Chicago cuts ribbon on schoolyard with stormwater improvements
The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) is celebrating the opening of a school playground that blends stormwater management components into the lot’s improvements.
Partners of the Space to Grow® program, including MWRD, the Chicago Department of Water Management, Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Healthy Schools Campaign, and Openlands joined school leaders to celebrate the new schoolyard with a ribbon cutting on Oct. 28.
The schoolyard includes an artificial turf field, basketball courts, porous playground surfacing, several play hills and rain gardens, and an outdoor classroom.
Coles School is uniquely located above a seam of sandy soils. With the use of permeable surface improvements, the lot can now hold 568,534 gallons of stormwater per rain event. That is equivalent to filling more than 13,500 bathtubs or 300,000 basketballs, an enormous amount of water kept out of the sewer system and nearby homes when heavy rains ensue. The schoolyard thus reduces flooding, reduces basement backups, reduces the load on the combined sewer system, and educates students and neighbors about green infrastructure techniques and purpose.
“This new schoolyard offers students, teachers and the community an attractive place to gather while also building resilience in anticipation of future storms,” says Kimberly Du Buclet, MWRD commissioner. “Thank you to our Space to Grow® partners for protecting our water environment and their commitment to improving the lives and learning experience for Coles School students.”
Coles is the second of four $1.5-million schoolyards that the Space to Grow® partnership is set to unveil this fall. Once the ribbons are cut, 34 Space to Grow schools will have been completed since 2014, bringing the grand total of storage volume to 6.5 million gallons per rain event.
Related
