What a difference a green schoolyard can make

Like any new leader taking over a large, complex organization, the next mayor of Philadelphia will have a host of options when setting the administration's priorities, and these choices will greatly influence how the city changes in the future.

But while working to provide more jobs and improve schools and neighborhoods, the next mayor should also remember the importance of Philadelphia's parks and green spaces as a tool to meet these goals. After all, the city is among the nation's leaders when it comes to parks, led by the magnificent Fairmount Park, and including a well-distributed network of neighborhood playgrounds and recreation centers.

A recent mapping analysis of Philadelphia by the Trust for Public Land concluded that the vast majority of city residents live within a 10-minute walk of a public park or playground. But compared with other large cities, Philadelphia lags in its investment in parks.

Despite that hurdle, the city Parks and Recreation Department has proven its ability to invest limited resources in ways that are bringing park equity to neighborhoods previously lacking green space. With more adequate resources, the department can tap into its underutilized park assets to create stronger, more cohesive neighborhoods.

Philadelphia has shown that spending on parks, particularly in underserved neighborhoods, can be an effective way to help deal with a variety of issues, from job creation to public health and social justice. But achieving these goals will take strong public-private partnerships.

For example, Philadelphia is on the leading edge of a growing movement in American cities to convert asphalt schoolyards into green community spaces.

The Trust for Public Land, working with Parks and Recreation, the School District of Philadelphia, the Water Department, and other partners, is creating public outdoor spaces at recreation centers and schoolyards to provide both a better place for kids to play and a place from which the larger community can benefit. These sites provide outdoor classrooms for teachers to enhance their curriculum and safe places for neighbors to exercise and socialize, and they capture storm water from surrounding streets to reduce flooding and water pollution.

And because schoolyards are often the largest public properties in otherwise dense, park-poor neighborhoods, they present great opportunities to better connect schools to the communities they serve. Better parks and green schoolyards are improving these underserved communities.

This vision of schoolyards as places to create healthier neighborhoods exists because city leaders thought creatively about solving community problems, and their vision resonated with philanthropic funders, who are leveraging city dollars by donating private money to support the effort. Because of those partnerships, new green schoolyards and recreation centers were completed last year, and more will be opened in the months ahead.

But there is still much to do, and the commitment of the next mayor will be essential to ensure that this cooperative approach can be applied to all the neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

The William Dick School and the Hank Gathers Recreation Center, in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of North Philadelphia, are good examples of what can be accomplished. Work began there with a community-driven design process that included weekly classes with students and numerous community meetings to ensure that what was created would reflect the particular goals of its intended users.

Today, these sites provide nearly 14,000 people living within a 10-minute walk with a new green space in which to play or relax with friends and family. According to the principal of the school, altercations during recess have decreased, and science teachers are using their rain garden as a teaching tool, where students are learning about the environmental services provided by the natural world. This is all happening in a place that until recently was covered in asphalt.

Yes, the next Philadelphia mayor will have a long list of choices to make, particularly at a time when city and school budgets are challenged. But by investing in creative solutions like green schoolyards, our next mayor would help establish an equitable, functional, and benefit-rich network of parks and playgrounds throughout the city. Doing so will address many community priorities in the process.