Creating Safe, Joyful Outdoor Learning Opportunities

After leading my first bike bus on Bike to School Day in 2022, I was left wondering about other opportunities to create safe and joyful child-friendly streets. That summer, I embarked on a learning tour in Munich and Rotterdam called Remaking the Street, during which I participated in classes with urban planners and designers. As the only participating educator, I shared my knowledge of child development and human behavior, and they explained street design. In the two years since, the school where I work has implemented several street experiments that repurpose streets and parking spaces that have given students safe, joyful opportunities to engage in playful learning outside. 

Here’s what we’ve done, from most to least intensive; how it worked; and how you can bring these same ideas to your own school community. 

1. Repurpose an Entire Street

The most intensive option for creating safe and joyful space is to repurpose an entire street as an Open Street for your school. The types of programming you can plan for the open street will depend on your school size, location, and student body. At my school, we use the Open Street to teach our CycleKids Learn to Ride classes—kids in grades three through five learn how to ride bicycles. They really benefit from the dedicated space to practice riding a bike—few of them would otherwise be able to use New York City streets to practice and might never learn to ride a bicycle.  

In order to create the Open Street, we had to submit an annual application to the Department of Transportation. The city government has begun issuing funding to some schools to support programming on Open Street. However, for now, we rely on volunteers to set up and take down barricades during the day to shut off the street. 

While the financial cost of repurposing an entire street is relatively low, the time and human power needed are not insubstantial. Local advocacy organizations have created a School Streets Toolkit for NYC to support school stakeholders with their applications. You’ll need to make contact with your local transportation department to apply for an Open Street and may want to connect with a local advocacy group as well.  

2. Repurpose a Section of a Street

If repurposing an entire street doesn’t seem feasible, you may be able to repurpose a section of the street. After experiencing a torrential downpour-induced flood at our school late in 2023, we focused on greening our street—building rain gardens around the tree pits to combat climate-related flooding. 

The best part of this project was seeing how the community came together for a common cause—students’ families and teachers wanted to chip in! One teacher helped with construction, and a group of parents helped set up the rain gardens. We even took students on a field trip to buy plants and worked together to plant them. When the groundskeeper at the church next to our school saw what we were doing, he decided to spruce up his tree pits too—now he even waters our planters for us. 

We relied on local nonprofits, grants, and PTA funding to make the project possible. We got a Litter Cleanup Grant from the Sanitation Foundation and are now seeking Super Steward Trainings from the New York City Parks Department to get tools for the care of the tree pits. We were able to get free compost, which is ultra-absorbent compared with regular planter soil, from the free community compost and invested in a blend of wildflower seeds specifically for rain gardens. 

Other schools would potentially be able to get a local lumberyard to donate materials to build planters or could work with local nonprofits, the local Parks Department, or plant nurseries.

3. Repurpose a Parking Space

A third option is to repurpose parking spaces, especially at schools with parking lots. At our school, we repurposed one parking space to be more appealing to students by creating bike parking and green space. Now, where there was space for one car, we have space for 12 bikes alongside lush planters full of greenery. 

In order to make this happen, our school principal put in a request with the Department of Transportation to install the bike rack. If your school has its own parking lot, there will be a lot less bureaucracy, but you will bear the cost. In that situation, you may want to connect with a local bike shop, company, or advocacy organization to see if they would donate the bike racks and the greenery too. Once it was set up, we had a class of students and teachers adopt the planters, taking care of them and keeping them green.

In addition to these interventions, we’ve continued to organize bike bus routes on monthly Bike to School Days to encourage active, green transportation and created a temporary Open Street to host after-school Learn to Ride classes on the side street next to the school. 

Our situation is not perfect—the asphalt still creates a heat island on summer days, the side street isn’t a full-time school street, and we are only one school in a city of 1 million students—but we are allowing ourselves and our students to dream and imagine the kind of world they want to live in. Taking several small steps like these, your school can encourage health, wellness, and sustainability through reimagined street spaces for kids.