Today, the third Atlanta Community Schoolyard site opened at L.P. Miles Elementary School off Bakers Ferry Road in west Atlanta, joining the first two sites at L.O. Kimberly Elementary School in Southwest Atlanta and John Wesley Dobbs Elementary in the Lakewood neighborhood, which opened in spring 2022.

The Schoolyards Program is a national effort of The Trust for Public Land designed to expand community access to schoolyards during non-school hours to increase the percentage of people who live within a 10-minute walk of a park. In Atlanta, the program is in partnership with Atlanta Public Schools, Urban Land Institute Atlanta, and Park Pride with support from the philanthropic community.

“The program helps reimagine schoolyards as vibrant community parks designed to meet the needs of students and nearby neighbors,” said George Dusenbury, Georgia state director for The Trust for Public Land. “We know that parks are essential to the health and well-being of communities, and this is one way we have committed to making them available and welcoming to everyone.”

Like all schoolyard projects, Miles’ students played an integral role in the overall design of the new park. During construction, students visited the schoolyard space to learn about what and how amenities were being installed. Some students even made a video for a national competition about how the new community schoolyard will help protect air quality on campus.

The schoolyard design is based upon an accessible sidewalk weaving through the site’s topography and mature trees. Users of all ages will be able to take in the sights and sounds that the adjacent forest has to offer. The project includes four outdoor classrooms, each providing unique seating arrangements to benefit different groups and subjects, as well as an outdoor library, which features free books for all ages to borrow and share.

Employees from Cox Enterprises and Purchasing Power volunteered in April 2022 to install site furniture, plant perennials, install the schoolyard library, and construct raised planters in the school courtyard. Additionally, volunteers collaborated with Trees Atlanta to remove invasive plant species in the site’s forested area.

Park Pride is providing support to the program by developing a curriculum focused on the benefits of parks and community engagement for the projects. Over the course of the overall Atlanta Community Schoolyard program, staff and volunteers from ULI Atlanta inventoried all pedestrian routes to the pilot school sites and developed reports shared with City of Atlanta agencies and elected leaders that describe where walking routes to the school are unsafe and inaccessible and where changes need to be made.

In Atlanta, 23 percent of residents do not live within a 10-minute walk of a park. Over the past three years, The Trust for Public Land has worked with 10 APS schools to design the schoolyards so that they can be used as parks during non-school hours. Reimagining community schoolyards is one proven strategy designed to help cities reach that 10-minute walk goal. The Trust for Public Land has worked in dozens of cities to transform hundreds of schoolyards and make them available to the general public during non-school hours.