On a schoolyard in the Westlake neighborhood, third grader Dylan recalls a peregrine falcon — his favorite bird — flying over his head.
“We’ve seen one here,” Dylan, a student at Esperanza Elementary School, says. “It was flying over the habitat. It’s the fastest bird on earth and it looks cool.”
The native habitat he described is part of a larger redesign underway at the school.
Across the 1.26-acre campus, roughly 30,000 square feet of blacktop is being replaced with grass, native plants, trees, shaded play space and outdoor learning areas.
The project, led by the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust in partnership with the school district, is funded by a California Natural Resources Agency urban greening grant of nearly $1.5 million awarded in 2021. Construction began last summer.
When completed this year, the campus will include a lawn for instruction and recreation, stormwater capture features, a new running track, solar-reflective basketball and handball courts, and dozens of native shade trees intended to reduce heat across campus. The effort is also aimed at reducing the urban heat island effect in areas with limited green space.
Changes are already visible on a recent visit to the school, with fencing around new soil beds and fresh plantings replacing sections of pavement. Some of the areas on campus that already have native bushes and trees predate the project and are being folded into a larger redesign of the campus.
Without all the greenery, “everything will be boring and there will be no insects and animals,” Dylan declares.
Replacing asphalt with green space on campus
Esperanza is part of a broader push to rethink school campuses in dense neighborhoods where open space is limited and schoolyards often function as the only daily outdoor environment for many students, said Tori Kjer, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust.
“We’re really focused on elementary school campuses because those students spend the most time outside and they have recess,” she said. “Currently, the majority of LAUSD campuses are asphalt.”
Esperanza stood out even before the construction began because earlier, smaller-scale greening efforts had already begun on campus, Kjer said.
“The school actually had a burrowing owl show up on their campus before we even started,” she said. “They have a habitat patch that the principal installed himself. It’s just a very unique and inspiring school campus.”
The land trust is currently in the early planning phase to transform three additional schools in Koreatown — Cahuenga Elementary, Alexandria Elementary and Harvard Elementary —similar to the project at Esperanza.
Kjer said the green space at Esperanza will be limited to students, but the organization is working toward eventually opening it to the community. There isn’t a timeline for that yet.
“We are planning to do some fundraising and then work with the district to hopefully open it as a community school park which means it would be open on the weekends and during school breaks,” she said.
A push to bring nature into daily learning
At Esperanza, the current project builds on a long series of incremental changes spearheaded by Principal Brad Rumble, who has worked at the school since 2014 and has spent much of his career in LAUSD’s urban core.
“We’re in the shadow of the skyscrapers of Los Angeles,” Rumble said during a recent visit to the campus. He points out pyramid ants, the California sagebrush, a Marine Blue butterfly, white sage and toyon with ease and excitement as he moves through the habitat. “And we can do this.”
Rumble said early changes began with identifying pavement on campus that could be repurposed.
“Students who live in an urban setting like this, they can’t ride their bikes in their neighborhood. They don’t have that green space,” he said. “So what can we do on campus to support those efforts?”
Rumble’s interest in greening school campuses grew out of working in neighborhoods with limited access to nature.
“It’s the absence of nature that made me interested in nature,” he said.
One of the earliest projects he helped implement at Esperanza involved removing a piece of asphalt, 122 by 10 feet, in the employee parking lot, and replacing it with native plants. A bungalow classroom was set for removal at the southwest corner of campus, and Rumble asked that the asphalt underneath be taken out as well.
That project later expanded into redesigning the campus courtyard and building a small native habitat in 2017 that now functions as an outdoor learning environment.
Rumble said the goal is to integrate outdoor space directly into instruction rather than treat it as separate from the classroom.
“I think stewardship is going to be really important for all of us in this century, right? And where better to learn stewardship than on your elementary campus,” he said.
Teachers say the green space is instrumental in how students engage with classroom lessons.
For example, each fall the school holds a contest predicting the date when the yellow-rumped warbler will return to campus, and the winning class gets a picnic on the front lawn and a bird-watching experience.
Kindergarten teacher Cynthia Barrilleaux said outdoor instruction has changed how students observe and retain information.
“There’s nothing like taking the learning outside and making it meaningful,” she said. “They’re becoming more observant of the things around them and connecting it to learning.”
Second grade teacher George Moreno said the environment has also affected teachers.
“It also makes us value green spaces more because we’re also affected by the environment in which we work,” he said. “It makes a difference in our psyche. It makes us happier, more relaxed people and I think it trickles down to our students as well.”
The campus is a hotspot for birds, with documented sightings including burrowing owls, willow flycatchers and other species not commonly reported in dense urban sections of LA. Teachers and staff have also used iNaturalist to track biodiversity on campus.
Dylan, the third grade student, said he notices more insects now than he used to, and he expects that to grow as the project finishes.
“The playground is going to expand their habitats which will give us more insects and birds coming to our school every day,” he said.
Margarita Alvarez, a volunteer mom at the school, said she’s excited that her child will have a place to play that is “more natural.”
“Where there was no shade, now our children will have shade,” she said.
