Guests from the Michigan Environmental Justice Conference visited Salina Elementary and Intermediate School campus on Sept. 29, 2025, to learn more about the district’s Green Schoolyards initiative.
Approximately 80 visitors from two buses of conference attendees stopped by the school on Monday. Green Schoolyards is cultivating more natural areas and interactive green spaces around the Salina Campus, which includes Salina Elementary and Salina Intermediate. About 900 students attend the two schools.
Elementary Principal Sue Stanley and Intermediate Principal Eman Ali provided the visitors with a brief history of the schools and the neighborhood and discussed the Green Schoolyards initiative in more depth. They also took guests to see some of the features around the buildings.
In June, Salina Elementary dedicated a new kindergarten playground with a double slide embedded into a small hill, a clamber log pile, and a wooden xylophone, among other items, nestled among natural landscaping.
Last year, the campus also added another rain garden and planted a prairie area, trees and bushes. These features joined existing improvements including vegetable and pollinator gardens and the outdoor learning spaces already on the campus.
All of the features are part of a larger initiative to add green space, benefiting the physical and mental health of students and the community, while also mitigating environmental concerns in the area, such as reducing stormwater runoff. The campus sits near a large industrial area.
To date, more than $2,000,000 has been donated to the Salina Green Schoolyards from a long list of donors. Learn more about the Green Schoolyards Initiative on its website.
Last December, the Green Schoolyards at Salina received a Michigan Environmental Justice Impact Grant, which led school representatives to participate in the conference.
District representatives also had a table at the conference to discuss the initiative with visitors. Attendees included representatives from groups that could become potential sponsors for the work.
School leaders will host another round of visitors on November 12th as part of the Place-Based Education conference sponsored by Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative (GLSI) from Nov 12-14 in Ypsilanti. Principals Stanley and Ali will present at the conference.
