This week, green schoolyards will be inaugurated at five more Milwaukee Public Schools thanks to Reflo’s Green and Healthy Schools program in partnership with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District.
The five schoolyards this year, serving six schools – Milwaukee Sign Language School and Morse Middle School for the Gifted and Talented; Forest Home Avenue School; Greenfield Bilingual School; Lincoln Avenue School and Story Elementary School – were funded with $8.4 million from these partners and others, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
An official unveiling is set for Tuesday morning at Milwaukee Sign Language School and Morse Middle School for the Gifted and Talented, 7900 W. Acacia St., where the largest schoolyard greening project so far includes a densely planted and biodiverse microforest.
Forest Home Avenue School, appropriately, has also gotten a microforest.
Thirty-one schools in MPS have now taken part in the project, not counting schools like Maryland Avenue Montessori, which created its own greening project with some of the same partners before the Reflo program started in 2018.
As part of the greening, large sections of nonporous pavement at the schoolyards is removed and replaced with natural areas that not only serve as play and learning spaces but also help keep hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater on site and out of the combined sewer system.
The schools take part in the planning of each schoolyard transformation.
This helps prevent sewage releases into Lake Michigan.
Five more schoolyards are set to go, with completion expected next summer.
Those are Humboldt Park School, Kagel Dual Language School, Walt Whitman School, Samuel Clemens School and Riverwest Elementary.
The 2026 cohort includes Cass Street School, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School, Emerson School, Milwaukee French Immersion School and Trowbridge School for Great Lakes Studies.
Read more stories about green schoolyards here.
The Reflo website also has information on all the past, current and planned green schoolyards projects. The site also has links to donate to the school projects.
Forest Home Avenue
Greenfield Bilingual
Lincoln Avenue
Milwaukee Sign Language & Morse Middle School for the Gifted and Talented
Story School
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
