New York Road Runners and the Trust for Public Land celebrated their partnership creating schoolyards that serve as community parks outside of school hours throughout the five boroughs on Monday by opening a refurbished schoolyard at P.S. 223Q The Lyndon B. Johnson School in Jamaica which students helped design.
“We are kicking off marathon week for the 2021 TCS New York City Marathon…and I can think of no better way to do that than to be here amongst this great group of kids, potentially our next generation of runners,” said Kerin Hempel, CEO of New York Road Runners, who was joined by students of P.S. 233Q for the playground’s ribbon cutting ceremony.
Through their five-year-long partnership, the NYRR and the Trust for Public Land have combined forces to bring 11 playgrounds featuring running tracks.
“It’s really been inspiring to see firsthand how these spaces really come to life and how The Trust for Public Land is able to turn a field of asphalt into these really living, breathing beautiful green spaces for the kids to expand their imagination and expand their fitness and really come together,” said Hempel.
100 million people in America—including 28 million kids—don’t have a park close to home, according to a report released by the Trust for Public Land last year. As a result, the has decided to try and improve overall access to greenspace by turning schoolyards into shared outdoor spaces.
“We hope that this is going to lead to the next generation of Marathon champions, tennis stars that go to Arthur Ashe stadium right in Queens, basketball stars,” Carter Strickland, vice president of the mid-Atlantic region for The Trust for Public Land. “We’ve got a stage for future actors and really for future scholars from the outdoor classroom.”
As a classroom assignment, students took the future playground space’s measurements to see if it could accommodate a track and other play equipment and took a field trip to P.S. 140 in Jamaica to visit the school’s playground, also built through Trust for Public Land program, to see what they liked and wanted in their own green space.
