Pleasantville is a mostly Black and Hispanic community located between two major freeways, the I-10 and the 610, in Houston, Texas. This placement is no accident, said Bridgette Murray, a retired nurse and local community leader: “The highway plan in the 1950s was used to divide communities of color.” Today, an estimated 300,000 vehicles stream by on a daily basis, she said. The neighborhood is also close to the Houston Ship Channel, exposing it to heavy industrial pollution.

But state air monitoring stations aren’t placed to capture all the hazards concentrated in that small area. So Murray’s group, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), has been partnering for almost a decade with urban planning expert Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University, to do their own air quality monitoring. ACTS just won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the program.

Bullard has been called the father of the environmental justice movement. His 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” documented the systemic placement of polluting facilities and waste disposal in communities of color, as well as those communities fighting back. He said scientists and communities need each other.

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people,” he said. “We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

“It’s a mutual respect,” Murray said of the relationship between her group and the Texas Southern researchers. “You have to have a partner that respects the ideas you are bringing to the table and also allows you to grow.”

Bullard is co-founder, with Beverly Wright, of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, which brings together historically black universities and community-based organizations in what Wright has termed the “communiversity” model. There are partnerships like the one in Houston all over the South: Dillard and Xavier Universities, in New Orleans, working on wetlands restoration and equitable recovery from storms; Jackson State is working in Gulfport, Mississippi, on legacy pollution; and Florida A&M in Pensacola on the issue of landfills and borrow pits (holes dug to extract sand and clay that are then used as landfill).

Bullard said it’s no accident that so many HBCUs are involved in this work. “Black colleges and universities historically combined the idea of using education for advancement and liberation, with the struggle for civil rights.”

When these partnerships go smoothly, Bullard said, universities provide community-based organizations with access to data and help advocating for themselves; students and scholars get opportunities to do applied research with a clear social mission.

“We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

A lot of growth is happening in environmental justice right now. ACTS’ $500,000 EPA grant is part of what the White House touts as “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by the Federal Government.” Notably, President Biden’s Justice40 initiative decrees that 40 percent of all federal dollars allocated to climate change, clean energy, and related policy goals flow to communities like Pleasantville: marginalized, underserved, and systematically overburdened by pollution.

Expanding on this model, the EPA has allocated $177 million to 16 “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers” — a mix of nonprofits and universities that will help groups like ACTS get federal grants to achieve their goals.

But, warned Bullard, all the new funding might cause a gold rush, raising the danger of attracting bad actors. Sometimes, he said, universities act like “grant-writing mills,” exploiting communities without sharing the benefits. “You parachute in, you mine the data, you leave and the community doesn’t know what hit them. That is not authentic partnership.”

Murray, at ACTS, has seen that kind of behavior herself. “A one-sided relationship where they came in to take information,” she recalled. “The paper was written, the accolades [for researchers] happen, and the community is just like it was, with no ability to address anything.”

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

It takes sensitivity and hard work to overcome what can be a long history of town-gown tensions between universities and local communities. “You have to earn trust,” said Bullard. “Trust is not given by a memorandum of understanding.” One way to break down barriers is to make sure that all participants — whether they have a GED or a PhD — share the air equitably at meetings between researchers and community leaders. And those meetings might be held in the evenings or on weekends, because community groups are often run by volunteers. 

Denae King, a PhD toxicologist, works with Bullard as an associate director at the Bullard Center. She said she’s always looking for a chance to give space to community partners like ACTS, and reduce or equalize any power dynamic.

“I just ended a meeting where someone was asking me to put together a proposal to showcase environmental justice at a conference,” she said. “Before I would be willing to do that, I want to make sure it’s OK to showcase community leaders in this space. I might split my time in half and we co-present. Or it may look like me helping the community leader to prepare their presentation. I might be in the room and say nothing, but my presence says, I’m here to support you.”

This column about the ‘communiversity’ was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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As part of a new program, every third grader in Albuquerque Public Schools spends a day at the Los Padillas Wildlife Sanctuary just outside the city. There, a wide variety of local landscapes are packed into five acres: a meadow, piñon, juniper and cottonwood trees, an arroyo and even a pond — a rarity in the desert.

“All the way into October they can fish in the pond with a net,” said Monie Corona, an environmental education resource teacher for the district. “There’s cattails, dragonflies. For the kids to feel like they’re playing, but they’re actually learning — that to me is the key thing.”

The sanctuary borders the black mesas to the west and to the east and the Rio Grande bosque — a term for a forest near a river bank. To the south is the Pueblo of Isleta, one of New Mexico’s many Native American communities: There are 19 different sovereign Pueblos, plus Apache and Navajo communities, across the state.

Research on the physical, psychological and academic benefits of outdoor learning for kids is well-established, and is now informing the development of climate education. What’s also becoming well-known is the essential role of traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge in the effort to cope with the climate crisis. Authorities as disparate as UNESCO and the U.S. Forest Service, have underlined the value, not only of specific place-based and historical knowledge of flora and fauna, but of traditional ways of relating to and understanding humans’ place in the natural world as we seek to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

And, as recently noted in a review of the potential impact the education sector can have on U.S. cities’ climate plans by This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor), Albuquerque Public Schools is among those pioneering the attempt to connect outdoor learning with local and Indigenous knowledge.

During Los Padillas field trips, the children spend time with Indigenous educators like Jered Lee, whose ancestral roots are in the Naschitti Region of the Navajo reservation in the northwest corner of the state.

“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important,” he said. “Even though I don’t live in a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, their values can still be applied to my livelihood today.”

Related: For preschoolers after the pandemic, more states say: Learn outdoors

Perhaps surprisingly, Lee doesn’t much care for the term “climate change”; he finds it too political. “We hear that we live in unprecedented times; well, when was it ever precedented? As far as I have understood, as far as our traditional stories, the world has always been changing,”

he said.What he seeks to instill in his brief time with the children is a sense of gratitude for being alive, and connection to other living things.

“They sit on the grass, and I sit on the earth with them, and try to see things from their eyes … I ask them to name their five senses, which they all know, and then I say, ‘Who taught you how to use them?’ And they might say ‘My mom,’ and then they think about it … and it’s almost like they refer to a divine source. They didn’t have to be instructed, and it’s in line with other growth processes in the natural world.”

Lee shares with the children a version of the Navajo creation story, and another one about horses, but he won’t tell them to a reporter on tape: They are part of an oral tradition passed down to him from his elders. He will say that he talks to the children about the rhythms of nature, and humans’ place in the world.

“The movement of nature, the rising of the dawn, the daytime sky, the evening light and the darkness of night, and how that process regenerates itself and the elongation of that process creates the spring, summer, fall, winter, and creates our being, our livelihood … for many it’s like we’re separate from that, we’re above that and we’re more intelligent than that. But the most intelligent people I know adhere to nature and know there isn’t a knowledge that surpasses that. It’s a humbling realization for people but it’s also good.” 

“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important. Even though I don’t live on a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, the values associated can still be applied to my livelihood today.”

Jered Lee, a Navajo nation member who participates in Albuquerque Public Schools’ outdoor learning program

Some 80 percent of the students enrolled in Albuquerque Public Schools are people of color. Around 5.3 percent are American Indian, and are served by the district’s Indian Education Department.

Monie Corona works within that department in a newly created position, supporting Los Padillas and other outdoor programming. Her watchwords are “cultural humility, cultural relevance and the cultural landscape.” She said this collaboration, bringing Indigenous learning to all students in an outdoor setting, “has been a long time coming, let’s put it that way. As a [white] teacher coming in 30 years ago, I was not prepared for working with Native American students and their culture. There’s a lot of things we have to understand and be able to respect as well.”

She said her focus and that of her colleagues sharpened in 2018, after a state court’s decision in Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico found that the state wasn’t doing enough to meet its obligation to help all students become college and career ready, especially low-income students, Native Americans, English language learners and students with disabilities. New Mexico’s high school graduation rate is consistently among the lowest in the nation; Albuquerque’s is even lower, at 69 percent in 2022.

Corona hopes that the Los Padillas program, as well as aligned efforts to bring Indigenous traditions into the school garden program and into outdoor learning opportunities at all grade levels, will enhance student engagement, particularly for those with Native heritage.

“Making sure the kids know their culture — it’s not easy,” she said. “We want to build up their self esteem, their motivation to be at school.”  

Lee said that just about every time he speaks to a class, one or two children will raise their hand and say, “I’m Navajo, too!” or name another tribe. But his aim is to share his culture and language and find commonalities with students, no matter their background. “Here in Albuquerque there’s different cultures. And I’ve realized this about many cultures around the world, the more you talk to them, our language, our customs may be different but the root of our cultural values are very similar.”

This story about outdoor learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Dora Ramos is a family child care provider in Stamford, Connecticut, where the temperature climbed above 90 degrees for a few days in July. She takes care of children in her home, which has a large backyard, and was able to adapt, still getting the children outside, even on the hottest days.

“Our parents bring the children at 7:10 a.m., so we bring them outside very early — first thing,” she said. “We have sprinklers; they use the hose to fill up pots with water and ‘cook.’”

But in Dallas, where the high hit 110 degrees on August 18, it wasn’t safe or possible to play outside for weeks-long stretches this summer, said Cori Berg, the director of Hope Day School, a preschool there. “It was cranky weather for sure,” she said. “What most people don’t really think about is what it’s like for a child in a center. They’re cooped up in one room for hours and hours and hours.”

Much research supports young children’s need for movement, outdoor play and time in nature. Regulations in many places require kids in child care facilities to have access to outdoor play space, weather permitting.

But increasingly, the weather does not permit. And leaders in the world of early childhood development are starting to call attention to the imperative to design and upgrade child care centers — and the cities where they are located — for our climate-altered world, with the needs of the youngest in mind.

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside. And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.”

Jessica Sager, who runs the network All Our Kin

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it,” said Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force, which has just issued its first set of recommendations. (Full disclosure, I’m an advisor to This Is Planet Ed, which convened the task force in collaboration with the think tank Capita.)

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education,” said Garling. But while children under 5 have a developmental need to spend time outside, extreme weather — whether heat, wildfire smoke or other air pollution — is particularly dangerous for this age group. Young children breathe twice as much air per pound of body weight, Garling pointed out.

Related: OPINION: We must help our youngest learners navigate enormous risks from climate change

Ankita Chachra is a designer, architect and new mother working on the issue of climate-resilient cities for children at the think tank Capita. She recently blogged about choices made in cities around the world, from Copenhagen to her native Delhi, that can help preserve outdoor play. These can sometimes be simple adaptations. When it’s very hot, Ramos, for example, takes her children outside first thing in the morning.

“Copenhagen has parks that do flood with extreme rain,” Chachra said, but permeable surfaces, like grass, allow the water to drain away quickly. “Asphalt, rubber, and metal get extremely heated when you don’t have shade to protect those surfaces. Grass, mulch, and wood absorb heat differently. A shaded street or area is 4 degrees Celsius cooler than those that don’t have shade,” she added. And when cities make room for parks over cars, there is more equitable access to safe, cooler outdoor space.

Cori Berg, in Dallas, is grateful for her yard’s “two giant pecan trees — those giant shade structures are really expensive.”

When children just can’t go outside, early child care educators said they have to improvise. Jessica Sager, whose network All Our Kin supports in-home family child care providers in 25 states, did an informal survey at The Hechinger Report’s request to ask providers how they are coping with extreme weather.

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

“I heard a lot of stories about the wildfires in particular,” she said — the smoke from Canadian fires affected at least 120 million Americans this summer. “Our educators had air purifiers — we had gotten them during Covid. Our coaches had already worked with educators about doing indoor gross motor play — obstacle courses, scavenger hunts. Balls, scarves, parachutes. Putting a mattress on the floor and letting kids jump up and down. A lot of song and dance activities. Or putting colored tape on the floor and pretending it’s a balance beam. ”

On a city-wide level, some have proposed bringing back free or cheap indoor playspaces, such as the McDonald’s ball pit, perhaps repurposing disused shopping malls.*

But despite all this creativity, it’s emotionally difficult for both providers and children when children can’t play outside because of severe weather and other hazards — Berg’s “cranky weather.”

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside,” said All Our Kin’s Sager. “And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.” There’s a “real parallel to what caregivers had to do during Covid,” to make a scary reality understandable for little kids, she said.

Garling and other policymakers are conscious that they are bringing up climate threats at a time when the early childhood sector already feels besieged.

The United States government spends much less than the average of its peer countries on early child development in a good year, and supplemental funds provided during the pandemic have just fallen off a cliff, leaving the sector even more cash starved. Group child care in private homes is often parents’ most affordable solution: The National Center for Education Statistics says 1 in 5 children under 5 spend time in these settings.

Related: COLUMN: Want teachers to teach about climate change? You’ve got to train them

But these home-based programs pose a major infrastructure challenge. Garling’s organization recently released a new interactive map showing that in New York City, these centers often — 37.2 percent of the time — include basement space. And 1,638 centers, serving 22,000 children, are at risk of flooding in storms such as the one that hit the city with more than 8 inches of rain on September 29.

“At times it feels overwhelming. There’s so many things early care and education professionals have to worry about,” Garling said. But on the other hand, she argued, there are federal funds the sector can and should claim for retrofitting and upgrades now.

“I feel like there are current opportunities through [the Inflation Reduction Act] that are creating more urgency — in a good way,” she said. “This is not something I was talking about two years ago and now it is 80 percent of what I talk about all the time. “

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

In the meantime, early childhood educators are working hard to instill a love of nature in the children they care for, in all kinds of weather. Berg has been taking her teachers on nature walks, and introduced a curriculum about Texas’s many state parks. 

The Connecticut child care owner, Ramos, who grew up visiting a farm in her native Peru, sees empathy blooming in her toddlers as they encounter the natural world. “One day a one year old was walking and saw a little slug on the ground,” she recounted. “He points — ‘Oh no, oh no!’ He was so sad. The father immediately went down, picked it up and put it on the grass. It made my day.”

*Clarification: This sentence has been updated to clarify the support for indoor play spaces.

This column about outdoor play was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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As higher education leaders in California and Louisiana, we see the impacts of the changing climate across the communities we serve.

Propelled by historically warm oceans, after the hottest July ever recorded, Hurricane Idalia wreaked deadly havoc across the Southeast. In Louisiana, the record heat exacerbated hundreds of still-burning wildfires. In California, when Tropical Storm Hilary hit, the National Weather Service warned of life-threatening flooding, the streets filled with mud and residents were evacuated by bulldozers.

As these events demonstrate, our students, faculty, staff and institutions are at severe and sustained risk from the increasingly destabilized climate. Climate change will impact the entire system of higher education — its operations, facilities, fiscal model and mission. With each unprecedented weather event, our systems are being tested and too often fail — even as we welcome students back to our campuses this fall.

This means that we must be at the forefront of a response to climate change, supporting the health and welfare of our campus communities and understanding the myriad effects of the climate crisis on students. Many have been displaced from their homes by severe weather events; all are impacted by excessive heat and heightened levels of climate anxiety.

Yes, this is yet another opportunity for higher education to focus on resilience, but we must do more than merely navigate daily challenges.

Our mission to prepare students and graduates to lead calls upon us to actively address what leadership means in a changing global climate. As stewards of our communities, we serve as hubs of learning and research, and now we must incorporate climate literacy and climate action too.

Related: Activist students go to summer camp to learn how to help institute a ‘green new deal’ on their campuses

As co-chairs of the Higher Ed Climate Action Task Force with the Aspen Institute, we recognize the scale of these challenges and the opportunity for higher education to advance solutions. Our task force consists of students, faculty, college presidents, business leaders, climate leaders and former government officials working together to build on the important leadership that we have seen emerging in our sector.

Hundreds of campuses have begun working to reduce their carbon footprints and increase climate resiliency through Second Nature’s Climate Leadership Commitments, and we must advance this action more broadly.

We are in the vanguard, too, of real solutions: Much of the research documenting the climate crisis and advancing potential responses originates from colleges and universities.

Yet, both the scale of the problem and the currently under-utilized asset of higher education highlight the urgent need to do much more. Our task force will create a road map for higher education’s expanded role. This means teaching students, advancing research and embracing our mission to serve a broader public good alongside other social leaders. It also means, more specifically, training the clean energy workforce and partnering with key sectors, including businesses, government and community-based organizations, to find ways to remediate the damage and remove the threat to future generations.

Climate change can spark heated debate, but we also know there is no better place than higher education to have a productive dialogue that will lead to concrete solutions.

To inform this comprehensive framework, our task force is learning from leaders on the ground and across the country about a range of climate issues facing higher education. Kanika Malani, a medical student at Brown University, outlined her work with other students to push medical schools to incorporate teaching about heat-related illnesses into their curricula. Ayana Albertini-Fleurant, a Howard University alumna and founder of Sustain the Culture, highlighted her efforts with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to ensure that the coming clean energy transition equitably extends to all populations, recognizing and reversing racial inequality in the economic and environmental spheres.

Mixed into all these discussions is a focus on efforts to effectively prepare our students to be entrepreneurs who will create great, climate-friendly jobs and innovators who will find new climate solutions.

On campus, we can convene students, faculty and staff, community members and leaders to explore ideas to decarbonize campus operations, adapt to climate risks — including extreme weather — and increase support for students’ mental and physical health.

We can pursue grants, financing and the tax credit opportunities in the Inflation Reduction Act to fund this work, and we can work with private-sector partners to align credential opportunities with workforce needs.

And as we embrace the central role of faculty to promote climate literacy, meaningful action can help prepare students for the effects of climate change across a range of fields, from business to agriculture to architecture and beyond.

Related: COLUMN: What does it look like when higher ed actually takes climate change seriously?

Nationally, by recognizing that climate change will disproportionately affect Black, Latino, Indigenous and other people of color, and low-income rural and urban communities, higher education can help advance a just transition to a sustainable economy with a focus on alleviating disparities.

The Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans provides a leading model, demonstrating how HBCUs, tribal colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions have already helped prepare their communities to adapt to climate change.

Climate change can spark heated debate, but we also know there is no better place than higher education to have a productive dialogue that will lead to concrete solutions. Through an open exchange of ideas, practical research, collaboration and our commitment to serve as stewards of place, higher education can provide vital tools and help shape our societal and scientific responses to climate change.

Doing so will motivate our students and launch a new era of innovation, deeper citizen engagement and the creation of a more equitable, sustainable and resilient economy, society and world.

Mildred García is the chancellor-select of the California State University system and Kim Hunter Reed is the commissioner of higher education for Louisiana. They serve as co-chairs for Higher Ed Climate Action with the Aspen Institute.

This story about higher education and climate change was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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On hot days, fourth-grader Adriana Salas has observed that when the sun beats down on the pavement in her schoolyard it “turns foggy.” There are also days where the slide burns the back of her legs if she is wearing shorts or the monkey bars are too hot to touch. Salas, who attends Roosevelt Elementary School in San Leandro, California, is not alone in feeling the effects of heat on her schoolyard. Across the country, climbing temperatures have led schools to cancel classes and outdoor activities to protect students from the harmful effects of the heat.

Jenny Seydel, an environmental educator and founder of Green Schools National Network, encourages teachers to leverage students’ observations about their schools to make learning come alive. According to Seydel, when teachers use the school grounds as a way to learn about social issues, they’re using their school as a three-dimensional textbook. For example, schools’ energy and water conservation, architecture and lunches are rich with potential for project-based learning. “We can learn from a textbook. We can memorize concepts. We can use formulas, but we don’t incorporate that learning until it is real,” said Seydel.

Against the backdrop of climate change, Roosevelt Elementary School teachers turned to their schoolyards as a way to apply lessons about rising temperatures to the real world. While these issues can seem overwhelming to young students, exploring them within the context of their school can not only make lessons stick, but also encourage students’ sense of civic agency. 

Related: This California high school includes sustainability and green jobs in its curriculum

Armed with infrared thermometers and a map of their school, fourth graders at Roosevelt embarked on the “How cool is your school?” project created by Green Schoolyards America, an organization that works to transform asphalt-laden schoolyards into greener spaces. The guiding questions for the fourth graders were:

• Is our school a comfortable place for children and adults when the weather is warm?
• How can our school community take action to shade and protect students from rising temperatures due to climate change? 

In groups of three, students of Dorie Heinz and Nicole Lamm classes measured and recorded the ground temperature at 25 locations around their school. As students gathered data from places like the tetherball courts, lunch area, and parking lot, a pattern emerged: materials matter. For example, one group found that the ground temperature they recorded at the main playground, which was made of rubber safety material, was almost 50 degrees hotter than the temperature they measured at their school’s grass playing field. 

“Our school districts are one of the largest land managers,” Lamm explained to students. “Most schools are covered in asphalt and other materials that heat up in the sun, and schools generally have a lack of shade.”

According to preliminary research by Green Schoolyards America, over two million students in California attend schools with less than 5 percent tree canopy. Less tree coverage contributes to urban heat island effect, which is when heat-absorbing materials like asphalt or tar result in higher temperatures in a community. Students’ firsthand observations provided a tangible link between their immediate surroundings and issues outside of their school. 

Related: COLUMN: Is A/C the new ABC? As the country gets hotter, schools need upgrades

When the students returned from gathering data, they shared their findings as a class. When students presented the temperatures they measured, Lamm recorded it on a poster-sized map of the school with color coded stickers. Blue stickers represented the lowest temperatures, which were below 70 degrees fahrenheit, while red stickers represented temperatures above 100 degrees fahrenheit. Shades of yellow and orange stickers indicated temperatures in between.  

Looking at the map, students pointed out the greater volume of red stickers, compared with blue ones. “It’s mostly hot where we’re playing,” said Adriana. The two lonely blue stickers were in areas with a large tree and a shade structure, respectively. 

Lamm and Heinz prompted students to brainstorm how to make the playground cooler. “We want to mark our map with triangles to show where we think we should plant more trees and squares for where we think we need shade structures,” said Heinz. One student offered an idea to protect their schools’ youngest students. “There’s this little concrete box. I was thinking maybe we could plant a tree because sometimes I would notice kindergartners eating a snack there,” he said. By the end of the activity, the map was covered in colored dots. Triangle and square-shaped stickers – students’ proposals for shade – were next to some of the hottest areas. The teachers posted the map with all of its stickers in front of the school to show their findings to parents and community members. 

Related: COLUMN: How student school board members are driving climate action

Tackling larger issues at the school level can nurture problem-solving skills that extend beyond academic subjects and prepare students for the complexities of the larger world. “It’s really depressing for a lot of kids to read about all the negative things that climate change has created in the world,” said Sharon Danks, CEO and founder of Green Schoolyards America — the organization that created the “How Cool is Your School” activity. In offering this hands-on STEM lesson plan to schools, Danks and her team hope that administrators implement students’ suggestions and create green schoolyards. “It gives kids a chance to learn about climate change, but also learn about being positive forces for change for the better,” she said.

While green schoolyards can vary widely because they reflect the surrounding ecosystem and climate, they may include features such as edible gardens, stormwater capture features or walking trails. Danks described a green schoolyard as “an ecologically rich park and a place that has all kinds of things happening and all types of different social niches for people to be doing different activities in different places and in a natural environment filled with plants and living things.” 

“We can learn from a textbook. We can memorize concepts. We can use formulas, but we don’t incorporate that learning until it is real.”

Jake Seydel, an environmental educator and founder of Green Schools National Network

Green schoolyards offer protection against the heat and provide a unique setting for interdisciplinary learning experiences, according to Priya Cook from Children & Nature Network, an organization that works to ensure kids have equitable access to green spaces. She adds that benefits associated with outdoor learning, such as improved behavioral control and increased student engagement, “impact the way a kid can thrive in the classroom.” When students have access to a green schoolyard, their physical activity increases, and studies have shown that being in natural spaces improves mentalhealth and wellbeing.

While green schoolyards boast a lot of benefits, not every school can easily make the transformation. Danks cited failures to pass bills supporting greening projects and a shortage of funds as the most significant obstacles. Removing asphalt is costly. And because green space is inequitably distributed, schools with the most asphalt are also likely to be schools with the least financial resources. However, California has allocated $150 million for green schoolyards, and other states may follow suit.

As one of the most heavily trafficked public spaces, green schoolyards could have an outsized effect. “There’s a reframing that needs to happen in our budget, in our mindset, that says this is a crucial space for children,” said Danks.

The post Why schoolyards are a critical space for teaching about — and fighting — extreme heat and climate change appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Jesika Gonzalez will tell you that she wasn’t the biggest fan of Porterville, California, while she was growing up. 

“When I was younger, I was very, like, angsty,” the 18-year-old said as she flicked her purple hair over her shoulder. “Whatever, this town’s small, nothing to do.”

Porterville is a predominantly Hispanic working-class town in the Central Valley of California, where environmental hazards include some of the worst air quality in the state; the past year’s torrential rains that inundated hundreds of acres of farmland; and a heat wave that pushed temperatures past 110 degrees Fahrenheit this July. 

But Porterville has this going for it: Its school district pioneered a partnership with Climate Action Pathways for Schools, or CAPS, a nonprofit that aims to help high school students become more environmentally aware while simultaneously lowering their school’s carbon footprint and earning wages.

“The issues we’re trying to address are common, and we’re delivering real benefits: environmentally, in terms of student outcomes, in terms of cost savings.”

Kirk Anne Taylor, CAPS‘ executive director

CAPS is part of a growing trend. Like similar programs in Missouri, Illinois, Maine, Mississippi, and New York City, CAPS is using the career-technical education, or CTE, model to prepare young people for the green jobs of the future before they get out of high school. 

For Gonzalez, a self-described tree-hugger, the program has changed the way she looks at her hometown. These days, she downright appreciates it, “because I’ve had the opportunity to see that sustainability is everywhere.”

Related: Activist students go to summer camp to learn how to help institute a ‘green new deal’ on their campuses

CAPS started in part because a local solar engineer, Bill Kelly, wanted to share his expertise with students in the school district’s career-technical education program. Kirk Anne Taylor, who has a deep background in education and nonprofit management, joined last year as executive director with a vision to expand the model across the state, and far beyond just solar power. 

CAPS students are trained for school-year and summer internships that teach them about the environment and how to lower the carbon footprint in school buildings and the larger community. They earn California’s minimum wage, $15.50 an hour. 

For instance, Gonzalez and her classmates held a bike rodeo for younger students. They’ve created detailed maps of traffic and sidewalk hazards around schools, to promote more students walking and biking to schools.

Other CAPS participants give presentations, educating fellow students about climate change and green jobs. They are helping manage routes and charging schedules for the school’s growing fleet of electric buses. They work with farmers to get local food in the cafeterias.

Their most specialized and skilled task is completing detailed energy audits of each building in the district and continuously monitoring performance. In the first year of the program, some of these young energy detectives discovered a freezer in a high school holding a single leftover popsicle. Powering this one freezer over the summer vacation meant about $300 in wasted energy costs, so they got permission to pull the plug. 

The popsicles add up. Over the past few years, by reviewing original building blueprints, inputting data into endless Excel spreadsheets, and cajoling their classmates and teachers into schoolwide efficiency competitions, CAPS students have saved the district $850,000 on a $2.9 million energy budget — this in a district that was already getting about two-thirds of its energy from onsite solar. And 100 percent of the most recent participants are going on to college, far higher than the students who aren’t in the district’s career-technical education program. 

Related: ‘Teaching among the ashes’: It’s not just your home that’s burned, it’s everyone’s’

CAPS is small, just 18 students this year. But its model sits right at the intersection of several big problems and opportunities facing the country. One is that in the wake of the pandemic, public school achievement, attendance, and college enrollment are all suffering, especially in working-class districts like Porterville. This is likely not entirely unconnected to the fact that young people are suffering a well-publicized mental health crisis, of which eco-anxiety is one part. 

Career technical education programs like this one have been shown to lead to higher graduation rates and to put more students, especially working-class students, into good jobs.  

And there’s massive demand for green workers in particular: Skilled tradespeople like electricians are already in short supply, making it difficult for homeowners and businesses to install clean energy technologies. The Inflation Reduction Act and associated investments are expected to create nine million new green jobs over the next decade. 

Some CAPS students are also changing community attitudes toward climate change, starting with their own families.

Gonzalez says her dad is skeptical of climate change and the progressive politics it’s associated with, while her mom seems passive — “like, what can I do?” But they supported her involvement in CAPS because it’s a paying job, and recently her dad said, “I’m proud of you for doing what you like to do.” 

She’s heading to California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in the fall to study environmental science and management. 

Related: Are we ready? How we are teaching – or not teaching – kids about climate change

David Proctor, 17, grew up the oldest of seven. His mother didn’t believe in climate change, Proctor says, but grudgingly agreed to the CAPS program. It helps that Proctor is earning money for his work monitoring the district’s solar performance. He loves every minute. 

He’s on track to graduate this coming December and be the first in his family to go on to college. He wants to combine his interest in climate change and public health. 

Jocelyn Gee is the head of community growth for the Green Jobs Board, which has a reach of 96,000 people and focuses on creating equitable access to high-quality green jobs. They see a huge demand for programs like CAPS. 

“We get a lot of requests from college students and high school students about what kind of roles are there for them,” Gee said. “This field hasn’t existed for that long. There are very few people. So you need to invest in training the next generation now so a few years on you will have the brightest in the climate movement.” 

This field hasn’t existed for that long. There are very few people. So you need to invest in training the next generation now so a few years on you will have the brightest in the climate movement.” 

Jocelyn Gee, head of community growth for the Green Jobs Board

They said the strength of a program like CAPS is that it’s making life better for Porterville residents right now. “I really think that hyperlocal solutions are the way to go,” Gee said. “It’s great when green jobs involve the frontline communities in solutions.”  

One factor that distinguishes CAPS from other green CTE programs is that it’s also designed to address the opportunity for public schools themselves to decarbonize. Schools collectively have 100,000 publicly owned buildings, and energy costs are typically the second largest line item in budgets after salaries. The Inflation Reduction Act, along with Biden’s infrastructure bill, contains billions of dollars intended specifically to address school decarbonization, but many districts lack the grant-writing and other expertise required to chip the money loose.

In partnership with CAPS, the Porterville Unified School District, or PUSD, recently learned they’ll be bringing in $5.8 million over three years from the federal Renew America’s Schools grant program. The money will fund lighting, HVAC, and building automation upgrades — all needs identified by the students’ energy audits — as well as an expansion of the internship program itself. Only 24 grants were awarded nationwide out of more than 1,000 applications, and the education component made Porterville’s stand out. PUSD and CAPS have also scored a $3.6 million grant from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) for a green schoolyards program. 

The district is also applying for an Environmental Protection Agency grant that would allow them to go from six electric school buses to 41, nearly the entire fleet. The vision is to train students to maintain and repair these as well. CAPS students have already started analyzing and planning more energy-efficient routes that allow for charging. 

“The issues we’re trying to address are common, and we’re delivering real benefits: environmentally, in terms of student outcomes, in terms of cost savings,” said Kirk Anne Taylor, CAPS‘ executive director. CAPS is expanding to three other districts in California, with more in the works, and the program in Porterville has drawn visitors from Oregon, New Mexico, and as far away as Missouri.  

For Elijah Garcia, a graduating senior headed to the University of California, San Diego to study chemical engineering, the work has given him a newfound commitment to pursuing a sustainable career. It’s also given him hope for the future. 

“We’re trying to change something — climate change — that when you look at it in a vacuum it’s, like, insurmountable. But this is boots on the ground. It’s a bit more tangible. I can’t do everything, but I can do this little bit.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post This California high school includes sustainability and green jobs in its curriculum appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Tempers get short. Test scores suffer. On the worst days, schools close, and students lose days of learning while parents’ schedules are disrupted.

Yorkwood Elementary in Baltimore, before it finally got air conditioning last year, was subject to closure by the district on any day the forecast hit 90 degrees by 10 a.m. And the number of those days has been rising over time.

“I remember one year we literally had seven [closure] days before we were able to have a full week of school because of the heat,” said Tonya Redd, the principal.

July 2023 was the world’s hottest month on record. And America’s schools weren’t built for this. According to a 2021 study by the Center for Climate Integrity, more than 13,700 public schools that did not need cooling systems in 1970 have installed — or will need to install — HVAC systems by 2025,based on the increasing number of very hot days during the school year. Total estimated cost: over $40 billion.

The good news is, there are many design and architectural innovations that can keep students, faculty and staff comfortable, while also creating healthier, greener and even more engaging places to learn. And there’s federal funding to pay for it.

But, installing air conditioners without making other renovations, which is often the cheapest and most expedient option, raises a school’s fossil fuel consumption, ultimately making the problem of climate change worse.

Baltimore is an example of a district that’s had to rapidly upgrade for a changing climate. Six years ago, 75 out of its 140 school buildings, including Yorkwood Elementary, lacked air conditioning.

Now, that number is down to 11, according to Cyndi Smith, the district’s executive director for facilities planning, design and construction. “It has been a big challenge,” she said. “We have the oldest average-age buildings [of every district] in the state, going back to the late 1800s.”  

Nationally, classroom heat is an environmental justice issue. This is because Black and Hispanic students are concentrated in urban areas that are subject to the heat island effect, in the South and Southwest, and in school districts with older facilities. In Baltimore, Maryland, just below the Mason-Dixon line, almost three quarters of the district’s students are Black, and another 17 percent are Hispanic. A 2020 paper calculated that excess heat might be responsible for as much as 5 percent of the race-based gap in test scores.

At Yorkwood, 96 percent of the students are Black. Redd saw the heat affect her students in multiple ways. “The children would be lethargic, due to the heat in the classroom.” Students used to sit for high stakes tests in the spring in sweltering weather. And, until this year, they couldn’t attend summer learning at their home campus; again, too hot.

Having air conditioning last school year “has actually been amazing,” Redd said. Instead of students trudging into the first days of school, resigned to the heat, she said, “There are smiles on the faces of students, teachers and parents.”

The state of Maryland committed a decade ago to universal A/C in schools. They have paid for all this with a combination of local, state and federal funds, and not without some partisan back-and-forth.

“I remember one year we literally had seven [closure] days before we were able to have a full week of school because of the heat.”

Tonya Redd, the principal of Yorkwood Elementary in Baltimore

Baltimore is one of the first round of recipients of the Renew America’s Schools grant, a clean-energy program that is part of the bipartisan infrastructure law; 88 percent of all applications included HVAC upgrades.

The Inflation Reduction Act also includes tax credits for geothermal heat pumps, a more efficient option for both heating and cooling. Depending on certain conditions, the tax credit could go up to 50 percent, according to a guide from the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I am an advisor). School districts can receive this credit as a cash payment with the new direct pay mechanism in the IRA, but details on how this will work will be forthcoming from the IRS.

Smith said that, ultimately, Baltimore’s education budget hasn’t allowed the district to improve energy efficiency in the ways she would have liked. “We need [new] windows in a lot of our buildings. We did kind of have to cut back and say, OK, even though it would be great for energy savings in the long run, the A/C was our priority.”

Monica Goldson, who just joined Maryland’s state board of education, said her priority is to figure out how to “maximize efficiency while also meeting [districts’] climate change action plan recommendations.” This, she says, requires investing not just in HVAC and insulation, but in professional development for building maintenance staff.

When districts have the money and time, schools can be reimagined from the ground up to cope with extreme weather.

Dan Boggio, the founder of architecture firm PBK, which primarily designs schools and campuses, said he has seen increased interest in what he calls “hardening buildings against heat” over the past decade. When schools pull out all the stops for efficiency, he said, “We think we can come very close to saving 20 percent of the energy that the building uses over the year.”

The Alief Independent School District in southwest Houston, Texas, worked with PBK to create an exemplary early learning center that opened last August, 2022.

To start, the district built on a site that was five acres larger than they’d normally choose and left it in its natural state as much as possible. “We’re always looking for sites with trees,” said Boggio. “It’s a heat sink.” Stormwater on the site runs off into ponds and wetlands, reducing flood risk — the more typical stormwater setup is “an ugly concrete pool with chain link fence around it,” said Alief’s Jeff DeLisle, director of maintenance and operations.

With input from the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy, landscapers planted the green space with native plants, grasses, flowering plants, trees and shrubs — a prairie landscape that resembles the Houston of a century ago. The green areas, water features and reduced concrete minimize the urban heat-island effect, and they’re already starting to attract native birds. The whole area is used as an outdoor classroom for the Pre-K students.

“Used to be, our buildings were designed for 95 degrees max. Over the past 5 or 10 years as we’ve built new buildings, as we’ve remodeled buildings, we’ve asked our designs to plan for over 100 degree temperatures.”

Jeff DeLisle, director of maintenance and operations, Alief Independent School District, Texas

The early learning center was also designed with a “front porch” area of large overhangs that give children a shaded place to play. When Boggio gets a chance, he designs buildings with the longest axis east-west. “Believe it or not, it’s easy to shade the sun on the south side; it’s almost impossible on the west,” he said. The angle of the light comes too low for window shades. 

Houston area schools have had air-conditioning since the 1960s, but now they need to do more, DeLisle said. “Temperatures are changing; conditions are getting worse. Used to be, our buildings were designed for 95 degrees max. Over the past 5 or 10 years as we’ve built new buildings, as we’ve remodeled buildings, we’ve asked our designs to plan for over 100 degree temperatures.”

This means heavy overhangs on windows, coatings on the glass to reduce UV rays, and white roofs to reflect heat. And then there are the behavioral shifts — like calling the groundskeepers in at 5:30 am, and pushing football practice into the evening.

Even when districts are doing everything they can to meet the demands of the moment, the future still feels uncertain. When Anthony Mays, the district superintendent of Alief, is asked what measures he imagines taking in 10 years as Houston’s weather continues to change, he grimaces. “That is an extremely scary thought,” he said.

“You see the strain on the machinery we have now. I don’t know what technology will look like to try to accommodate these extreme temperatures.”

This column about climate and design was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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For 10 days this August, some 150 high schoolers from across the U.S. are descending on a sleepaway camp in Southern Illinois to discuss the fate of the planet — and what they can do about it.

The summer program is run by the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led campaign to halt climate change. Its goal is to teach students the skills they will need to launch an effort this fall using schools as a lever for slowing greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating the green energy transition.

Known as the Green New Deal for Schools, the plan calls for making school buildings greener and safer, advancing high-quality, interdisciplinary climate change lessons, developing disaster plans for schools, providing free lunch for all students and creating pathways to green jobs.

“The Green New Deal for Schools is so important right now in the U.S., where our school buildings are crumbling, where our students are not being adequately prepared to face the realities of the climate crisis, where there are vast inequities across race and class,” said Shiva Rajbhandari, a Sunrise Movement organizer and a 2023 graduate of Idaho’s Boise High School.

The campaign is part of a growing recognition of the importance of schools and young people in the fight against climate change. Heat waves, wildfires, floods and other disasters worsened by climate change are disrupting classes, displacing students, leveling school buildings and contributing to student mental health problems. Some school districts have started to take the problem seriously, by adding more climate change education and investing in electrified buses, composting and renewable sources for heating and cooling. But climate change advocates say schools — community hubs that impart knowledge and rely on billions of taxpayer money — can do much more.

Young people, meanwhile, are significantly more likely than older Americans to be concerned about the problem. They’ve helped shape lawsuits, protests and movements designed to inspire climate action; some, including Rajbhandari, have run successfully for local school boards on climate platforms. Yet many of them receive little to no introduction to climate science in K-12 schools.

The Green New Deal for Schools is meant to focus this climate activism on the education system. At the camp in Benton, Illinois, students will learn about the plan and how to advocate for it, along with participating in typical camp activities like swimming and using the ropes course. Camp organizers hope they’ll turn their schools into centers for climate action and press school administrators and legislators for new policies and investments.

Related: How some Mississippi teens are saving their town from climate change

Aster Chau, a rising sophomore at the Academy of Palumbo in Philadelphia, had an awakening about climate change in world history class, when they were introduced to a book called “1,001 Voices on Climate Change: Everyday Stories of Flood, Fire, Drought and Displacement Around the World.” Learning about the warming planet left Chau feeling like they were “being suffocated,” they said. Signing up for her school’s environmental justice club and being connected to Sunrise, they said, “made me feel less alone.”

This past winter, Chau attended a precursor event to the camp in Philadelphia, at which students got an introduction to the Sunrise Movement and climate advocacy. This month, in Illinois, they are part of the program’s art team. Students are making banners, stickers, signs and even a zine to help inspire action on climate change, Chau said.

“The Green New Deal for Schools is so important right now in the U.S., where our school buildings are crumbling, where our students are not being adequately prepared to face the realities of the climate crisis, where there are vast inequities across race and class.”

Shiva Rajbhandari, 2023 graduate of Boise public schools, in Idaho, and Sunrise Movement organizer

Chau said they’re particularly troubled by the ways climate change is exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in her district. Philadelphia schools are chronically underfunded, with notoriously decrepit school buildings; many, including Chau’s sister’s school, lack air conditioning. Some years, the district has had to let kids out early and delay the start of the school year because of high temperatures. 

Meanwhile, some parts of the city that are predominantly Black and Hispanic tend to be hotter than whiter neighborhoods, because those formerly redlined areas tend to have dark, flat roofs and fewer trees. “It’s difficult to acknowledge, until you see it,” Chau said.

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost all subjects — even PE

Rajbhandari, who plans to study public policy and math at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill this fall, said that racism — not politics or funding — has proved the biggest obstacle to climate action on the school and district level.

“Black and Brown students in our cohort have the toughest time getting their hubs off the ground because their principals are suspicious of the organizing they are doing and don’t want them to start a club, or their schools don’t have a model of student engagement that exists in many other public schools, or their school district is so dramatically underfunded,” he said.

In New Orleans, Gerard Isaac, a rising sophomore at New Harmony High School, said he sees that dynamic play out in his district. His current school, which he said is more racially integrated than those he previously attended, has a focus on environmental studies, but he said some schools have few activities and clubs beyond sports and band.

At the Sunrise camp this summer, Isaac said he hopes to focus on solutions to the climate crisis. He said he wants educators to emphasize solutions, too. In his freshman world geography class, he said, students sometimes felt overwhelmed by the climate catastrophe, leaving them depressed and despairing.

 “It would leave a bad taste in their mouth, like they can’t do anything to help,” he said. Isaac added: “I literally signed up for an environmentally based high school, and I want to help.”

There are reasons to be optimistic. Rajbhandari said he’s witnessed a big shift in the level of advocacy for schools and climate since he attended his first Sunrise event in 2019, a protest at the Idaho state capitol. “There’s a ton of momentum right now for comprehensive action on schools,” he said. “The groundwork has been laid by students across the country working in individual schools. Now it’s time for a coordinated strategy, and to bring a more massive federal investment for states and at the federal level to decarbonize schools.”

At The Hechinger Report, we’ve been covering the climate crisis from many school-related angles, including its mental health impact, risks to school infrastructure, how it’s taught (or not), greening campuses, advancements in climate education, and much more. With the start of each school year, the problems seem more intense and immediate. As this new academic year begins, we want to hear your thoughts on how climate change may be altering your communities and schools.

Do you have questions about how climate change is affecting schools? Have you seen climate-related effects on classrooms near you? Do you have solutions in your communities? Let us know by writing to me at preston@hechingerreport.org. And thanks for reading.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the photo credit and pronouns for one student.

This story about a Green New Deal for Schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Sometime this fall, in a classroom in New York City, second graders will use pipe cleaners and Post-it notes to build a model of a tree that could cool a city street. They’ll shine a lamp on their mini trees to see what shade patterns they cast. Meanwhile, in Seattle, kindergartners might take a “wondering walk” outside and come up with questions about the worms that show up on the sidewalk after it rains. 

This summer, teachers around the country are planning these lessons and more, in professional development programs designed to answer a pressing need: preparing teachers to teach about the climate crisis and empower students to act. 

“I believe that the climate movement is the most interesting movement in education,” said Oren Pizmony-Levy, associate professor of International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. (Disclosure: The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.) Schools have to address student climate anxiety, provide them knowledge and skills, including the ability to recognize misinformation, and empower them to act, while schools also “clean up their act” by decarbonizing their physical infrastructure.

Teachers don’t necessarily feel prepared to lead this work yet, said Pizmony-Levy.

“We’ve been doing research with New York City Public Schools for the past 6-7 years. About a third of teachers say they teach about climate change in a meaningful way. Those who don’t, give the following reasons: 1) It has nothing to do with my subject; 2) I don’t know enough about it; 3) I don’t feel comfortable talking about it; and 4) I don’t have the right materials,” he said.

National polls by Education Week and the North American Association for Environmental Education bear these views out. Three-quarters of teachers, and 80 percent of principals and district leaders in NAAEE’s poll agreed, “Climate change will have an enormous impact on students’ futures, and it is irresponsible not to address the problem and solutions in school.” Yet only 21 percent of teachers felt “very informed” on the topic and only 44 percent said they had the right resources to teach it most of the time or always. 

On July 17-20, Pizmony-Levy led a first-of-its-kind professional development institute for NYC public elementary school teachers who want to teach climate change in any subject. Teachers who signed up were responding in part to Mayor Eric Adams’ Earth Day commitment to soup up green learning. Climate lessons are supposed to be taught next year in every school in the nation’s largest public school system. 

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost all topics — even PE

Forty teachers from every borough gathered in a heavily air-conditioned room that bore the sweet scent of smoke from the barbecue restaurant next door. They heard lectures from climate scientists, and talks on related topics like environmental justice; learned about efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of New York City public schools, and how to address common student misconceptions, for example, “If it’s called global warming, why do we have things like the polar vortex?” 

“Teachers can’t give this information if they don’t have it, and our generation of educators, it’s not something we learned in school,” said Alisha Bennett, a school social worker in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, who participated in the training. She came because of her strong interest in infusing climate justice into her school’s equity work. 

Oré Adelaja, a third grade teacher, said she “just learned about environmental racism,” in the training. Her school is in East New York, a primarily Black and Hispanic neighborhood with high rates of childhood asthma. She envisions asking her students to document the resources like green space and trash bins available in their community, and write letters to their city council representative to get more of what the neighborhood needs. She said, “Let’s give them the data points to critically think and draw conclusions.”

In a session focused on teacher leadership, Adelaja came up with a nature-based metaphor for her work: “A bird who every day came to the nest and fed its young until the young learned to fly — giving my kids the information and knowledge, and eventually that agency and self-sufficiency to find their own solutions to their own problems.” 

The sessions received funding through a $25 million National Science Foundation grant to Columbia University. The teachers participating committed to creating lesson plans — like the shade simulation — that will be made available freely for others to use on platforms including the website SubjectToClimate.org. 

Related: Climate change: Are we ready? 

Megan Bang, a professor of the learning sciences and director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University is training cohorts of Pre-K through fifth grade teachers this summer in Washington State, Illinois, Michigan and Louisiana through her project,  Learning in Places, which is funded through the National Science Foundation. (Disclosure: Bang is a member of the K-12 action commission at This Is Planet Ed’, where I’m also an advisor.) She said this teacher education is designed to be intellectually demanding. 

“We just did an interview with an incoming teacher who told us: ‘In 20 years I’ve never been asked to think like this,’” Bang said. “If we don’t offer educators the opportunity to rethink their intellectual ideas — about climate change, science, inequality — it makes it really difficult to do this work.”

Bang, who is partly of Ojibwe descent, said she looks at different mental models of the relationship between humans and the natural world — do we see ourselves as apart-from nature, or part of nature? Broadly speaking, she said, in indigenous traditions, it’s the latter. 

Drawing on the tension between the two worldviews, her work presents students with moral dilemmas about nature and opportunities to take civic action on behalf of the wild world. She said that just giving kids facts is not going to be effective.

“In most of education we think knowledge leads to difference in behavior,” she said. “Social science does not support that. In the 90s and early 2000s we thought if people understood the carbon cycle, they would know why climate change matters.” That didn’t pan out, to say the least.

Instead, students in the “Learning in Places” curriculum are encouraged to ask “should-we” questions — values questions. For example, in the worm inquiry, created by a Seattle teacher, students asked: Should we rescue the worms from the sidewalks so they can burrow back into the wet ground? If we do, it will benefit the worms; if we don’t, it could benefit the birds who eat them. 

Taking science out of the lab and immersing students in the living world, like parks and gardens, buffers some of the negative views of climate change that even the youngest students come to school with, Bang said. According to her research, “Five-year-olds tend to have ‘the earth is scorched and unsavable’ models when they come to school. Kids come in with, ‘Humans harm the earth and the earth is dying,’” she said. “That doesn’t motivate action or change.” 

This column about teaching climate change was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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When I first ran for school board in 2017, I was concerned about climate change personally but honestly didn’t understand what role I could play as a school board member.

Once elected, I realized that our school district — like most school districts — is one of the largest landowners, real estate developers, transportation providers and employers in our community. This gives me — and school board members across the country — tremendous influence to lead positive change for climate action and climate justice.

But making large changes to public infrastructure is difficult. For example, it took my school district about five years to purchase one electric bus.

Yet I know we can act with urgency when needed: During the pandemic, I watched as we mobilized massive change over days and weeks.

With the latest international climate change report stating that we only have a few years before we reach a disaster tipping point, we must act with urgency from the position of power we have.

I know we can act with urgency when needed: During the pandemic, I watched as we mobilized massive change over days and weeks.

The confluence of many school districts’ aging infrastructure and the need to become more resilient to the negative effects of climate change has motivated school boards to become more innovative and knowledgeable about building, replacing and remodeling. That includes everything from updating heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems, to electrifying school bus fleets, to insisting on sustainable packaging for the goods we purchase.

We have an opportunity like no other time in history to help reshape an educational environment so that it encompasses clean water and healthy air as well as job opportunities and safe places to work, live and play.

We also have a responsibility to ensure those improvements happen equitably and don’t perpetuate the climate injustice that already plagues our nation’s cities.

As co-founders and co-CEOs of School Board Partners, Ethan Ashley and I have had the privilege of working with school boards that are doing amazing work to tackle the challenges ahead of us.

Related: COLUMN: How student school board members are driving climate action

School boards in Prince George’s County, Maryland; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Arlington, Massachusetts, to name a few, are examples of school boards with a 21st-century vision for their systems — and they have shared and built those visions with their communities. Their work is highlighted on UndauntedK12’s website.

Engaging communities and making them partners in climate change efforts is a common thread among school systems finding ways to move forward expeditiously.

And we must act with speed. We are already seeing the effects of climate change. Your world can change in an instant, given the uptick in historic weather events and natural disasters. Every school district is one wildfire, one tornado, one flood away from having to rebuild.

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicates about $370 billion to fighting climate change and creates historic opportunities for schools to make the clean energy transition. With tax credits that can reduce costs by 30 to 50 percent for such infrastructure updates as heat pumps, solar panel installation and battery storage, the time is ripe to make bold investments.

Agile districts are moving forward with the idea that no new school or district building should be built or renovated without ensuring that it is constructed and refurbished using environmentally sound materials and efficient use of energy, water and other resources. Existing building upgrades can be done using sustainable building criteria for everything from major improvements to simple maintenance orders.

Other ideas gaining traction include transforming schools into independent power producers by investing in clean renewable technologies such as solar and wind and setting ambitious goals such as utilizing 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2040 for all transportation — highly plausible and practical given that costs certainly will be coming down for electric vehicles over the next decade.

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost all subjects – even PE

That doesn’t mean these changes will be easy or easily affordable. Trade-offs will have to be made, and investing in the future rather than the present is especially difficult when you’re talking about kids you are trying to serve well now.

However, we must remember that reducing our carbon footprint will lead to healthier buildings and transportation, cleaner air, healthier food, less waste and operational cost savings. All of this will help districts focus their limited resources more equitably and contribute to better health outcomes and a safer future for our children.

I will never forget a group of students who came to speak at our board meeting a few years ago. One young woman looked up at us on the dais and with tears in her eyes passionately pleaded: “This is our future, and yet we don’t have any power. You have power, please use it.”

Children spend more of their waking hours away from home at school than anywhere else. We must provide an environment conducive to their well-being — now and in the future. We can only do so by understanding and embracing the enormous challenge we face in addressing climate change and all of its components.

The world is changing fast, and we cannot stand still.

Carrie Douglass is the co-founder and co-CEO of School Board Partners, which supports and trains school board members. She is a twice-elected school board member and past board chair. She has worked as a teacher, school leader, district administrator and nonprofit leader.

This story about school boards and climate change was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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