Designing School Stormwater Facilities

The Learning Landscapes Design team is always striving to create more inspiring spaces for learning and play. Addressing school stormwater is a great way to achieve this goal. Often schoolyards are filled with lawn and asphalt, large climbers and swings (if you are lucky). These spaces are low cost and easy to install and maintain.

But, our students bear the cost of these low quality environments. In this post we will talk over designing stormwater facilities at schools. Because once we pave a majority of the site we have a LOT of water to deal with. This can be an opportunity or nuisance depending on what solution is designed. There are many approaches to designing school stormwater facilities. Below are two examples.

Milwaukee Public Schools – District Wide Green Schoolyard Redevelopment

Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is the largest school district in Wisconsin with current enrollment at 75,616. MPS currently manages approximately 1,271 acres of real estate. In an effort to reduce their ecological footprint and offer STEAM learning opportunities MPS had built a grant program through the Green Schools Consortium. By coupling grants for stormwater improvements with green schoolyards the District is able to see wide sweeping change across the City.

Each school’s “Green Team” along with engineers from Stormwater Solutions Engineering and Learning Landscape Design staff developed a conceptual schoolyard redevelopment plan, including significant installations of stormwater green infrastructure, outdoor educational elements, culturally relevant curricular connections, healthy food access and school gardens, arts and community engagement, and recreational improvements. The proposed projects remove tens of thousands of square feet of asphalt and manage hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater runoff. The projects will also provide significant opportunities for students to engage in green infrastructure and eco-literacy topics first hand through STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) curricular connections.

Our team worked on cohort 3 and 4 including 5 schools each! We are starting design on Cohort 5 which includes another 5 schools! Group by group MPS will effect every campus, improving learning opportunities and ecological connections across the city. The designs take advantage of each site’s existing qualities and layout to provide functional stormwater solutions through bioswales and underground cisterns. Children are able take the pathways through the bioswales to see the collection of stormwater runoff and observe the drainage conditions and different plant material.

In addition to the stormwater improvements a variety of spaces were provided to enhance students’ outdoor experience. These spaces include nature play areas with balancing stumps and logs, loose parts building areas, open lawns, gardening spaces, music areas, pathways through native grasses and wildflowers, and a variety of outdoor classrooms with overhead structures, amphitheater style seating and stages, and picnic tables.

Fratney School MPS – Before and After – Photo Credit Reflo

Metropolitan Learning Center – Student Designed and Installed Project

The Metropolitan Learning Center offers a unique academic program focused on experiential learning, character development, and service to its community. Many Community members and Learning Landscapes Design Team helped a group of 4th and 5th grade students envision and implement this stormwater retrofit project.

The students had done research and understood the impacts of excess urban rainwater. They wanted to do something to help the issue at their school site. Together we looked at the school site, selected a project, developed a site plan, developed an implementation plan and got the project constructed! The students were an integral part of every step in the process. You can see them below doing plant research and building a 3D model!

The resulting project redesigned their parking lot to accommodate the same number of spaces but also allow for a central stormwater swale. Off duty ODOT crews cut the asphalt, then students and school volunteers installed the rest. Many years later it is still a gem to this very urban school and it is thriving.