When Oakridge Elementary announced plans to renovate their fifty-year-old building, the parents’ chat groups exploded with opinions. Some wanted cutting-edge technology in every classroom. Others advocated for enhanced security features.
The sporty parents lobbied for upgraded athletic facilities. As for me, I just hoped they’d fix the ventilation system that made my daughter Emma’s classroom smell like wet gym socks mixed with taco Tuesday leftovers. Nobody—literally nobody—was asking for biophilic design elements.
In fact, when Principal Hernandez first mentioned the term at a PTA meeting, I watched several parents discreetly Google it under the table. (I know because I was one of them.) The concept sounded expensive and frankly a bit precious for our public school with its perpetually stretched budget and long list of basic needs. “Great, they’re prioritizing fancy nature features while the third-grade math books are still teaching that Pluto is a planet,” muttered the dad sitting next to me.
I shared his skepticism. The proposed changes—larger windows, natural materials, indoor plants, outdoor learning spaces, and something called “dynamic lighting”—seemed like trendy architectural flourishes rather than educational necessities. But as the parent of two children with very different learning styles, I was inadvertently positioned to become the unofficial before-and-after case study for the renovation’s impact.
My daughter Emma, then in fourth grade, would experience the completed renovation midway through the school year. My son Jack, two years younger, would remain in the unrenovated primary wing until the following phase of construction. Same school, same teachers, same curriculum approach—but dramatically different physical environments.
The renovation work happened over summer break and through the fall semester, with students temporarily relocated to portable classrooms. When Emma returned to the newly completed intermediate wing in January, my expectations were primarily aesthetic. I figured the spaces would look nicer—Instagram-worthy learning environments that would photograph well for the district website but not necessarily function better for actual education.
The first sign that something more significant was happening came about three weeks after Emma moved into her new classroom. We were having our usual after-school conversation about her day, a ritual that typically required archaeological-level questioning to extract more than monosyllabic responses. That day, unprompted, she launched into an elaborate description of the bird nest being built outside her classroom window.
“Ms. Patterson stops our math lesson sometimes so we can all watch what the birds are doing,” she reported. “We’re keeping a class journal about it.
I noticed the mama bird brings different materials than the daddy bird.”
This was the same child who, just months earlier, had declared birds “basically dinosaurs with anxiety” and showed zero interest in wildlife beyond our perpetually shedding golden retriever. Now she was voluntarily journaling about nesting behaviors? Something had shifted.
I didn’t immediately connect this new interest to the renovated space. But over the following weeks, I noticed other changes in Emma’s engagement with school. She began bringing home detailed observational drawings of plants growing in the classroom’s integrated garden boxes.
She asked for help identifying the “weird green stuff” (moss) growing on the rocks in the new outdoor learning area. Her teacher reported increased participation in group discussions, particularly when they held classes in the outdoor learning circle. The most tangible change appeared in Emma’s reading habits.
She’d always been a reluctant reader, preferring active play to sitting with a book. In the new classroom, with its cushioned window seats overlooking green space, she began voluntarily choosing reading as an activity. “It’s just cozy there,” she explained when I commented on this change.
“It feels like reading in a treehouse.”
Meanwhile, Jack continued in the unrenovated primary wing—same overhead fluorescent lighting, same beige walls, same small windows set too high for smaller children to see out of unless standing on chairs (a practice actively discouraged by his increasingly frazzled teacher). The contrast in my children’s experiences became impossible to ignore. The differences manifested in ways both subtle and obvious.
Emma started sleeping better, while Jack still struggled with the transition from school to home, often appearing overstimulated and emotionally dysregulated after the school day. Emma’s teacher reported improved attention spans across her class; Jack’s teacher sent home notes about his difficulty staying focused during lessons. Emma began showing interest in caring for our houseplants; Jack remained indifferent to anything green unless it involved either sugar or food coloring.
Around the third month after the renovation, I ran into Jack’s teacher Mrs. Reynolds in the grocery store, where she was buying wine at 4:15 on a Tuesday. (No judgment here—I’d seen her classroom at the end of a school day.) After exchanging pleasantries, I asked how things were going in the primary wing.
“We’ve started calling ourselves the Fluorescent Dungeon Crew,” she said with a laugh that sounded only slightly hysterical. “It’s hard not to be jealous of the intermediate teachers. Their students are different now—calmer, more engaged.
And the teachers! Stress levels noticeably lower, fewer sick days. Meanwhile, my kids are bouncing off the walls by 10 AM because there’s nowhere for their energy to go except ricocheting around our beige box.” She grabbed a second bottle of Pinot Noir.
“July can’t come fast enough. That’s when they start on our wing.”
My curiosity piqued, I began informally surveying other parents about changes they’d noticed in their children who were in the renovated spaces. The patterns were consistent: better sleep reported by 8 of 10 families, increased interest in nature-based activities, improved mood after school, and—most surprisingly—more detailed recall of learning content.
“Theo never remembered what happened at school before,” one mother told me at pickup. “Now he comes home talking about photosynthesis and the water cycle—not because the curriculum changed, but because he’s watching it happen in those plant wall things they installed.”
This anecdotal evidence was interesting but hardly scientific. Being married to a behavioral researcher has its downsides (like having your parenting decisions questioned using peer-reviewed studies), but it does give you access to someone who knows how to design a half-decent observational study.
With my husband’s guidance, I created a simple questionnaire for families with children in both the renovated and unrenovated wings, capturing baseline observations about attention, sleep, nature interest, and content recall. The results were compelling enough that Principal Hernandez asked to include them in her presentation to the school board advocating for accelerating the renovation timeline for the primary wing. Of the twenty-seven families with children in both environments, twenty-three reported positive changes specifically in the children learning in biophilic classrooms.
The remaining four noted no significant differences. But the most convincing evidence came when standardized testing results were released mid-spring. Students in the renovated wing showed an average 7% improvement in math scores and 9% improvement in reading comprehension compared to the previous year’s scores from the same cohort.
While many factors could contribute to this improvement, it was a notably larger jump than historical year-over-year changes. The differences extended beyond academic metrics. Nurse Abernathy reported that students from the unrenovated wing visited her office for complaints like headaches and stomachaches roughly twice as often as students from the renovated wing.
Behavior referrals were down 23% in the biophilic classrooms compared to the previous year in the same grade levels. My professional interest thoroughly piqued, I arranged to observe in both wings, spending a morning in Emma’s class and an afternoon in Jack’s. The contrast was even more striking than I’d imagined.
In Emma’s classroom, natural light poured through large windows that faced a wooded area at the edge of school grounds. The lighting system automatically adjusted to complement the daylight, maintaining optimal illumination without the harsh glare of traditional fluorescents. Plants integrated into custom shelving units created partial room divisions, allowing for multiple activity zones within the same space.
The overall noise level was notably lower thanks to sound-absorbing ceiling materials and the wood-fiber acoustic panels that doubled as display boards. The students moved differently in this space—flowing between areas with purpose rather than the chaotic pinballing I was accustomed to seeing in elementary classrooms. During independent work time, several children chose to sit in the window alcoves or on the natural fiber floor cushions rather than at traditional desks.
When a sudden rain shower started, the teacher smoothly incorporated it into the science lesson, gathering students near the windows to observe how the water moved across different surfaces in the outdoor learning area. That afternoon in Jack’s classroom presented a stark contrast. Despite his teacher’s admirable efforts to create a positive environment—cheerful posters, carefully arranged reading nooks, colorful storage bins—the fundamental limitations of the space were obvious.
The windows provided minimal natural light or outside views. The overhead fluorescents buzzed audibly and cast a slightly greenish tint that made everyone look vaguely nauseated. The hard surfaces everywhere created a constant background din that forced the teacher to raise her voice to be heard, which in turn caused the students to speak louder, creating a escalating cycle of noise.
By 2:30 PM, both the teacher and students appeared visibly fatigued. Several children were slumped at their desks; others had become increasingly fidgety and disruptive. When I checked in with Jack afterward, he complained of a headache—something he mentioned often after school days but that rarely occurred on weekends or vacations.
The experience crystallized my understanding of how profoundly physical environments affect learning. These weren’t just cosmetic differences—they were fundamentally different physiological and psychological experiences for developing brains. When the final phase of renovation finished the following year, completing the transformation of the entire school, the changes in the learning community were remarkable.
Overall attendance improved by 4%. Teacher retention increased—the school lost only one staff member that year compared to their typical turnover of four to six. Parent volunteers increased by 37%, with many commenting that the new environments made them want to spend more time at the school.
For my own children, the impacts continued beyond that initial observation period. Emma maintained her newfound interest in environmental sciences, eventually joining the school’s ecology club. Jack, once moved to the renovated primary wing, showed similar positive changes—better sleep patterns, improved focus, and decreased after-school irritability.
His standardized test scores improved by 11% in math and 8% in reading—slightly better than the average improvements seen in the first renovated cohort. Perhaps the most telling outcome was what happened during spring parent-teacher conferences in the fully renovated school. Ms.
Patterson, Emma’s teacher, shared something I found particularly significant. “We’ve seen test scores improve, behavior referrals decrease, and attendance get better,” she said. “Those are the metrics administrators and school boards care about.
But what I wish I could quantify is joy.” She explained that in her seventeen years of teaching, she’d never experienced a group of students who expressed such genuine happiness to be at school. “They’re not just learning more—they’re loving learning more. And as a teacher, that’s everything.”
The renovation had cost more than the bare-minimum update some parents had initially advocated for.
But even the most skeptical members of the community acknowledged that the return on investment extended far beyond aesthetics. The biophilic elements weren’t luxury add-ons—they were foundational to creating an environment where children could learn optimally because their basic physiological and psychological needs were supported. As our children advance through the school system, I’ve become an increasingly vocal advocate for biophilic design in educational settings.
The evidence—both the data-driven metrics and the countless qualitative improvements I’ve witnessed firsthand—makes a compelling case that these approaches should be standard practice, not exceptional upgrades. Children spend over 15,000 hours in school environments during their K-12 education. The quality of those environments—not just their aesthetic appeal but their fundamental alignment with human developmental needs—matters profoundly.
My children’s contrasting experiences in the “before and after” of biophilic renovation taught me that lesson more effectively than any research paper or design theory ever could. The proof was in their engagement, their enthusiasm, and ultimately, in their learning outcomes. When I think back to that skeptical dad at the PTA meeting muttering about fancy nature features versus outdated textbooks, I understand his initial reaction.
But the false dichotomy between academic basics and supportive environments misses the essential point: children learn better when their surroundings support rather than work against their biology. The most rigorous curriculum delivered in a space that induces fatigue, distraction, and stress will yield poorer results than that same curriculum taught in a space that promotes alertness, focus, and emotional regulation. That’s not theory—that’s what I watched unfold in my own children’s educational experience.
And it fundamentally changed what I believe our children deserve from their learning environments.
