Outdoor Environmental Education for Title One Students

The Authority contributed $425,000 toward the City of Santa Clara's project to create this new 3-acre neighborhood park, originally named San Tomas Community Garden Park, located along the San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, on the southwest corner of San Tomas Expressway and Monroe Avenue. The grant funded a community garden, open space, and picnic area.

The Authority’s grant helped fund Living Classroom’s Garden-Based Instruction in the Campbell School District. Living Classroom's environmental education program focuses in three key areas: environmental literacy, connection to healthy food, and science learning that is relevant and real to the lives of students. Living Classroom will provide a full-service program to schools, including lesson instruction to hundreds of classrooms with multiple lessons for each class each year over multiple years, lesson materials, garden installation and maintenance, and recruitment and training of volunteer parents and docents. The goal of the Authority-funded portion the program was to provide top quality, engaging garden-based learning experiences in the areas of science, nutrition, math, and social studies for at least 1,200 K-3 students at five Campbell schools

While there are many trails in the Santa Clara Valley, none connect the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Diablo Range and tie the Santa Clara Valley into the Bay Area Ridge Trail, a 375-mile network of trails that unites the ridges circling the Bay Area. The Authority is helping to fund the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council’s feasibility study to consider and identify a preferred Ridge Trail alignment between Santa Teresa County Park and the Coyote Creek Trail as part of ongoing efforts to fix this South Bay “trail-gap.”