I thought this article on gardenifying a school playground was good. Here are a couple of my favorite parts:

For years, any effort to improve the school had been defeated by a politically connected principal who used the P.A. system to blather about such matters as her latest enema, teachers say. But she was gone by 2003, when the district’s facilities people came around with bond money and a districtwide plan to repave the vast expanses of asphalt that schools euphemistically call playgrounds.

Linda Slater, a second-grade teacher, called Green, a Times food and gardening writer who, although she had no children, had been volunteering (futilely) to start a garden at the school.

Now Green and Slater and other teachers yakked about how troubled they were by the sight of children running about on days when the sun-baked asphalt seemed capable of melting sneakers. They raged at the notion that it was OK for kids to play with only chain link separating them from the fumes and cacophony of the Santa Monica Freeway.

“I wanted to call Amnesty International,” says Green.

Page 2:

I often encounter people on the verge of blubbering helplessly about some little common-sense change they couldn’t push past the LAUSD or teachers union.

This may be the first time, however, that I’ve heard ranters say they came to realize that even bureaucrats sometimes have legitimate reasons for resistance. Well-meaning community amateurs are always waltzing onto campuses with grandiose ideas, only to flake out and leave behind big messes.

Attitudes changed, Green says, when the conspirators presented the district with professional plans, demonstrating that “we weren’t stupid hippies.”