The Allergy Free School Yard
Please join us in making the Allergy Free School Yard Initiative© a great success. Our goal here is simple: we want school yards for all of our children that are healthy places for them to exercise and play.
In the past school yards were frequently planted with trees and shrubs that triggered pollen allergies and allergic-asthma. The typical school yard is, unfortunately, all-too- often considerably more allergenic than the surrounding urban landscaping.
Today, more than ever, especially given the current epidemic of childhood obesity, children need to be encouraged to exercise, and to play vigorously. School yards should be fun, safe, healthy places, and they should always be allergy-friendly.
The person who started this project is Canadian horticulturist and award-winning educator, Peter Prakke. Besides directly advising schools, Peter has also been instrumental in getting allergy-free landscapes installed at all the new "Bravery Parks," across Canada, each park named after a Canadian soldier who was killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
This website is new, as is the Initiative itself. The aim for the site is to become a useful tool to help link together different groups of parents, teachers, principals, school staff, landscapers, arborists, health professionals, and concerned citizens. Although brand new, the Initiative is already starting to work, and individual schools and school districts are making the commitment toward healthy school yards.
Please speak to the people in charge of planting trees and shrubs in your own schools. Strongly encourage them to include allergy-potential in all future tree or shrub selections for your school yards.
We encourage schools to use OPALS™ for plant selection. This is a numerical plant/allergy scale, where landscape plants are ranked 1-10. With the scale, 1 is best, least allergenic, and 10 is worst, most allergenic. The scale is now used for allergy reduction, worldwide, by many landscape professionals.
We need your help. Working together we can make great things happen! Call or send letters, or emails to your own local newspapers, city council members, and your school superintendents.
If you'd like help on similar projects in your own area, contact Mr. Prakke, at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
* The Allergy Free School Yard Initiative has the full backing and enthusiastic endorsement of Thomas Leo Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening, from Random House Publishers.
