Sustainable, Bright Futures: How Urban Green Schools Improve Learning

By Rhea Maniar

Woodland Elementary School, Milford, MA. Photo credit: Ed Wonsek

Each year, 100,000 public schools in the United States serve over 47 million students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Thirty percent of those students are in urban schools. Urban schools face different demographics, communities, cultures, and challenges than their suburban counterparts and are often critically under-resourced and overstretched. 

While there have been many attempts at both macro and micro-level reform for urban schools, a powerful new campaign is taking hold of cities as they endeavor to improve both teacher retention and student well-being. Dubbed “green schools,” the movement from the US Green Building Council strives to create an environment where teachers and students are focused, active, and supported in schools and where urban communities can see schools once again as crucial tenets of community and sustainable life.

Green schools are schools where the educational program, physical space, and organizational culture support sustainability. Its framework focuses on reducing environmental impacts and costs, improving health and performance, and providing effective sustainability education. In recent years, they have sprung out of places like Boulder, Colorado, and Austin, Texas, serving over 150,000 students nationwide. Taking best practices in school sustainability from these regions can help address many of the issues teachers and students face in urban areas.

Urban school districts, especially in large cities like New York and Chicago, face a severe teacher shortage driven by chronic underfunding, overcrowded classrooms, inordinate time demands, and a lack of support or decision-making power. The teachers who remain face higher rates of stress and burnout compared to their suburban counterparts. 

Urban students confront parallel challenges. They too face higher levels of stress and receive significantly less social support from family, friends, and school administrators than students in suburban or urban fringe areas. This lack of support leads to poorer learning outcomes and chronic absenteeism.

The physical infrastructure of schools could positively impact health and academic performance, but most school buildings are not up to par. In a 2017 study from the American Federation of Teachers, teachers cited poor building conditions as one reason they left the profession. And climate change exposes how schools are poorly equipped to handle environmental stressors. For example, extreme heat reduces how much children learn over the school year — especially in buildings without air conditioning.  

There simply are not many high-quality, sustainable classrooms, especially in urban areas, and this disparity hurts teachers and students alike. Thus, it is vital to provide educational spaces that address these needs. 

Green schools utilize the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System to reduce environmental impact by improving energy efficiency, limiting the watershed of the building, and using recycled materials during construction. They also prioritize interior design by adding more natural light, improving air filtration, and optimizing temperature. 

These schools then take sustainability practices a step further by implementing environmentally-focused curricula, school community gardens, and hands-on activities in which students interact with their environment and think critically about their surroundings. 

Addressing social, physical, and emotional issues, green schools recognize how healthy and sustainable spaces help teachers and students. 

Green schools contribute to healthier working conditions that keep teachers in their roles. The main reason is because of better, greener buildings; when done properly, sustainability measures like updating HVAC systems and improving indoor air quality can ease the stressors inherent in the teaching profession. An example of maintaining teacher retention comes from Great Seneca Creek Elementary School in Maryland, which was the first LEED-certified green school in the state. Within two years of opening, the school saw zero teacher turnover.

Green schools can also aid teacher well-being and help students learn. A study in Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences (2012) found that green spaces helped boost mood and concentration while reducing anxiety among K-12 students in Spain. Green areas or courtyards provide students with restorative spaces where they can relax and engage in unstructured play, which is essential for their emotional resilience, socioemotional development, and academic outcomes.

Finally, green schools can improve student behavior by serving as valuable community infrastructure before and after the school bell rings. By focusing on sustainability and shifting the frame from testing-based success to students’ emotional and social well-being, green schools can help improve community behaviors. A study looking at children’s positive behaviors in renovated green schoolyards in low-income urban neighborhoods over time found fewer injuries, enhanced perceptions of safety, and decreases in bullying and gang activity, with positive changes in physical activity and social interaction maintained up to thirty-two months after renovation. In another survey of green school leaders, 99 percent of responding principals reported improvements in student engagement, and 77 percent of respondents reported improvements in broader community engagement. Increased community engagement and positive behavior reinforcement are key factors in educational outcomes in environments across the board: rural, suburban, or urban. 

However, green schools aren’t a catch-all solution and certainly aren’t the only ones to increase equity and sustainability in urban schools. A one-size-fits-all solution involves compromises and concessions, and using the same checklist for different states like New Mexico, Washington, and North Carolina means that each location has to choose options that may not suit their environmental circumstances. 

For example, green standards encourage student bicycle use, and schools can fulfill that by offering large bike racks — but in certain areas without safe street infrastructure like protected bike lanes, they often go unused. Thus, green schools must meaningfully incorporate their solutions into their surrounding environment. But more importantly, cities should aim to improve their built environment to make sustainable options more possible. 

Green schools can be a significant solution for many urban school districts. With the right approaches, these powerful schooling environments could benefit student well-being and teacher stability inside the classroom and the community ecosystem that makes up their vibrant cities outside of it.