Phoenix school district has big plans for outdoor learning. Can they fund it?

About four years ago, elementary students were relocated from the Larry C. Kennedy School in Phoenix after an assessment deemed much of the site unsafe due to failing infrastructure.

Most of the campus was leveled. Now, the Creighton Elementary School District is preparing to reopen the school this fall with a new concept: a focus on outdoor learning and sustainability.

The school, which will serve up to 700 students in kindergarten through fifth grades, will be the first of its kind in Creighton, and district leaders believe it may be the first of its kind in the state.

The school is drawing some inspiration from a small private school in south Phoenix that focuses on teaching students to care for the Earth, said Eric Dueppen, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.

“We're trying to do this at a scale, and for the public, in a way that is unique,” Dueppen said.

What will the school look like?

According to Creighton Superintendent Jay Mann, the idea of a school focused on outdoor learning came from conversations with students, staff and community members.

Because Creighton is in an urban area — its boundaries encompass parts of central Phoenix — the district wanted to provide meaningful outdoor experiences for its students, Mann said.

“We’re looking at all of the different things that we can do with students to expose them to outdoor spaces … that would help with their learning and development, but also ... their health and wellness,” he said.

The school's architects, Weddle Gilmore Black Rock Studio, have experience designing outdoor spaces; their projects include the Rio Salado Audubon Center in Phoenix and the Gateway Trailhead in Scottsdale.

District leaders hope the school will ultimately include outdoor features like a sports court with basketball hoops and a solar panel shade structure, sports fields, a yoga area and an eco-play area with trails and native Arizona plants to teach students about lower water utilization gardening. There are plans for several gardens on the campus, including a rainwater harvesting garden to help supply water for the school and a garden intended to produce food for the cafeteria. The school building itself is centered around a courtyard, which could be used for outdoor learning, Mann said.

The school year starts in early August, a month when temperatures in Phoenix reach well above 100 degrees nearly every day. During the hotter months, students would learn outdoors in the mornings when it's cooler, Mann said, in parts of the campus where he expects temperatures to be reduced.

"Part of the plan that the architects put together was to ... have a lot of landscaping that supports temperature reduction on the campus," Mann said.

Shade will be provided through solar panel coverings, trees and canopy shade structures, some of which will be funded through grants from Phoenix, according to Mann.

"We certainly will watch kids to make sure they're hydrated, we'll watch the temperatures and we'll have protocols" for when it's too hot, he said.

Focusing on outdoor learning and sustainability

The school will be unique from others in the district in its focus on outdoor learning.

Not only will students have the outdoor recess time that all kids across the district get, but they’ll also spend at least an hour every day learning outdoors, Dueppen said.

Dueppen said the school will adapt existing curriculum so the project-based elements allow students to study environmental sustainability — learning to create “a healthy planet not only today … but also for the future,” he said. Math lessons, for example, could involve calculating the solar energy generated by the school’s solar panels or the volume of rainwater collected by the rainwater harvesting garden, he said.

Mann said the school is also intended to support student wellness.

“With all of the things that we were dealing with both in the pandemic and immediately post-pandemic, we saw … a powerful opportunity to create spaces that would create some inner peace for our students as well, and create some opportunities for wellness,” he said. He added that studies have shown positive effects of spending time around trees. One study found that “forest bathing” reduced blood pressure and depression and others have linked trees to improvements in student concentration and ADHD symptoms.

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The school will primarily serve students in its attendance boundaries, who were relocated to another nearby district school while Kennedy was under construction. It will also house the district's program for students with severe disabilities. However, district leaders anticipate that students outside its assigned boundaries will also want to attend the school.

Competition for student enrollment in Arizona is “fierce,” Dueppen said, and he believes it’s in the best interest of the district and the community to create a “destination learning environment."

District seeks funding to complete vision

The district is moving full steam ahead with plans to open the revamped Kennedy School for the 2024-25 school year.

But though district leaders have high hopes for the school, they anticipate challenges in funding all the features they hope to include.

The district’s budget to rebuild Kennedy comes from a 2016 bond measure, which was intended to fund the replacement of the school. At the time, the district was anticipating the infrastructure would fail due to the aging buildings, Mann said.

But that money — approximately $26 million — can only fund the replacement of the old school with a main classroom building, according to Mann, and wouldn't include the additional features they hope to place on the campus. Costs have also escalated since the rebuild was budgeted eight years ago and the plans slowed due to the pandemic, he said.

Despite the limited budget, district leaders are intent on finding ways to fully fund the plans. Mann said there's no limit to grant funds that could be used toward additional resources for the school's property and programming. They’ve secured some grants and are in the process of securing others, and they are still seeking more partners who want to contribute to the vision.

“Knowing that our students could not only have an amazing learning experience … but that they would also then have an even broader impact on the community itself … just seemed like something far too powerful to set aside and say, ‘Well, budget’s tight, we’re not going to do this, we’ll just put up a building with a bunch of 900 square-foot classrooms,” Mann said.

Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix district to open school for outdoor learning, sustainability