Garden City Elementary students don’t sit behind desks. They don’t even have classrooms. Instead, they spend their school day flitting between interactive spaces in a “learning community,” perching on plush, colorful modular furniture. Gone are the days of scrap paper and worksheets — at Garden City, they write out their work on tables and walls with dry-erase markers. And students don’t file across campus to the auditorium — their cafeteria, which serves nutritious farm-to-school meals, converts to an assembly space with a wide, green staircase that every student can find a seat on.

It’s no wonder Garden City is one of five Rhode Island schools designated a 2024 U.S. Department of Education Green Ribbon school at a ceremony in Washington, D.C on July 9. The school received recognition for sustainability practices and experiential learning at its new campus, which opened August 2023.

Garden City is at the vanguard of “21st century learning opportunities,” says Principal Bryan Byerlee. In addition to embracing sustainability in its design, the school restructured students’ day-to-day experience.

Each learning community contains a main “learning commons” orbited by “learning studios” and rooms for small-group work. Learning communities also house “active labs” and “teacher collaboration workrooms” to accommodate different learning styles, Byerlee said.

The layout “allows students to learn in a flexible, yet strategically structured, collaborative environment,” Garden City’s application reads.

The school is flooded with natural light and circulates high-quality filtered air, creating an environment where students feel safe and “connected to nature,” Byerlee said. Garden City also provides students with reusable water bottle fillers, while routing rainwater to landscape gardens intended to attract friendly pollinators and resist drought.

“It’s a huge, daily kind of impact,” Byerlee said. “We can’t accomplish much of anything in education if we don’t have a safe, healthy environment.”

Students also have access to a library and media center, a makerspace, a gymnasium and outdoor learning spaces, including a playground and baseball diamond.

Teachers at Garden City follow “project-based learning,” integrating environmental principles into students’ assignments. Students were tasked with discovering how the school’s construction disrupted the surrounding ecosystems, or how animals respond to humans in their environment. Other project topics included responses to natural disasters and reducing waste in the community, Byerlee said.

Byerlee noted an uptick in “student engagement” over the last year, which he attributed to “teaching practices that give students choice and agency” and “the opportunity to have choice, be comfortable and collaborate.”

Curricula at Garden City are designed to foster civic and environmental engagement. Students take field trips to local parks and the state house. Firefighters, local engineers and Audubon society members give guest presentations in the classroom, and projects take the form of field studies and experiments.

“The Garden City School is the first school building in the City of Cranston building in the new millennia,” the application reads. “It serves as a first step to improve efficiency and innovation, not just in this school but district wide.”

Garden City’s renovation is part of the Cranston school district’s five-year strategic master plan, funded by a $147 million bond referendum approved in November 2020.  Its new 86,000 square foot facility holds 575 students and cost $54 million, replacing the old campus built in the 1950s. Construction on the school began in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The school building, designed by education architecture firm Fielding International, centers sustainability in its structure, Byerlee said.

According to the application, Garden City anticipates energy savings of over 3500 kilowatt hours per student per year, annual CO2 reductions of over 1.2 million lbs and annual water savings of 305,000 gallons.

Byerlee traveled to the Green Ribbon Schools ceremony in Washington, D. C., where 41 schools received the recognition. At the ceremony, Byerlee and other representatives from Rhode Island received support from Rep. Seth Magaziner and Sen. Jack Reed.

“It’s a testament to the kind of investment we’re making in our state,” Byerlee said.  “It was a great honor to be in D.C. with my colleagues from Rhode Island, representing the work we’re doing to improve school facilities.”

In the coming years, Byerlee hopes the district will continue consolidating old school buildings to provide “21st century learning opportunities.” Students should also get involved in decision making, he added.

“I’m just super proud of Cranston for being a leader in 21st century school building designs in the state, region — I would dare say the country,” Byerlee said. “We just have to keep on going.”