LA Waterkeeper, symposium participants identify funding, artificial turf as key barriers to greening schoolyards to benefit students, communities
Press release from the LA Waterkeeper
More than 125 participants gathered on May 13 for “From Runoff to Resilience: Stormwater Harvesting on School Campuses,” a full-day symposium hosted by Council for Watershed Health, Heal the Bay, Los Angeles Waterkeeper, and Randolph Consulting Group. The event brought together parents, school districts, city agencies, nonprofit organizations, community-based organizations, consultants, and teachers to explore how greening schoolyards can improve water resilience, reduce water pollution, address the urban heat island effect, and benefit students and communities across the LA region.
“Participants left the Runoff to Resilience Symposium inspired for the future of stormwater harvesting on school campuses,” said Maggie Gardner, Science and Policy Manager at LA Waterkeeper. “Our speakers shared case studies and research on successful projects and their impacts, including both water quality and student well-being. We learned how practitioners are overcoming challenges in project design and management, operations and maintenance, and off-site stormwater and liability, and what challenges we still need to solve. We ended the day by exploring funding opportunities for schoolyard greening projects with stormwater harvesting elements.”
The symposium surfaced six key takeaways for advocates, practitioners, and funders working to advance schoolyard greening at scale.
- Greening schoolyards requires high-level changes and provides community-wide benefits. Creating community- and watershed-level impacts demands sustained commitment over time. Speakers highlighted that green schoolyards provide measurable benefits to students as well as to communities, increasing local water resilience, reducing air temperatures and creating green recreation spaces in park-poor communities.
- Overcoming institutional resistance requires flexibility and persistence. Effective advocates turn “no” around by understanding schools’ and districts’ specific concerns and addressing them directly, connecting greening projects to existing school and district goals, such as improved attendance, social-emotional support, or workforce development.
- It takes a village, and local champions. A dedicated champion within a school or district can make or break whether a project gets built. Broad networks and partnerships are equally critical to sustaining momentum.
- The availability of the right kind of funding is central to progress. A key gap is in operations and maintenance (O&M) funding: outside of LA County’s Safe Clean Water Program, neither local school bonds, Proposition 4, nor other state measures allow for O&M expenditures. The lack of this specific type of funding is a significant barrier and frequent point of pushback from schools.
- Families, educators, city governments, scientists and others are all calling for an increase in schoolyard greening projects.
- Artificial turf is not the answer. Artificial turf surfaces can reach 160 degrees on hot summer days, posing real risks of burns, heat stress, and heat stroke, particularly for children. Artificial turf also sheds microplastics. People playing on artificial turf then breathe in or absorb these particles through their skin. And artificial turf is a major source of microplastics in urban stormwater runoff, a significant pathway for plastic pollution entering local waterways and drinking water sources.
Green schoolyards provide wide-ranging benefits, both to students and to surrounding communities. Replacing hardscape with trees, plants, and permeable surfaces can significantly cool temperatures in and around schools. Cooling benefits help students focus, ease stress, improve mental health, and raise test scores; UCLA research has found that test scores fall by 1% for every one degree the temperature rises. Green schoolyards also improve air quality, add public park space, expand access to nature-based learning, and lower utility costs for schools.
LAUSD is the region’s single largest landowner, with more than 6,400 acres across 3,200 parcels. Most of the district’s property is covered in hardscape, including buildings and blacktop. More than 3 billion gallons of stormwater runoff are generated on LA county school campuses every year, according to the Pacific Institute, and nearly two-thirds of that could be captured for reuse through greening projects. Urban and stormwater runoff is the largest source of water pollution in the LA region.
LA Waterkeeper and its co-hosts are continuing to advance the policy, partnerships, and funding needed to bring green schoolyards to more campuses across the region. For more information, see https://www.lawaterkeeper.org/our-stories/green-ca-schools-summit-2025.
