Monterey Bay Charter School is thrilled to announce our outdoor classroom design plans with the community. The Covid-19 pandemic has presented many challenges for educators, including how to safely resume in person instruction. We have invested a tremendous amount of time and energy into designing outdoor classroom spaces in preparation for the reopening of our school and partnered with Green Schoolyards America to create safe and efficient outdoor classrooms.

Green Schoolyards America is a co-founder of the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative that is helping schools across the country visualize outdoor spaces as essential assets in reopening with safety protocols in place. An amazing team of designers and architects toured our campuses and created the beautiful designs for our campuses. We are excited to be the first school on the Central Coast to partner with Green Schoolyards America and promote the national outdoor classroom initiative locally.

We Need Your Support

In order to bring our outdoor spaces to life, we are asking for your support through donations and sponsorships for the equipment, labor and site beautification to actualize the design plans. In addition to creating outdoor classrooms, we hope to add vibrant murals, plant new flowers, add sunshades, pull weeds, spruce up the garden, build a new chicken coop, add additional picnic tables and new signage. We want our families to return safely to school excited to be back and ready to learn in a beautiful outdoor environment.

Our goal is to promote engaging and safe outdoor learning with meaningful academic lessons and play time for our students.

Our families and faculty have reported they would feel most comfortable returning to in person instruction in an outdoor setting. Our administration is dedicated to providing our families and faculty with the safest option for returning to in person instruction. Building outdoor classrooms is an opportunity to live our mission of joyful learning and courageous living and uphold our community value of embracing our natural surroundings. Monterey Bay Charter School has long promoted the benefits of outdoor play, rain or shine. Studies have shown that ample time outdoors has tremendous benefits for our overall health. Exposure to nature inspires creativity, emotional well being and fosters a healthy relationship with nature whereas spending too much time indoors can negatively affect mental health. Fresh air in an outdoor setting reduces transmission of the Covid-19 virus. Our goal is to promote engaging and safe outdoor learning with meaningful academic lessons and play time for our students.

We are incredibly grateful to have partnered with Green Schoolyards America to create efficient and safe outdoor spaces for our students and faculty. We hope that you will consider supporting our efforts to raise the necessary funds for our outdoor classrooms. While we are eager to have our students return for in person instruction, we must do so safely.

The Governor’s “Safe Schools for All” plan still requires a county to have less than 25/100,000 COVID cases to reopen, within the Governor’s proposed framework. Monterey County hit this target mid February. Our governing school board approved reopening for in person, hybrid instruction beginning the week of March 22, 2021. We remain hopeful that our county’s case numbers will continue to decrease and the vaccine will become available to more individuals in our community.