Lauren Lepold-Schiro: Nurturing Youth With Compassion for Nature

Meet Laruen. Lauren Lepold-Schiro teaches special needs children at Nathaniel Hawthorne, a Milwaukee Public School. Her school is undergoing a green schoolyard transformation, adding green infrastructure like bioswales, rain gardens, and native plants that help absorb stormwater and provide a safe and vital outdoor space to learn and play.

A passionate—and compassionate—teacher in her seventh year in 2021, Lauren is excited about learning how to maintain the new green spaces at her school by visiting Green Tech Station, where bioswales teem with native plants like Black Eyed Susans. Green Tech Station contains several kinds of green infrastructure.

“I’m excited to turn our sea of concrete into a beautiful space for kids to learn and play,” Lauren says.

A “bioswale” is a fancy word for a ditch with plants in it—designed at a subtle pitch so that water drains into and flows through it. Along the way, plants’ roots take up some of that water and filter out contaminants. There are twin bioswales at Green Tech Station, each accepting the same volume of stormwater flowing from the adjacent street. Water that flows through the bioswale media enters a perforated pipe running underneath the length of each bioswale that conveys the water to a cistern underneath the Green Infrastructure Test Plaza. Here the water is stored before slow release into the sewer system—or can be pumped via solar power to irrigate plants elsewhere on the site.

Learn more about how the Green Tech Station bioswales serve this unique demonstration site here.