Schools That Heal

Design with Mental Health in Mind

Claire Latane

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642830798
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Research consistently shows that access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. But too few school designers and decision-makers apply this research to create healthy schools. Schools That Heal details the myriad opportunities—from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations—to make supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers.Schools around the world have been designed to support students' health. A Japanese community decimated by a tsunami has incorporated water elements into the school campus to reconnect students to nature in a supportive way and promote environmental stewardship. Sandy Hook Elementary, creating a completely redesigned campus in the wake of a school shooting, began with an inclusive design process to ensure the new school could be a place of healing and learning. And while the larger mental and physical impacts of how COVID-19 has changed schooling aren't known yet, Latané discusses how building elements like large windows—that can open to circulate fresh air—were once common in schools and could once again be useful as a cost-effective tactic for reducing virus exposure.Backed by decades of research, Schools That Heal showcases clear and compelling ways to create schools that support students' mental health and feelings of safety. Written in an accessible tone, this book reviews the evidence connecting design to mental health and makes design and advocacy recommendations to support students' well-being and sense of safety.With invaluable advice for school administrators, public health experts, teachers, and parents, Schools That Heal is a call to action and a practical resource to envision and implement nurturing and inspiring school environments. Healthy, healing campuses will better prepare students to take care of themselves, their communities, their cities, and their planet.

CHAPTER 1

Nine Reasons Why We Should Design Schools with Mental Health in Mind

What would schools look like if every design decision were made with mental health in mind? We might see them as the essential public goods that they are. We might design them so they could remain open in times of pandemic and social distancing. The physical qualities of schools impact mental health as well as public health. The schools students attend affect how they see and treat themselves, their peers, their futures, and the world around them. As the hearts of communities, schools connect people. They can reverse the feelings of isolation and overwhelm so many children, teens, adults, and seniors have struggled with even before the outbreak of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. When designed as nurturing, nature-filled environments, schools can give students a sense of belonging, soothe their anxieties, reduce their fears, and elevate their moods.

Mentally healthy school design is good for people, animals, plants, and ecosystems. It’s good for economies, too. Schools that heal work with nature and natural processes to need fewer materials for less money and less maintenance. They provide ample indoor and outdoor connection and space to alleviate crowding, noise, and physical contact. Supporting students’ mental and physical health through design helps them thrive academically and socially. Nurturing school environments promote positive behavior, safer schools and communities, and better lives for students during school and over their lifetimes. Because schools are an essential public resource, the way they are funded, designed, and managed impacts environmental and social justice and equity.

Very few schools today are designed to support mental health. Most don’t support physical health very well, either. More often than not, school environments are made up of hard institution-grade materials that reflect noise and light, limit choice, heighten stress and anxiety—and, as a result, aggression—increase heart rates, and reduce students’ sense of belonging and ability to learn. Reduced school funding and a desire to harden schools against potential external threats have created schools that are little more than walled testing centers of students’ intellects and teachers’ patience. And this is in the wealthier neighborhoods. In lower-income communities, they look and feel like prisons. The way schools are policed often lands students of color in a juvenile justice system that impacts the rest of their lives. Most public school environments offer little to spark the imagination, engage curiosity, or invite quiet reflection or kind interaction. Stark wide-open spaces and fenced grounds invite boredom, competition, or aggression. Teachers beg for relief. And students struggle and suffer.

Children and teenagers who go to school in classrooms with ample fresh air flow, big windows looking out to trees, and opportunities to play freely in nature are kinder to one another, are better behaved, do better in school, and are more likely to go to college. Students of all ages are calmer, less stressed, and less likely to act aggressively or criminally in schools and communities with more trees, places for people to gather outside, and opportunities to play creatively and be active. There are many reasons to design schools with mental health and well-being in mind. The following sections explore nine.

1. Children Need Healthy Environments to Develop Healthy Nervous Systems

As a somatic psychotherapist, Sergio Ocampo works with the mind-body-environment connection. He specializes in trauma therapy. For three years Ocampo worked with children suffering from trauma and related conditions in Los Angeles public schools. “A student’s surroundings affect the part of the autonomic nervous system which is associated with feelings of safety and calm,” he told me. “A school designed with soothing surroundings, visual depth, and varied interest signals to the brain to let go of hyper-vigilance and defensive or self-protective responses. The brain and nervous system can rest.”¹

Soothing surroundings are full of tree leaves and tall grasses swaying in the breeze, birdsong, and butterflies—scenes and sounds and scents that take us away from everyday stressors. With resting nervous systems, students are more open to interacting with other people, have a greater sense of well-being, and have better brain function. Schools made up entirely of hard surfaces separate children from the natural environments that they need to develop a healthy nervous system. Ocampo said:

Many schools, especially in urban areas, are devoid of nature … the opposite of the places humans evolved to live in. The result can be a nervous system which is unable to settle down and self-soothe. This can present itself as an inability to control emotions and impulses or achieve higher cognitive functions. The consequences can be learning difficulties, disruptive confrontation, and even violent behavior. Or the opposite can emerge in the form of shut down emotions and social interaction.²

We have to begin treating nature and the services nature provides as essential and precious resources in urban schools and communities. Our bodies, minds, and spirits work better and last longer when we are immersed in healthy natural environments. Nature provides the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the complex ecosystem that we all inhabit. Expanding research illuminates a web of benefits between healthy urban ecologies, public health, social and environmental justice, and educational outcomes. Nature is more than just window dressing. Students thrive when they can see, hear, smell, and feel the natural resources that sustain us.

2. Mentally Healthy Design Supports Public Health and Works toward Justice

“School facilities aren’t welcoming places for communities,” said Manal Aboelata, deputy executive director of Prevention Institute in Los Angeles. “People and communities are not just our clients—they are the benefactors or receivers of harms.”

Planning and public health practices are beginning to adopt this idea. “We need a lot more work to reframe mental health not as an individual problem that lives inside someone’s head but as a community-wide problem.

“There is still a stigma around mental health—we don’t internalize our community situation, privilege, and resources as connected to mental health and social connectedness,” Aboelata told me. But they are. “Connectedness and reversing isolation is important, especially for seniors. Street design, benches with shade … there are gaps and opportunities in every system.”

Loneliness doesn’t hurt just seniors. Before the coronavirus pandemic, a study by the health insurer Cigna found that nearly half of young adults in the United States felt loneliness and that millennials and Generation Z-ers were more likely than older generations to feel lonely.³ One in three people between fifty and eighty years of age reported being lonely. Loneliness is connected to depression, anxiety, and risk of heart attack, stroke, and early death.⁴ More and more, our lives are devoid of communal and multigenerational activities and full of isolation, independence, and loneliness. The best antidote is to engage in meaningful social contact, pursue purposeful work, and build strong relationships. Schools can be designed as nature-filled community centers where senior citizens, artists, businesspeople, and others can find and nurture meaningful relationships through volunteering time and resources and mentoring young people. This benefits students and the entire community.

These strategies boost ecological health and social cohesion as well as physical health. This in turn reduces the need for medical care, psychiatric care, and the subsequent economic stress that often leads to food insecurity, homelessness, and hopelessness. It is those things—not the inherent desire to commit crime—that lands most in the criminal justice system. We cannot expect young people or adults to thrive in neighborhoods overshadowed by schools that look and feel like detention centers. Public schools are positioned well to become community centers for health and resilience—a beating heart for the neighborhood. We can start repairing those injustices in public school neighborhoods with the least resources and the most to gain. Designing schools as healing, restorative, community-building places can build physical health, mental health, and resilience in the face of the next pandemic, recession, or natural disaster. While some physical improvements can take years, engaging students and the community in reimagining their school can have immediate benefits.

3. Designing with Empathy—Not Fear—Increases Students’ Sense of Belonging and Safety

Sometimes positive intentions have negative consequences. In the aftermath of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, school districts around the country began implementing “active shooter drills” to train students and teachers what to do in case of this type of emergency. This sets up the classroom and school as a place where fear undermines learning. Children as young as three and four come home after active shooter drills worried about being shot at school. While the threat is terrifying, the likelihood of a student experiencing an active school shooter is 0.003 percent.⁵ Drilling students to prepare for this unlikely tragedy leads to anxiety and trauma. The Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of American teenagers worry about a shooting at their school. The drills place undue fear in students. For example, having students “arm” themselves with pencils and rulers and barricade the door is an approach that isn’t even grounded in empirical evidence. A more effective response would be nurturing each student with student-centered learning environments that meet students’ unique and individual needs. A 2020 study by the US Government Accountability Office found that current or former students were the shooters in over 80 percent of school-targeted shootings between 2009 and 2019.⁶ Design solutions can also be an important part of preparing for the unimaginable—and less frightening. HMC Architects designs classrooms with bolts of color on the floor marking safe zones. Teachers instruct students to get into the safe zone, out of sight of doors and windows, for an “emergency drill.” This allows schools and districts to practice for emergencies—including earthquake, tornado, or lockdown—and avoids frightening children with mental images of guns and shooters and other extreme emergency language. Schools can include safe zones as a part of student training on how to handle the most common emergencies.

One of the most inspiring examples of how design can provide protection and support emotional well-being is in evidence at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the site of a horrific mass shooting in 2012. It was redesigned not as a fortress but as an embrace. Architect Barry Svigals told me:

We selected fifty people including consultants. The opportunity was clear—that they needed to be able to reset emotionally where they were. We started with what they loved about their community, a remembering and a re-visioning with what their community could be. This community engagement process is essential—even in schools that are already built—in order to reimagine what safety/wellness is and think about it holistically. It’s comprehensive, broad, deep.⁷

The whole hub of public health professionals, mental health professionals, law enforcement, social workers, parents, teachers, students, and the local community worked together to reknit the reasons for school back into the community.

4. Design Can Amplify Existing Restorative Justice and Mental Health Programs

Many school districts are replacing punitive discipline with restorative, relationship-based methods to bring people together around forgiveness and healing. Others have established robust mental health frameworks by providing services, social workers, and other systems to support students’ individual needs. Some, such as California’s Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), do both.

“Restorative justice is a really great way to help humans feel safe because it allows them to connect to one another, and build relationships, and do it in a way the student values can be present,” David Yusem, the director of OUSD’s Restorative Justice program, told me.⁸ Few schools, if any, see restorative justice as a design issue. But physical changes to schools can amplify the effects of restorative justice programs by creating calming, quieting environments and places where students can go alone or in small groups when they need to decompress. Creating an environment that invites rest and helps teachers and students nurture one another and themselves will reduce the likelihood of students acting out. Designing healing places to hold community circles—the center of many restorative justice initiatives—can facilitate the restorative justice process by providing inviting environments where people feel safe and comfortable. The more comfortable students, teachers, and community members are, the more likely it is that they can fully participate in the process of healing wounds and righting relationships.

Seeing an opportunity well over a decade ago, Deanna Van Buren founded Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. She acknowledges that people rarely understand the importance of design. “I believe and expect that people are not going to value design very much. These are working communities who are traumatized, and doing a design workshop is not their top priority,” she told me. “That doesn’t mean design and the environment is not a hugely important and impactful thing that needs to be addressed. But it’s not their responsibility to address it. It’s ours, as designers, and architects, and whoever else to be finding ways to ensure that people have healthy, nourishing, supportive environments for their life.”⁹

5. Boosting Children’s Physical Ability and Immune System with Nature Play Increases Long-Term Health and Physical Safety As Well As Mental Health and Well-being

When we talk about student health and safety, we need to think about students’ long-term health, over the course of their lives. Many school design and policy decisions are made to minimize the risk of students hurting themselves in the moment. My children went to elementary school during a time when running wasn’t allowed, for fear that a student might trip and fall. Other parents and advocates tell me the same rules apply at their schools. And yet most will agree that running and other vigorous physical activity is essential for students’ long-term health and well-being. One of the most impactful ways to benefit students’ lifelong physical and mental health is by letting them play freely in nature-filled environments.

“How do you define safety?” Sharon Gamson Danks, cofounder of the International School Grounds Alliance (ISGA), reminded me of a concept called beneficial risk. The ISGA’s Risk in Play and Learning Declaration calls for school grounds to be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. This call to action came from the enormous amount of evidence connecting beneficial risk—such as climbing trees, swinging from ropes, jumping off logs and boulders, running across uneven surfaces—with stronger minds, bodies, mental health, and social skills, even if it comes with skinned knees and other hurts.

After months of closed schools due to the coronavirus pandemic, rethinking priorities for school facilities is even more crucial. Pediatricians and public health experts recommend being outside instead of in recirculated air-conditioned rooms to reduce the spread of disease. Decades of research point to the health benefits of being in or looking at nature. We can transform schoolyards into outdoor classrooms, learning laboratories, restorative gardens, and nature play areas. This will support immune system health, reduce infection rates, and allow teachers more options for experiential learning. Opening outdoor classrooms will also help schools reduce class sizes during times of social distancing. This commonly brings concerns about protecting students from cold, heat, snow, rain, and wind. The traditional response from the forest school movement (popular in cold and blustery Denmark and Scotland) is “There’s no such thing as bad weather, onl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Manal J. Aboelata
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Nine Reasons Why We Should Design Schools with Mental Health in Mind
• Chapter 2: How School Environments Shape Mental, Social, and Physical Health
• Chapter 3: Site Design Strategies to Support Mental Health, Safety, and Well-being
• Chapter 4: Leveraging Schools for Public Health, Equity, and Climate Resilience
• Chapter 5: How to Communicate for the Best Chance at Change
• Chapter 6: Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees … or Does It?
• Chapter 7: Ten Schools to Inspire and Guide You
• Chapter 8: Conversations on Transformation by Design
• Chapter 9: For the Love of Students
• Resources
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index