How Climate Change is Changing NYC’s Schoolyards for the Better
As the climate crisis affects New York City, schools are adapting to rain and heat to save and improve recess.
The pre-k and kindergarten students at PS 41 Greenwich Village School used to play under a tree. It was old and slumping, but the wide, plentiful leaves shaded the yard’s small play structure, creating an oasis amid a bustling city. Then, it was removed.
“I never realized how hot it was in that playground until the tree was gone,” said Vicki Sando, a science teacher, parent of a former student, and sustainability coordinator at PS 41. “In the future, I will be advocating for a new tree, if not more trees. Because I know it’s a black top surface. It’s pretty warm.”
PS 41 is better off than most, though. The school campus encompasses nearly half a block and, in addition to a kindergarten playground, has a rooftop garden and general schoolyard for the other grades with a playground, basketball hoops, and a light blue-painted track.
Sando herself was instrumental in creating the rooftop garden at the school. In 2001, while she was a teacher and parent at the school, she started a small garden in the school’s yard that eventually spurred the creation of the green rooftop after receiving grants from the city.
“It’s kind of a narrative about how teaching sustainability and school buildings and facilities could be improved to enhance the overall environmental benefits for not only the school but the surrounding community,” said Sando, who added that the herbs grown on the rooftop are donated to the businesses in the local community. “Then, after having the green roof, we really started integrating more sustainability into the curriculum.”
However, even PS 41 struggles to keep its sustainability curriculum year-to-year due to teacher turnover, and, starting this summer, most of its outdoor space will be closed for several years due to school renovations. And, now, its kindergarten playground has lost its tree.
The story at PS 41 is the same story happening at nearly every school in New York City, if not around the country. As the years go by, schools’ outdoor spaces are becoming hotter, wetter, muddier, smokier, and less usable. The culprit: the climate crisis.
While New York City is working to reduce its carbon footprint by limiting greenhouse gas emissions, the effects of climate change are already arriving in the city and, over the next ten, fifteen, twenty years, these effects are only going to increase.
“The biggest change would be temperature increases and the number of days above 90 degrees Fahrenheit weather,” said Carlos Restrepo, an adjunct professor of Urban Planning at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. During his time as a professor, his research has focused on public health, environmental justice, and sustainable urban development. “And of course, there’s always the possibility for changes in precipitation, maybe more intense rain events, which have a big impact on New York City’s infrastructure.”
New York City’s infrastructure, of course, includes schools. And, rain events are particularly damaging to many school buildings due to their age of construction. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, several schools flooded and around 200 were damaged, according to Chalkbeat. Across the city, school was canceled for at least a week with 65 schools relocated due to the severity of damages.
“Every critical infrastructure system in New York will have to adapt in some way. So, for example, if you look at their wastewater treatment plants, there are currently 14 in New York City. They’re all located in areas that are at risk for flooding during a flood,” said Professor Restrepo. “It’s hard to pick just one system to focus on because they’re all in such critical condition.”
In addition to wastewater treatment plants, NYC’s subway lines, subway stations, electrical plants, and nearly two thousand schools, half of which are over 50 years old, will also need renovations. They, too, have a part to play in adapting New York City’s systems to the effects of climate change on a city level, often through unique and innovative strategies.
“Developing the policies, programs, and partnerships necessary to influence urban GHG emissions requires city government to stretch and expand the limits of their authority and chart new political, institutional, and technical territory,” wrote Sara Hughes, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan in her book Repowering Cities about the methods in which cities are governing climate change. “Once seen as inherently ungovernable, city governments are now viewed as bastions of… problem solving.”
And change is afoot: In addition to retrofitting buildings to consume less energy, schools’ outdoor spaces, rooftops, and playgrounds around New York City are being renovated, modified, and adapted to protect children’s outdoor time and space from extreme heat and weather events. It’s an effort with double the benefits: while schools and nearby streets are dryer and cooler, children benefit from new playgrounds and facilities and, across the city, children are returning to schoolyards for recess, gym, soccer practice, and playtime with smiles on their faces.
Schoolyards as Public Space
Leading the front in schoolyard renovations is the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit devoted to increasing access to public parks, public spaces, and green spaces for every American. Through a partnership with the Mayor’s Office, Department of Education, Department of Environmental Protection, and in balance with the School Construction Authority, which is in charge of building public schools, its New York City playground program has renovated over 220 playgrounds since 1996 by adding plants, new playgrounds, outdoor classrooms, and artificial turf fields that collect groundwater and use it to irrigate other plants in the yard.
“The goal of our program is to be able to convert every single school in New York City that has a yard into a green infrastructure and green school,” said Arissa Lahr, the Senior Program Coordinator on the TPL’s playground program.
Lahr had worked for the Trust for a little over two years after receiving a Master’s degree in Sustainability Management from Columbia University in 2020. Though she often works with the administrative side of the playground program, she prefers to be out and about in the spaces working on repairs or gardening over being in an office. The morning of our afternoon interview at the TPL playground at the East Village Community School, Lahr was gardening in the schoolyard at PS 111 Adolph S. Ochs in Hell’s Kitchen when the April 5, 2024 earthquake was felt throughout NYC.
“We have gone through different phases of our program. Our most recent phase would be our partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. And, their focus specifically was on preventing flooding and…on areas that are low in park space,” Lahr added.
In addition to flood prevention, the TPL also works to bring greenery into schoolyards. “Most of the time we go into a space, there’s not a single green element,” Lahr said. The program tries to plant trees in every yard and builds many planters. “But, maintenance is really hard. There’s one person taking care of this yard with the school and it’s a challenge.” Capital funding for longevity and maintenance dollars are harder to come by than initial project funding, Lahr explained.
Still, the TPL tries to open between one to three renovated playgrounds a year. Most recently, the schoolyard at PS 70M Lab School in Chelsea, Manhattan opened in the fall of 2023. In April 2024, the Trust announced four new schools to receive renovations across four boroughs, a process that can take up to several years and begins with a surveying and design stage with input from the school’s student body.
“The students go out, measure the yard, see what the yard looks like, and what’s wrong with it. But, they also think about how they use the space now, because you want to maintain that culture of the playground in the new space. One of the things we always say is that the kids are the experts,” Lahr said. “For example, right now we’re working at PS 96M in Harlem. And, every year they have a big basketball tournament. So it was really important to them that we maintain a space for basketball courts.”
After the surveying phase, students take a trip to an already completed schoolyard to understand what their space will look like once finished. Then, students each design individual plans for the playground and vote on a winner, though Lahr was quick to clarify that compromise is always part of the final plan.
“Kids will say, ‘We want a petting zoo.’ Okay. Well, is that practical? And we say, ‘Okay. Well, if we can’t have a petting zoo, can we have a pollinator garden?’ Then there will be insects to watch,” Lahr said as an example.
Throughout the design process, the TPL also works with landscape architects to create a concept for the schoolyard and surveys the nearby community. For example, a retirement home across the street from the East Village Community School’s playground requested shade and seating be incorporated into the school’s design, elements then included during the final plan.
These community considerations point to one of the other main tenets of the TPL’s renovation requirements: public access. In order for the Trust to work on a school’s yard, the school must ensure that it is openly available to the public after school hours, on weekends, and during breaks. “It’s in our name. Trust for Public Land. And, there are so many people in New York who don’t live near a lot of green space. This is one way to help with that,” said Lahr.
“We all want to do more.”
While the Trust for Public Land has renovated 226 schoolyards so far, its requirements, however, do restrict some schools from qualifying for the playground program. Schools with only interior courtyards or rooftop open spaces often cannot open these spaces to the public and, in the case of rooftops, cannot be worked on by TPL because of the complexity of building codes and construction.
Schools that have recently upgraded elements of their playgrounds or yards independently are also a low priority for TPL, which concentrates on spaces that have not received care in at least five years.
As a result, many schools have renovated their spaces on their own, like PS 41’s rooftop, hoping to create greener, shadier, and more environmentally conscious outdoor spaces. For example, PS 84 Jose de Diego in Brooklyn built a hydroponic greenhouse, and the Heschel School on the Upper East Side brought trees and plants to its rooftop.
Melina Kostopoulos, 21, a Queens resident, experienced this while attending elementary school at PS 84 Steinway School. “In the front of the school, halfway through my time there, they made a little community garden. I remember little tree stumps that were in a circle and we would read stories out there,” she said. “That was fun. And, it was important because then in the back, they basically only had this plain cement yard enclosed by chain link fences.”
“Basically, if the weather wasn’t perfect, we weren’t going outside back there,” Kostopoulos added. Clea Loci, 20, who attended PS 48 in Staten Island agreed, “Any sign of bad weather and no one was going outside.”
Eventually, both Kostopoulos’ elementary school and middle school, Louis Armstrong Middle School, had their playgrounds renovated by TPL, but the school’s individual efforts helped bridge the gap and provide positive outdoor experiences for students like her. Together, these renovations are adapting to the climate crisis at the most hyper-local of levels.
“These kinds of projects are using materials to absorb and retain water or re-release it slower after a period of time are helping address the problems of flooding and excess runoff,” said Restrepo. “They make sure that when there’s a lot of water, it doesn’t run off to the nearest storm drain, because when that happens the sewer system is overwhelmed and a lot of wastewater that should go to a wastewater treatment plant ends up going directly to the rivers and that becomes a significant water quality issue.”
However, not all schools can create or renovate their outdoor spaces independently. The Clinton School, a private school on the west side of Union Square in Manhattan, is limited to a rooftop outdoor space that faces many problems.
“It floods. In the winter, it freezes. And, it’s only good for small groups because there are a lot of sharp corners and hard surfaces,” said Chris Jacobi, a physical education teacher at the school. “It’s really only used during the late spring or early fall,” he added.
Although the school values physical education and has eight high school sports teams, outdoor time is largely limited to lunchtime, when many students leave campus to purchase lunch at one of the restaurants around Union Square.
“About 20 percent of our high school students are on sports teams, but we have to practice at different places all around the city,” said Tyler Spalding, the school’s athletic director. Both Jacobi and Spalding said that the school’s many basement and internal rooms separate them from the outside and they will often go many hours without seeing daylight.
“I think we all want to do more at the school,” Jacobi said, “but there is just a limit to what we can do. There are always ideas about what to do with the roof, but if we enclose it, it’s not really outside anymore.”
The Clinton School represents the opposite side of the scale from schools like PS 41 or Kostopoulos’ renovated outdoor spaces — schools that lack significant outdoor access if any at all. At these schools, limited chances to exit the classroom and get outside are even more valuable but fall to the wayside due to challenges of access and space. At the Clinton School, for example, recess occurs only twice a week and, most of the time, is taken inside.
Saving Recess
Even with renovated playgrounds, schools in New York City will need to prepare for the increasing frequency of indoor recesses and physical education classes in the coming years as the city becomes hotter and wetter. At the moment, guidance about indoor recess appears limited and outdated, as the CDC’s recommended strategies have not been updated since 2017.
This also reveals a larger problem within the city’s educational setting: despite guidance from the CDC, the DOE does not require recess during the school day, only suggests it. While at least 90 minutes of physical education per week is required by state law, zero minutes are required to take place outside and recess is only recommended. As a result, schools and teachers are left in the dark when it comes to recess, especially on poor weather days, which can result in indoor recess or remote learning on snow days, a NYC DOE program that has not gone well so far.
“I wouldn’t say there’s an official plan in place. I know during the wildfires [during the summer of 2023], that classes stayed inside and it was really a top-down decision. It would come from the DOE whether children are allowed to go outside or not,” said Vicki Sando. “So indoor recess would just be improvising.”
(The New York City Department of Education, when reached out to for comment, did not respond.)
“I mean, I’ve certainly taught classes on rainy days, and it’s not easy, especially when there’s several rainy days in a row. The kids are very jumpy,” said Sando. “So it’s best to get recess in whenever possible.”
Recess and outdoor time are not just priorities for teachers but parents too. “It was a huge priority when I was choosing what school to send my kids to,” said Taffy Akner, a mother of two boys who attend a private Jewish school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “To me, it was very important that my kids were allowed free time at school and how that free time was used. They can be crazy and it’s important for them to get outside.”
These priorities are not unfounded, as studies have shown that children are far more productive when they spend time playing and outside during the school day.
“It’s getting people over that mindset that play isn’t valuable,” said Ryan Swanson, one of the heads of Urban Conga, a multidisciplinary art, design, and architecture firm in New York City that creates public art pieces with playful, interactive qualities. “If you’re saying that productivity is the way you want to go, why can’t play exist as a part of that productivity? Because, if you look at the data, playing and allowing for that release increases productivity tenfold.”
“But, how can the actual infrastructure of the school start to allow for that to happen more organically?” Swanson asked. He proposed that in addition to recess and gym classes, classrooms and lessons should work play into the school day, making it a fundamental part of the school system rather than excluded to particular spaces. Even five minutes of less structured fun can make a difference, he said.
And, those five minutes can happen on a playground or in a schoolyard like one of the many renovated sites at NYC’s schools.
“Kids don’t care as long as they can play,” Swanson said. “They don’t care what you look like, how much money you have, or where you come from. They just want somewhere to be and someone to play with them.”
One busy afternoon at the East Village Community School’s playground is all it takes to prove that true: kids monkey around on the playground, a game of soccer starts between ten-year-old boys, one assigned to play goalie, and pick-up basketball reigns supreme on the court, the area decorated with painted designs created by students from the school next door.
Climate change-resistant playgrounds around the city are helping preserve playful moments and experiences. They prevent flooding by capturing groundwater, combat the urban heat island effect by planting trees, and, perhaps most importantly, provide the space and resources necessary to improve a fundamental element of childhood for NYC’s youngest: recess and play.
