• In some places where schools are being designed with environmental qualities in mind, teachers are using the schools themselves as teaching tools to connect students to nature.
• At the Hood River, Ore., Middle School, science students and their teacher told architects where the garden and greenhouse should go on the land, then told them to go ahead and design the rest.
• At Stoddert Elementary School in Washington, D.C., a 1932 master plan said where an addition should go, but school and community love for trees on the site in a dense neighborhood prompted architects to put the master plan back on the shelf and design for what people who are there now want.

From the article:

Like many of us who were children more than 30 years ago, Judy Wherry, principal of an environmentally themed LEED Platinum public school in Ontario, spent much of her childhood roaming in nature. ...