Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Some people who opposed Denver Public Schools’ recent $454 million bond issue — which the city’s always-generous voters passed by a  better than 2-1 margin — disparaged the district for wanting to spend $29.1 million of that on new “learning landscapes,” aka playgrounds.

But, fellow cynics, here is what someone who has been involved in this plan for several years wrote to me today about the investment — which includes grassing over the remaining pea gravel school yards at Denver elementary schools. It may make you think twice:

I just saw the the details of the DPS bond funding for learning landscapes. It is truly amazing. With the funding, all 85 elementary schools will have integrated school/community playgrounds, averaging in cost from $350,000 to $1.05 million. When this initiative was started, only five schools had grass. DPS has to be the number one school in the country for its elementary facilities. It is good news for school discipline, fighting obesity, and maybe some academic achievement, not to mention facilities for the adjacent communties.

That sounds pretty good to me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.