Outdoor Classroom at Strath Haven Middle School

Support creating a vibrant, flexible, and sustainable learning environment. This design reimagines the green roof and solar panel study space as a cohesive, welcoming, and ecologically beneficial outdoor classroom.

Our Outdoor Classroom will benefit the entire student body and school community.  This upgraded outdoor learning space and science lab will do the following:

1. Provide students with real-time lab opportunities which allow for authentic evaluation of current energy conserving (green roof) and energy producing (solar panel) technologies.
2. Allow students to investigate relationships between these two technologies, and make informed judgements, based on gathered evidence, as to whether these relationships are synergistic.
3. Provide a wide array of more detailed investigative opportunities to explore, for example, the degree of water retention of the plant boxes by studying their porosity and subsequent run-off.
4. Require thinking critically and using investigative skills.  
5. Actively engage students with each other in an open lab space, free of traditional classroom physical restraints.  The outdoor classroom provides instant access to natural variables which are difficult to realistically reproduce in a traditional indoor classroom.

Our primary interests are in leveling 1,782 square feet of the learning space, in an effort to make the area ADA compliant.  Once leveled, crushed stone would be placed on the surface.  The previously mentioned plant boxes will be re-purposed and placed onto the crushed stone bed.  In order to increase student outdoor laboratory and extended learning space, we have decided to eliminate four of the plant boxes.  We would remove the plant boxes which contain the 75% and 25% substrate mixtures, and just keep the following:

Two tables containing 100 % Humus / Topsoil (1 table with sedum and 1 table with higher mixed genera plants)

Two tables containing 50 % Humus / Topsoil and 50% Granular Mix (1 table with sedum and 1 table with higher mixed genera plants)

Two tables containing 100 % Granular Mix (1 table with sedum and 1 table with higher mixed genera plants)

One control table containing 100 % Humus / Topsoil (no plants)

One control table containing 100 % Granular Mix (no plants)

One control table empty (no substrate and no plants)

We would have new total of 9 total boxes.

We are also looking to add:

A pathway running the entire length of the lab area (100 feet).

Attaching the solar panels onto the model roof

Attaching the panels to inverter boxes located inside of a secure shed (shed already built)

We are confident that if you can contribute to our cause, the dividends will be enormous.  

Phasing

Year 1 : “The Great Room, Office & Utility Room”

• Install stone dust base and edging.

• Add facades, legs, and wheels to study boxes.

• Add modular seating (stumps/logs).

• Modify and organize the utility shed (consider including blankets for outdoor work).

Year 2: “The Front Door & Foyer”

• Install paths.

• Add entrance arbor.

• Plant shade trees and set up table seating.

• Install defining elements (native plants, edging, landscape stone).

Year 3: “The Back Yard”

• Establish meadow with clean mown edge and meandering internal path.

• Use District woodchips to define path and suppress weeds.

• Adjust or reinforce any existing design elements as needed.