Sunnyside Elementary School is located in the North Clackamas School District in a highly suburban neighborhood, just off of busy SE Sunnyside Road. At this school, 95% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and nearly 50% of its student body are kids of color. Only 25% of students met grade level benchmarks in science.
The school also sits in the Rock Creek watershed, a tributary of the Clackamas River. A large part of the school’s parking lot was already recently upgraded with new stormwater management facilities (pictured at right), but the school’s back parking still flowed off site untreated (pictured below). The Sunnyside Stormwater Retrofit Project changed that.
In partnership with the North Clackamas School District, Sunnyside School community, and contractors Parametrix and Verde Builds, the Estuary Partnership completed a schoolyard stormwater project in April 2025. The project entailed building a stormwater planter to treat polluted runoff from almost 10,000 square feet of parking lot. Native plants will uptake pollutants and also help slow stormwater during rain events, allowing rainwater to slowly infiltrate into the soil. With the completion of this project, the entire Sunnyside parking area now drains to stormwater facilities that capture and treat pollutants.
Sunnyside students were also involved in the project. Students learned about the impacts of stormwater pollution during a class lesson with the Estuary Partnership’s Environmental Educators, and then helped to plant native trees, shrubs, and grasses as part of the project to support the health of their watershed.
The project is funded by the Clackamas Water Environment Services RiverHealth Stewardship Program and EPA’s Columbia River Basin Restoration Program.