Marin students craft eco-friendly preschool playscape project

A group of Marin high school students is taking outdoor children’s play to another level.

About 30 juniors in the Marin School of Environmental Leadership at Terra Linda High School built a low-tech, eco-friendly play area that encourages children to interact more with the natural world using their own imagination and creativity.

The playscape, which the students designed and built from scratch, includes a 10-by-7-foot outdoor reading nook, two mud “kitchens” with running water, a scales station for weighing pine cones in buckets and two tiered wood ramps that create mini-waterfalls.

The students will install the play area next month at the Spring Hill School, a toddler-to-eighth grade independent school on two campuses in Petaluma.

A public unveiling and demonstration event is set for March 9.

“It’s very cool for them to have pride in giving to the community,” said Allison Oropallo, a teacher at the Marin School of Environmental Leadership, also known as MSEL. “It’s a lesson that all high school students should have before they graduate: Give back.”

Former Marin educator Eric Saibel, director of the Spring Hill School, said he agreed to the project after Oropallo, whose two children attend the school, proposed the idea.

MSEL students previously designed and built a children’s playhouse at the Petaluma school, which has about 180 students from 18 months to 14 years old, Saibel said.

“Every child, everywhere, deserves to be surrounded by beautiful spaces and structures that invite creativity, community, inspiration and reflection,” Saibel said.

“Our students will spend countless hours engaging with these structures over the years to come,” Saibel said. “The playground will be as dynamic a learning space as the classroom.”

The high school students get credit for a compelling project that benefits the community and teaches them hands-on construction, design, teamwork, engineering and woodworking skills. The experience can steer them onto a positive path for the rest of their lives, Oropallo said.

“Make us a better future,” Oropallo said of her advice to students. “Go and make the world better than how you found it.”

On a recent day, MSEL students were deep into the project at their engineering studio near the auto shop at Terra Linda High School. The design and engineering class meets in the early morning, before regular classes, but the students had plenty of energy and were engrossed in fine-tuning the various structures.

Anna Wallen, 16, who co-designed the reading nook mural with classmate Evelyn Noyes, 16, said painting the mural was the best part.

“Every morning, I get to start out here with my best friend,” said Wallen, referring to Noyes. “We just paint all morning. We didn’t use sketches, so it was just really fun to see what it became.”

Abby Lauster, 17, and Ezra Buell, 16, collaborated on the sidewalls and roof for the reading nook.

“The roof was tough,” Lauster said. “We had to plan to be able to remove it and then reinstall it at the preschool, so it was different than how you would design a normal roof. But we made it work.”

Bobby Townsend, 17, said he had never built anything before this project. He was assigned to a team that was putting the walls and siding in place on the reading nook.

“It’s really fun to try to learn how to build stuff,” he said.

Oropallo credited a team of parent volunteers, some of whom have been coming for years, with helping her monitor and manage the large classes on a daily basis.

“I couldn’t do it without them,” she said. Construction materials, including lumber and Plexiglas, were donated by Marin shops.

The school was founded in 2010 by a group of parents while their children were in middle school. The parents wanted to bring environmental literacy and leadership into the classroom.

Since then, admission to the program has become highly competitive and by application only. Students must commit to stay for all four years. It is one of two “schools within a school” in Marin, along with Marin School of the Arts at Novato High School.