professions to help work out the material. So we had the the equity working group that was focused on helping us to think about everybody at all the schools and find ways to keep to center equity as one of the central things that we were working on and making sure that all of our materials and to address this idea of creating it, and how to manual, we brought committees together in all different areas. And I’ll just step through them for you. One of them was the the equity working group. And their job was to, to write an equity mission statement for our project that that underlies the entire initiative, our goal was to, to help schools equitably reopen, and using outdoor spaces as a way to do that. And so they they helped us to, to hone the focus of our overall initiative, and then also to check in with all the other groups and documents that were being produced to make sure that we were following through on our goals of coming up with equitable solutions. second group was the outdoor infrastructure working group. And I think that’s the one that you joined at the beginning. And it was we had an amazing energetic and and wonderful group of experts in landscape architecture, who helped us to create all kinds of tools and guidance documents relating to how do you pick seating and shelter and think about the weather and make cost estimates and site plans and an even an augmented reality tool for projecting a virtual classroom into an existing photograph of the site so that you could explain, you could build consensus at a school using a picture. So we have all kinds of tools on that outdoor infrastructure page produced by that group, we had a separate group, working on outdoor infrastructure, at parks assuming that not every school has space on their own schoolyard. And so some would need to be walking out of their own gates and into local parks and into streets that were closed. And so that group produced documents that are about the logistics of how you do that with the school community and how do you write an MOU with a different outside organization to get them to let you do that and what do you need to bring with you for emergencies and that type of thing. So that that group, the parks, we called it the Parks Working Group, but it’s really about moving learning off site in general. And then we had another group that was focused on the educational curriculum side, and staffing and instructional side of of this. So what were you going to teach when you get outside? And how are you going to teach it and what’s the logistics of the schedules, and they’re, they’re probably, I’d say, the school districts that are trying this fall into a couple of different categories, those who have tried who have existing outdoor learning programs that are just looking to scale it up. And they’re, they might be teaching from the landscape as part of their curriculum to, and others who are trying it for the first time who are just trying to move outside and simply use the outdoor spaces to teach the same way they do inside. And so that group thought about those different needs. And we’re trying to provide materials for both, we had another group that was focused on integrating school programs, whether those were lunch, having lunch outside when everyone would have their masks off. And library time and art time and music time and other types of activities that are not traditional classroom-based programs that group worked on. We have had a community engagement group that also thought about strategies for bringing in the wider community at a school and helping people participate. And then the health guidance working group that they you collaborated in and gave your expertise to, we really greatly appreciate that. And that that group focused on both the the the COVID, science, helping schools understand all of the different types of things that the various health authorities were telling them sometimes with conflicting information. And so that group was sorting through it and helping to present it in a way that that would be easier for school districts to understand and navigate. And then there, there’s also a section of the webpage that was produced that’s about the benefits of health benefits of nature. And why we might want to do this for the long term. We also had a group had a group that was focused on sorting through state local and national policy models and, and also funding resources. And we’re trying to communicate the, what was happening at the national level with Cares Act funding and others that that schools should know about. So they can apply for it. And helping districts understand which pieces of that they could use for to fund their outdoor learning models. And, and then we also that group gathered examples of good policies that were health authorities had included outdoor learning in their explicit directions. And we wanted to surface those and make them available for others to use and think about incorporating into their own work. And then lastly, we had a group 11th working group, it was a community of practice for early adopters. And it met I think it’s met 24 times so far, since June, the end of June, met weekly over the summer, and every other week in the fall and this year. And it’s a community of practice for schools and districts that want to move learning outside during the pandemic. And now we’re also talking about and beyond. And so it’s a place where district colleagues could talk with one another and present their updates to one another to say what they’re working on and get some help in working through common issues, and be inspired by each other. And, and so we have an ongoing Working Group every Tuesday at 11 o’clock, 11 am Pacific, and we have links at our website for anyone who’d like to join. And we’re we’ve been recording recent presentations, and those will be on our website shortly. So people can see what individual districts have been doing. It’s really, really exciting. It’s wonderful to see how all the materials that all these working groups have been producing, have been helping schools get outside.
Fred Goldstein 13:37
Yeah, it’s amazing how much work went into this. And once I got into it studying, start thinking through all of the different areas you talked about, we kind of frame this thing as a base on equity. So you start thinking about equity to get people outside and individuals who may have difficulty walking or other things, you may have allergy. So all of those things were being considered as you did it, or equity in areas that maybe don’t have much space. You know, what do you do with that so, amazing. One of the things you mentioned, which I thought was just fascinating when I first saw it, because obviously, those shiny objects are sometimes cool, even though there’s tons and tons of resources on your website was the app that people could use? And could you explain a little bit more about what that thing does? Because I was just really impressed with it.
Sharon Danks 14:23
Yeah, that we have an augmented reality app made by volunteers his name is Sean Corriel, and he took a site plan that we had created to explain to schools, how much space an outdoor classroom would take up with kids sitting six feet apart, we have diagrams of little spots on the ground and circle. And he took that those diagrams in scale and put them into an augmented reality app that he created that allows any user to take a an iPhone, running Safari, and to point it at an area of their school ground where you can see the image that you’re about to take a picture of and project into that image. a three-dimensional model of an outdoor classroom space and then take a picture so that you can, it’s I like to think of it as Pokemon Go meet schoolyard design. It’s like, you know, it’s virtual things that don’t exist like a virtual tent and virtual seat log seats, projected into the landscape that you can photograph and then show others in your school community so they can see what’s in your head about what should be going into each spot in the schoolyard. It’s a consensus-building tool that makes it real and makes it site-specific. And it’s really, really cool that he made it for us.
Fred Goldstein 15:32
And as I recall it, you could do round seating, you could do different seating types, and it would lay it out within that photo, and you could see where you place each of those items. So you could safely put a class there. It was fantastic. One of the other issues and, you know, that came up a bunch, and I still hear it as I’m trying to push this idea out to get people to consider moving their classrooms outside is weather. And everybody’s complaining about the weather. How are we supposed to do this? But as I learned, I was just stunned to find out and you obviously knew they were doing this stuff in Maine, right?
Sharon Danks 16:09
Yes. It’s funny that they’re we their schools all over the country that are that are doing this work. And the ones that seem to be the farthest ahead as as like a region of the country are the ones that are the coldest, which, which those of us in warm places. find really interesting. So, you know, I think that that there’s Maine, for example, as a leader in going outside, there’s a number of school districts in Maine that have been outside since September for a good portion of their classes. Portland Public Schools has probably the largest program with 156 outdoor classrooms that serve about 5000 kids on a rotating basis. And, and so I think that that the equity issues we were talking about come up when we talk about weather and and so we we recommend that schools consider whether appropriate clothing part of the infrastructure of an outdoor classroom so that all children are equally warm and dry as the seasons shift. Some of the other weather weather adaptations that we see are that when weather is cooler, or even cold and snowy, kids don’t need to sit in their classroom. And it’s actually kind of hard to sit out a cold day in the same spot, it’s better to get up and move around. So one strategy to keep warm is to keep moving, which helps increase physical activity as well. And so a lot of the kids in the cold climates are doing hands-on learning, they’re going on hikes through snowy forests, and they’re they’re doing art projects that involve constructing things outside or they’re doing science lessons or other things that are that involve movement, as well as as academic studies. And they’re also having their meals outside or other things that that don’t, that where they can, they can sit in one place for a little while, get up and explore and, and do a variety of things. But we also we find in other places that have a lot of rain, that shelter is a really important piece of planning for weather and so many places are doing that with tents, and rain boots and rain jackets combined, I think just so that you’re not feeling cold and wet. And yeah, I think hot drinks also are good on a cold day to keep people warm from the inside. We have some school districts that have made scarves and mittens for kids and given those out or foot warmers. But in warm places, we also need to think particularly as spring and summer come through if there’s outdoor learning all summer to help catch up on learning loss, shelter, and shade I think are particularly important and keeping kids well hydrated and having enough sunblock. Things like this become the weather adaptations for the warmer places.
Gregg Masters 18:46
If you’re just tuning in, you’re listening to PopHealth Week Our guest is Sharon Danks, founder and executive director of Green Schoolyards America. And I know as you talked about this, particularly with the schools that are looking to do this, you actually had groups of volunteers, who will help take a look at what the school’s property looks like and sort of layout ideas or places that could do this.
Sharon Danks 19:10
Yes, so the there’s a page on our website called creating outdoor spaces, and that page has on it many tools that are meant to be self-explanatory for school districts and schools to go through and, and do some site planning on their own. And if they do it on their own, it’s things like taking that app, the augmented reality app and taking photographs and then go into Google Earth and taking an aerial photo of your schoolyard and putting locations on it. And that’s one way of communicating about your site. But for schools who are new at this and might want a thought partner, we do have a wonderful program called the Emergency Schoolyard Design Volunteers that was founded by my colleague Claire Latané, who’s a professor of landscape architecture and she has brought together about 250 Landscape Architects and other designers from all across the country who have volunteered to be the thought partners in making site diagrams with schools there, they would help a school think about what they already have that would work as good outdoor learning spaces and what they might want to add to that too, to extend the shade or to extend the seating or, but thinking strategically with a partner. And so that’s what the Emergency Schoolyard Design Volunteers are doing. And we have signups on our website, both for designers who’d like to join that effort and for schools that would like help,
Fred Goldstein 20:35
I guess I’ve had you mentioned your website a number of times, where should they go to find the stuff?
Sharon Danks 20:40
It is on the website is green schoolyards plural .org, and the tab is under COVID-19. So you can all the information is there and or we’re calling the, the the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative has a site on that COVID-19 tab and it’s become the name we’ve given that webpage is now the National Outdoor Learning Library. And so it currently is filled with materials focused on COVID-19. And but we’re we are increasingly also extending it to be a long term resource. And so we’re encouraging schools to to invest in things now that they can that will meet their needs to address the pandemic, but that they will also be able to keep in the years to come. A picnic table, you by now will be useful for many years, for example, and, you know, how do you how do you keep this going. And so there’ll be more and more resources appearing that are about long-term benefits and uses and strategies.
Fred Goldstein 21:38
So one of the ideas around this is that it goes beyond COVID that we continue with outdoor education for children in K through 12. And I know that there was a committee or a group of this a big workgroup that looked at all the benefits associated with outdoor learning for children.
Sharon Danks 21:52
Yes, there are many different kinds of benefits that were looked at, in from different perspectives and in different contexts. And, and I mean, this, this work is 30 years old in the United States. I’ve been working on it for 20 years. And the reasons that we were doing it all predate COVID. Right, so. So from the health perspective, there are benefits for social-emotional wellness, for cognitive benefits for physiological benefits, mental health benefits, and benefits for vision and for sleep. And a lot of those are tied to the presence of nature and trees. And so the website explores some of those in detail and has a fantastic list of the studies that have shown those things. There are also ecological benefits for long-term outdoor learning for converting pavement into ecosystem-based parks. And those are about climate resilience and stormwater management and wildlife habitat production. But on the climate front, it also crosses into health, because we, we have weather that’s going to be increasingly erratic and warmer and children who are generally not shaded at all at school. And so we’ve been tracking that long before COVID. of and trying to trying to channel some of the funding in out there across the country in for climate mitigation to get it to be spent in part on school in in schoolyard so children can directly benefit and be protected from from heat. And so we we look at at the value of shade to reduce temperatures, specifically on school grounds and protect kids from UV as well.
Fred Goldstein 23:34
Yeah, and I know that whole issue of you know, some schools have huge pieces of property and they’ve got grass and trees and things like that. And others are inner city. And you know, I recall growing up in New York City for a while there’s schools yards were small, but even those schools found ways to do thing out, do things outdoors, what were some of the ideas they used.
Sharon Danks 23:55
For smaller school grounds. They I have been to some schools in New York that have had their edible gardens, and hanging planters on perimeter fences. And I think you don’t need a large planting even to bring butterflies and birds to your site. You just need the right plants in the right place and calm like in New York City gardens I’ve seen mental health-oriented gardens that were quiet seating areas for kids to who needed a break from the hustle-bustle of the day. And those are also can be small spaces for small groups together. Trees. A single tree with a big expansive canopy doesn’t take up much ground space but has a nice shady umbrella. And I think we also see schools with smaller campuses, developing programs to take the kids out into the nearby neighborhood to make use of local parks and to set up joint use agreements with parks so that they can they can do that as well extending their own footprint. Some have gardens on the roof,
Fred Goldstein 24:57
and I seem to recall when I’m doing classes on the rood Another one maybe in the street and things like that as well to expand their spaces.
Sharon Danks 25:05
Yeah, the New York City, the New York City education department, actually, early on in this fall and the fall, invited schools across the city of New York City to go outside and, and I think it was something like 700 schools that that said yes to their offer in the first 48 hours or something. So there is great interest in New York, and getting outside, which is amazing. And so I think you can do it clearly spreading out for for, in the context of the pandemic, spreading out need space. But and so some of those schools, are they in New York, they also gave some schools permission to close the streets near them during the day so that they could have space to to have more room to spread.
Fred Goldstein 25:49
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. Because we know what the impacts, we’ve now seeing how seriously impacts are on these children who weren’t able to get into the classrooms, socialize with their friends, and neighbors, etc. And obviously, sit there at a zoom screen or whatever the educational system is that we’re using for technology. And it’s been really devastating as we see from the mental health perspective. So I know that recently, the CDC, you’ve mentioned this before, came out with at least a one-line recommendation that outdoor schools is potentially more safe way to go, which is some good work. Where do you see this going in the future?
Sharon Danks 26:25
In what way?
Fred Goldstein 26:27
Do you see schools continuing on with this after COVID? Or? Or?
Sharon Danks 26:32
Definitely, I think we, from the schools that have, we’ve heard a variety of really encouraging reports from the schools and districts that are trying this. For the ones that were outside. In previous years. We talked to one school that had 30% of its program outside in previous years and was 95% outside this year and said, We love it. And we’re not planning to go back to the 30, we’re gonna stay closer to where we are, like, we just love what we’ve built. And we’re saying here. And I think that many of the school districts we’re talking to are also trying to build on the momentum that that has been gathering now. They’re seeing fewer behavioral problems, kids, because kids are more engaged. They’re liking what they’re doing. They’re happier, they’re not having discipline issues. And they’re there. So they’re trying to figure out how to how to keep that and we are working on trying to support them in in doing that. And I think that there are, there’s some policies that need to be aligned to their staff positions and districts that would need to be funded to have coordinators of these things and to have have the infrastructure follow-through, you know, in a in a long term way. But but the interest is really exciting. We’re seeing it from state agencies. The State Education Department in Wisconsin wrote a version of our website that they tailored it specifically for Wisconsin, we see Maine moving in that direction, I think, and there are a lot of, of county offices of education that are also encouraging it.
Fred Goldstein 28:01
That’s been really fantastic, you know, to get all these groups involved. And I wish we had some more time Sharon because I’d love to get into this even more. But I know that if people go to your site, you’re doing webinars, and a lot of people are joining it. So really, it’s a pleasure to have you on. And sorry, we had to kind of get this a bit short. But thanks so much for joining us, Sharon.
Sharon Danks 28:21
Thanks so much for having me today. And for all your work on this initiative over the last year. We really appreciate it.
Fred Goldstein 28:26
Oh, it’s really been my pleasure. You folks have done a fantastic job. And with that, I’ll turn it back over to you Gregg.
Gregg Masters 28:31
And that is the last word of today’s broadcast. I want to thank Sharon Danks, founder and executive director of Green Schoolyards America for her time and insights today do follow her work on twitter @SDanks S and on the web at www.GreenSchoolyards.org. And finally if you’re enjoying our work at PopHealth Week, please like the show and the podcast platform of your choice and do consider subscribing. Keep up with new episodes as they become available for PopHealth Week my colleague Fred Goldstein and Health Innovation Media, this is Gregg Masters saying bye now.