Elementary school principal Laurie Ocampo loved the sweeping green expanse of NewGrass™ that was installed at her school this summer, replacing the schoolyard’s 11,000 square feet of former dirt and sparse, constantly dying grass.

But Ocampo knew the true test for the synthetic grass schoolyard at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic School in Casa Grande, Ariz., would be how it held up to the school’s 340 students when they returned from summer break.

“It’s great,” Ocampo said recently. “It looks so nice. It seems to be holding up well, and the kids seem to really like it.”

The 11,000-square-foot NewGrass™ installation is also helping keep the school’s hallways and classrooms clean, she said.

“Before, we always had dust and dirt coming in, just because the schoolyard was so bare,” she said.

Worse, because the terrain has high and low elevations, the kids ended up tracking mud into the school whenever it rained or if the yard was still wet after the school had watered the bare patches of natural turf that it had tried to maintain before NewGrass™.

“That’s just not a problem now,” Ocampo said. “We like it a lot.”