Eight years after Principal Simer Garcha expressed her desire to green and beautify her campus at Pacoima Middle School, the “living schoolyard” was unveiled as volunteers from the school and community gathered to celebrate the final planting of native trees.
The unveiling and community planting – held on Saturday, Sept. 28 – was the last phase of the school’s greening project. The new living schoolyard replaced 14,000 square feet of blacktop with a large garden that is designed as space for the school community to assemble and has smaller “reading gardens” with sitting areas where students can relax and enjoy a book.
Around 30 volunteers – including teachers, Pacoima Middle cadets and parents – attended the event to help plant more than a dozen trees in the garden. The volunteers were broken up into groups, each naming a tree after it had been firmly planted.
One of the volunteers, Brandy Jaime, heard about the project through her daughter, a sixth grader and a Pacoima Middle cadet. She thought it was a wonderful idea and came on Saturday to help beautify the school but was pleasantly surprised to see how large the garden was.
“I hope [this project] becomes a trend because it would be so nice to have this kind of courtyard or peaceful sitting area for a lot of schools,” Jaime said. “It definitely beautifies [the school] more.”
Daniel Berger, executive director of TreePeople, said the garden will serve as a “living classroom” that will improve students’ physical and mental health.
“There’s a huge need for these types of classrooms in Southern California and the San Fernando Valley,” Berger said, where communities are affected by extreme heat.
“I think it’s one of the most important things in the world to teach children about the environment and being eco-friendly,” Berger said. “This is the one planet that we’ve got. We’re the stewards of it, and we need to take care of it and we need to instill that belief and understanding and lessons with the next generation so that they can carry that forward.”
School is the best place to teach kids, he continued, where they spend most of their time during the week. Taking what they learned at school, students can use those lessons in their community – planting trees in their yards and becoming environmental advocates themselves.
The project at Pacoima Middle is one of about two dozen that TreePeople currently has to green Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) campuses, and Berger said this one serves as an example of the work that can be done.
“This is one of the first that we have completed in this current relationship with LAUSD, and we know that it’s just the start of more to come,” Berger said. “We’re going to transform campuses across the region, bring shade equity, trees and greening to those areas that need it most.”
The physical environment in and around the school has been a point of concern for Garcha. Approximately 70% of the campus is covered in asphalt, and there’s plenty of car pollution from the busy streets and 5 Freeway next to the school.
Garcha first brought up her concerns to LAUSD Board Member Kelly Gonez in 2016, when she became principal of Pacoima Middle. Three weeks later, Gonez returned to the school with the environmental organization TreePeople. Through their collaboration, they received a nearly $800,000 grant from the California Natural Resources Agency’s Urban Greening Program for the project.
“As a result, my campus is changing,” Garcha said. “We have already planted 100-plus trees all over campus. … I’m really, really excited to see that this place will be used by my teachers to talk about climate change, sustainability [and] native vegetation.
“The main thing that I’m excited about,” Garcha continued, “is that this place will give relief to my students who are cooped in all day inside their classrooms during lunch and break [to] enjoy nature and get relief from the heat.”
Gonez, echoing some of Garcha’s sentiments, added that too many LAUSD campuses are covered in asphalt and concrete and they look “more like prisons than the places of joy and learning that we want them to be.”
The Saturday unveiling came almost exactly two years after the LAUSD Board of Education passed a resolution, authored by Gonez, setting a minimum standard of 30% green space on all campuses by 2035. Although the project is a step in the right direction, Gonez said that more still needs to be done.
“Two hundred and five of our elementary schools have 10% or less green spaces on their campuses right now. That is an injustice that we need to do something about,” Gonez said. “We have over 100 projects in the pipeline to build more green schoolyards in our schools in LA Unified, and our students deserve that.”
There were around 100 volunteers!