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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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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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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Climate change is here, now, lapping at the walls of higher education — quite literally.

Nathalie Saladrigas is an undergraduate at Miami Dade College, where her off-campus housing regularly floods. “You can’t even leave your car in the parking lot because it will get flooded — I mean up to your knees flooded,” she told me. 

And 1,400 miles northeast, the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has also flooded, thanks to Hurricane Ida, a 2021 storm strengthened by climate change that cut across the continent all the way from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast. Maurie McInnis, president of the SUNY-Stony Brook, vividly remembers the stresses of that fall semester’s opening. “A big rainstorm, and all of a sudden we had to find beds for 400 students,” she said.

Higher ed is a massive, diverse sector with roughly 20 million students in the U.S. alone and a major physical and carbon footprint in all 50 states. Universities, for decades, have expanded society’s knowledge of climate impacts and climate solutions. But some leaders argue it’s time for these institutions to remake themselves wholesale for this rising tide of rapid change.

Two announcements last month indicate potential ways forward. SUNY-Stony Brook will anchor The New York Climate Exchange, a brand-new, $700 million campus on Governors Island in New York. And, This Is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Aspen Institute, launched a Higher Ed Climate Action Task Force, uniting university leaders and other stakeholders like Saladrigas, a climate activist, to make recommendations for action across the sector. (Full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor to This Is Planet Ed.)

John King, the new chancellor of the State University of New York system as well as the co-chair of This Is Planet Ed, just appointed the system’s first-ever chief sustainability officer and executive director of climate action at SUNY. The appointment reflects King’s belief that colleges and universities can’t afford to engage with climate solely on an intellectual level, or as a narrowly focused topic in the sciences; they must also walk the walk, by rapidly decarbonizing their own infrastructure. 

“It is my hope that more higher education systems will see SUNY’s efforts and recognize the potential for system-wide climate action, to reduce our emissions, prepare the clean workforce, advance equity and environmental justice, spur innovation, and empower the next generation to lead a sustainable future,” said King, a former secretary of education under President Barack Obama.

Related: Climate change: Are we ready?

It’s quite a to-do list, but what does that look like on the ground? McInnis of Stony Brook has a vision. The New York Climate Exchange, she said, won’t put shovels to earth until 2025. But its leaders have already established a thriving matrix of partnerships among groups that don’t always naturally speak the same language — from fellow institutions like Georgia Tech, Pace University and Pratt Institute, to corporations like IBM, to environmental justice nonprofits like WE ACT in Harlem, to the New York State Iron Workers. Among other initiatives, the iron workers union will have input into a job-training program affiliated with the campus that will be readying the necessary workers to rip out thousands and thousands of oil- and natural gas-burning boilers, the better to convert New York City’s buildings to clean energy. In fact, green job trainees will, it’s planned, outnumber traditional students on the campus by 10 to 1.

One day, McInnis said, elementary school students will arrive by electric ferry for field trips, observing “living laboratories” that model “new ways of building, powering, treating coastlines.” Four hundred thousand square feet of buildings will be powered by clean energy with backup battery storage. The campus will capture and reuse gray water, and keep 95 percent of the trash it generates out of landfills. It will be filled with undergrads, grad students and professors from Stony Brook and partner institutions, some visiting for a “domestic study abroad.” And one day, she said, the campus will welcome leaders from around the world. “With time we hope to host major convenings of groups of other people who want to talk about climate change and how cities need to respond,” McInnis told me. “We want to be a global convener for the important conversations we all need to have on the most critical issue of our time.”

Every university president probably dreams of becoming a “global convener” in one way or another, and of winning $150 million in philanthropic funds to do so, as this initiative did. (The city will also contribute, but much of the projected $700 million price tag is still to be raised). But, it might seem a strange time for such boosterism, considering that enrollment in higher education is plummeting nationwide and is down 20 percent over the last decade at SUNY colleges and universities, half of which occurred during Covid.

Bryan Alexander is a higher education futurist whose latest book, Universities on Fire, is all about colleges’ responses to the climate crisis. He sounds a note of muted optimism around the New York Climate Exchange vision. “On the one hand it’s very exciting to see the state commit so much funding,” he said. Yet, he added, “the idea of starting a new campus from scratch is interesting and also very risky.” Especially in New York State, which, he noted, already has quite a bit of aging higher ed infrastructure, like McInnis’s flood-prone dorms back on Long Island, which date to the 1960s and 1970s.

Still, he said that universities have historically executed big cultural pivots by establishing greenfield campuses where new norms of collaboration, learning and knowledge production can be set forth. And when it comes to climate change, that’s exactly what’s required: “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Alexander said. “This is a moment of civilizational transformation and we can’t be left out of it. Every aspect of academia gets to play a role.”

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

That was a common sentiment at the first This Is Planet Ed Higher Ed Task Force listening session in early May, presided over by Kim Hunter Reed, the commissioner of higher education for Louisiana, and Mildred García, the president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Essentially two dueling messages emerged: It’s a really difficult time for higher education to take on a new, major, paradigm shift, what with funding crunches, political headwinds in red states, and post-Covid enrollment syndrome; and, there’s no choice but to act big and fast.

Students are certainly contributing to that sense of urgency. A great deal of climate action at universities has been driven by student activism. And students today see climate as joined with other urgent struggles for justice. “As a low income person of color, I know a lot of communities like mine are directly impacted by climate change,” said Saladrigas. “It’s a lot of intersectional issues. And learning about climate change is inaccessible.”

To Saladrigas, the political environment in Florida feels particularly discouraging to climate learning; she plans to transfer out of state as soon as she can. “If you don’t have resources,” she said, “you can’t allow for students to learn more about how to make a change.”

This column about climate solutions in higher ed 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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“Idaho really is the state where we can solve climate change,” Shiva Rajbhandari tells me over bagels and lox at Russ & Daughters Cafe in New York City. “It’s got sun and it’s got wind and these beautiful natural spaces. And it’s a very resilient ecosystem.”

Rajbhandari, who beat an incumbent to win a seat on Boise’s school board last year, sounds like any other boosterish local elected official — except he’s an 18-year-old high school senior in the same district he governs. And he’s part of a growing number of student school board members across the country, many of whom are putting climate action at the top of their agendas.

Currently, Rajbhandari is one of approximately 500 student school board members in 42 states serving almost 20 million students. That’s according to a new organization, the National Student Board Member Association. Its founder, Zachary Patterson, is now an undergrad at Duke University. Back in high school, he first organized his fellow students to petition for a permanent student board seat on San Diego’s school board, and was then elected to the position in 2019, in a wave of student activism that around the same time pushed the district to pass an ambitious climate action plan.

 “The difference is you have a vote.”

Markus Ceniceros, a high school senior who was recently elected to the Littleton Elementary School District Governing Board, west of Phoenix, Arizona

As a board member he worked to keep focus on the new climate plan, helping the district get funding to convert to electric school buses. He’s clearly passionate about student power: “We believe that when students are central to educational decision making, outcomes improve.”

Now, Patterson said, student board members around the country are helping each other create comprehensive climate action plans for net-zero buildings and climate curricula, and are moving them forward in their school districts. There’s a lot of momentum around these issues: Billions of dollars in funding in the federal Inflation Reduction Act, passed last fall, were specifically designated to incentivize cutting the energy usage and emissions of the nation’s 100,000 school buildings, as well as swapping out diesel buses for electric. Student board members are working alongside groups like Schools for Climate Action (which just held a lobby day in Washington that Rajbhandari attended), Generation 180, Undaunted K12 and the Green Schools National Network.

Related: COLUMN: The world is waking up to education’s essential role in climate solutions

Last spring, Portland Public Schools, which has included student representatives on its board for several years, passed a pathbreaking climate policy that was co-written by the student representative. Kat Davis, the Oregon district’s advisor for climate justice, a newly created position, says students have been “so important” to the district’s role as a climate pioneer. She said, “We take student engagement really seriously.”

The district’s high school students elect one of their own to a permanent seat. Students also sit on committees, including the Climate Crisis Response Committee. The district’s new climate policy prohibits the installation of gas-fired equipment in all new buildings, and requires all fossil fuel infrastructure be phased out of existing buildings by 2050. The policy also mandates climate education, and requires schools to address climate-related impacts on health, safety and well-being. “We are all very much aware of the fact that it’s not an option NOT to do something about climate change,” said Byronie McMahon, the high school student who currently sits on the board. “We have a responsibility.” 

The district’s students, born in the 21st century, haven’t known a world without heat waves and wildfire smoke; their moral clarity and fierce urgency “push us to be better,” Davis said. “Their role is to never be fully satisfied.”

The drive for student representation has been growing — Chalkbeat reported earlier this year that 14 percent of the nation’s largest school districts now have a student serving on their boards in some capacity. But it’s most common for them to be in an “advisory” role, without a vote.

That was true for Solyana Mesfin, another student leader and climate advocate. She was appointed by Gov. Andy Beshear to serve as the first student representative on Kentucky’s State Board of Education from 2020-22. “To have a voice at the table is very important — but also a voting voice as well,” she said. “Students are the main consumers of the education system. There’s nobody more impacted.”

Now a first-year at the University of Louisville, Mesfin is also advocating for electric school bus adoption as co-chair of an advisory council for the World Resources Institute.

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

In Boise, Rajbhandari said his journey to the school board started in seventh grade Earth science, when he was “lucky” to have a teacher who went above and beyond the state standards to teach about climate change. “I think we talked about the polar bears and the rainforests and the effects of climate change on places like Miami. But it’s kind of weird because we didn’t really talk about how climate change is causing the [wildfire] smog that cancels our cross-country practice every year for two weeks in September or is causing an uptick in asthma in our community or caused people to lose their homes, literally, like a few miles from our school.”

“We didn’t really talk about how climate change is causing the [wildfire] smog that cancels our cross-country practice every year for two weeks in September or is causing an uptick in asthma in our community or caused people to lose their homes, literally, like a few miles from our school.”

Shiva Rajbhandari, school board member and high school senior, Boise, Idaho

After a few years of battling his personal climate anxiety with individual actions, like buying fewer new clothes, Rajbhandari found and joined the activist groups Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion. And his experience with those groups, in turn, empowered him to seek elected office. Since he joined the school board last fall, it has contracted with a consulting firm to conduct a carbon audit and find “low-hanging fruit,” easy fixes, like improving building insulation and swapping regular lights for LEDs, changes that, Rajbhandari said, will quickly pay for themselves. Next, he said, “We can put solar panels on our schools and make money for the school system through the state’s first power purchase agreement [and ultimately] surpass our city’s climate goals and save millions of dollars in the process.”

It’s a lot easier to think big like this when you’re sitting on the dais as a voting board member, rather than petitioning the board. “The difference is you have a vote,” said Markus Ceniceros, a high school senior who was recently elected to the governing board of the Littleton Elementary School District, west of Phoenix, Arizona. Ceniceros is a champion of LGBTQ rights and mental health as well as clean energy and electric school buses. “When you’re just a student, people can tell you, well, maybe.”

This column on student school board members 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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RAMSEY, N.J. — Last spring, Jamie Gorman had a panic attack at the mall.

The then-high school sophomore was with a group of friends at Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey, when she began to feel overwhelmed. Her fingers were tingling. She couldn’t catch her breath. She felt shaky and dizzy.

Her teenage friends sprang into action.

“They were like, ‘Jamie, sit down.’ ‘Jamie, give me your phone — unlock it,’” Gorman recalled in a recent interview at her high school.

“They immediately called my dad so he could talk to me. They found a water bottle for me. They sat with me; they were just there for me.” She said her friends were “very comforting because they were very calm and they were like, okay, we know what to do.”

It was not just luck that gave Gorman such capable friends. They, like every sophomore at Ramsey High School in Ramsey, New Jersey, had just finished a training program called Teen Mental Health First Aid, designed to give students the practical tools needed to recognize warning signs and help a friend through a mental health crisis.

Teen Mental Health First Aid is adapted from Youth Mental Health First Aid, a training designed for adults who work with or care for teens. The latter program was developed about two decades ago in Australia, and has been taught in the United States since 2008. The benefits of both programs are supported by peer-reviewed scientific studies. In teens, the training has been shown to increase mental health literacy and reduce reported psychological distress. In one randomized controlled trial, teens reported a significantly higher level of confidence in helping a friend who was anxious or suicidal, lower stigma around mental illness, and were more likely to choose the correct, helpful course of action.

Since 2020, the number of people trained in mental health first aid in the U.S. has more than doubled, to over 1.1 million, says Tramaine EL-Amin, the assistant vice president for strategic partnerships and a client experience officer at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. The reasons for the growing interest are clear. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the state of children and teens’ mental health since Covid qualifies as a national emergency. The latest national numbers from the CDC show “mental health among students overall continues to worsen,” with more than 40 percent of high school students in 2021 showing signs of depression.

Just as first aid training doesn’t make someone a doctor, Mental Health First Aid participants are not certified to provide therapy. The course is designed to help them act as first responders — to assess a situation, do what they can in the moment, and inform a trusted adult. The curriculum covers anxiety and panic disorders, depression, suicidality, eating disorders, addiction and other common mental health concerns for this age group. It trains teens in the appropriate actions to take if a friend shows warning signs of a developing problem, plunges into acute crisis, or is recovering.

Related: The pandemic robbed thousands of New York City children of parents. Many aren’t getting the help they need

Kayla O’Rourke, a classmate of Gorman’s at Ramsey High School, said the areas of the training that are really sticking with her are those that buck popular misconceptions. “Something I learned, which I would never expect,” she said, “is that you have to say right to them, like, ‘Are you thinking about hurting yourself or are you thinking about suicide?’ Which is something that I would never be so blunt about.”

Both she and Gorman said the training has made them feel less alone in their own moments of stress. And they regularly draw on the self-care techniques they learned.

More than a decade before the pandemic, the need for mental health care among children and adolescents was rising, and the last few years have made it worse. A 2021 advisory from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy bleakly sums up the situation: “The pandemic era’s unfathomable number of deaths, pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distancing from loved ones, friends, and communities have exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced.”

Yet mental health care providers are scarce in the United States. In 2019, there were just 14 practicing child and adolescent psychiatrists for every 100,000 children. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says that children with the most serious diagnoses wait, on average, several years for appropriate treatment. And, the CDC says that 80 percent of children and youth who need treatment have no access to a specialized mental health provider. The shortage of care is worse in rural areas, for Black, Indigenous people and other people of color, and for LGBTQ youth. What’s more, it takes years for people to qualify as mental health counselors, psychologists or psychiatrists, meaning this problem cannot be solved quickly.

That’s why organizations like Child Trends have been urging schools and communities to take an all-hands-on-deck approach to youth mental health. Rather than place all the pressure on practitioners, the organization encourages a “population health” mindset that looks upstream and enlists the entire community in promoting mental wellbeing, prevention and early intervention.

One attempt at “population health” is the launch last year of 988, the national suicide and crisis hotline. The Biden administration has spent $400 million to help mental health facilities support the system.

Mental Health First Aid represents yet another population health approach.

The National Council for Mental Wellbeing, which delivers the training along with the National Association of Counties, anticipates a new influx of funding following the passage the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act last June, in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. The states of Arkansas, Maine, North Dakota and Virginia all now mandate some form of Mental Health First Aid training for school personnel, according to EL-Amin.

Parents are signing up for training through PTAs. And teens are being certified to help their peers, since it’s very common for young people to first turn to a friend rather than an adult.

Related: We know how to help young children cope with the trauma of the last year — but will we do it?

Ramsey, a well-resourced district in an affluent suburb, has committed to training not only every student but every adult in the district — from administrative assistants to custodians. This is the approach recommended by the National Council for Mental Well-Being, which requires that at least 10 percent of the adults in a school or organization receive training before it can be offered to teens.

Molly Dinning, the director of student support services for the Ramsey School District, said that “light bulbs went off” after building administrators took the training. “Like, everybody needs this. We have to make this an all-encompassing program.” And that includes teenagers, who, she said, are empowered by the training in ways that go beyond just mental health.

“It gives them a lot of ownership, self-direction, knowledge and self-confidence in these situations that they’re definitely going to face as they go through life,” she said.

The more people in a community who have this knowledge, the more likely someone who is hurting will receives an early intervention before their needs become more severe. But there’s also evidence this kind of training can itself promote mental well-being across a population. In preliminary findings from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, two-thirds of teens surveyed reported they used the self-care strategies from the training course to deal with their own stress.

A thousand miles west of New Jersey in Ottumwa, Iowa, Ottumwa High School is also concerned with student mental wellness. The school, which serves a population with a much lower income than Ramsey, has just one dedicated mental health counselor for its 1,300 students. (Ramsey High School has two for 780 students.)

Ottumwa’s counselor, Kolby Streeby, said “friends are the first line of defense” when students are having a hard time. “Unfortunately, family isn’t always a good support for them.”

Streeby and her students said that familial homophobia and transphobia are problems in the community. Other students are dealing with a family member’s substance abuse; Iowa is known for high rates of methamphetamine use in particular.

Streeby, who was already certified in Mental Health First Aid, was excited to hear about the Teen Mental Health Program. She offered the training to the nine members of the student club she supervises, the Teen Outreach Program.

The students completed the training in December. Tenth grader Oliver Hernandez-Norris said it proved useful almost immediately.

“I had noticed some signs in my friend I was concerned about, and I wouldn’t have even thought about it if I hadn’t taken the training,” he said. The friend was losing interest in activities, becoming distant from others and showing anger. Hernandez-Norris said that if he had not been trained to recognize the behaviors as symptoms of depression, he could “have thought they were stressed out about work.”

“I messaged Kolby [Streeby] and said, ‘My friend is going through these warning signs.’  And I asked my friend on a call — ‘Are you doing OK? Do you want to maybe hang out?’ They’re OK now. They were just going through a tough time.”

Von Conley, a senior, said the training helped them personally. “When we went over all the warning signs of someone who was like, spiraling, I recognized a lot of those behaviors in myself,” they said. “When I’m not feeling great, I tend to withdraw from everyone. In the moment I felt like I needed to do something better for myself — I needed to confide in the people I love instead of hiding it.”

Related: Supporting students: What’s next for mental health

Although the stressors that contribute to mental health issues are often more common in low-income communities, it appears that adoption of the program, for the most part, has started in wealthier, majority-white districts.

The program’s direct cost — excluding loss of classroom time and time for professional development — can range from $1,700 for a small package of instructor training and materials, to as much as up to $52,000 for a district-level package. These costs can be covered by regular school budget, federal grants — including Project AWARE — or by outside donors.

The National Council on Mental Wellbeing says it doesn’t collect demographic information on who participates in the program to protect the privacy of teens who take part. But all of the districts that agreed to allow media interviews about the program were predominantly white. Most, with the exception of Ottumwa, were more affluent than the national average.

EL-Amin said the organization is “leading several national efforts to support the diversification of our instructor pool and engaging philanthropic efforts to obtain resources for under-resourced communities.”

With its emphasis on adolescents helping their peers, Teen Mental Health First Aid training could help address another aspect of teenage life post-Covid. Ramsey’s principal, Michael Thumm, said that he sees many students struggling to make and maintain close friendships after months of social isolation. “Going into this school year, the ninth graders had concerns about … the way they got along with one another. They seem a little bit more immature, and struggle with some of the interpersonal relationships.”

Gorman and O’Rourke in New Jersey, and several students interviewed in Iowa, all said the training made them a better friend — more open, more empathetic, more likely to check in because they had both the language to speak about tough times, and the practical tools to help. 

“When one brave friend breaks the ice with that kind of thing, people start to flood the conversation,” O’Rourke observed.

In fact, one night, Gorman had some friends hanging out in her basement, and she confessed to being stressed.

“Having the course made me feel more confident to talk to them because I felt they were more receptive and more aware of the possibilities of what I could be feeling,” she remembers.

“I was like, I’m feeling really overwhelmed. And they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m also feeling overwhelmed.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so good to know,’” she said. “Having a group of friends and all being honest with each other about the way that we’re feeling made us feel so much better. Like, I’m not the only one who’s feeling really stressed before math class, you know?”

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

The post A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden touted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as “the most significant investment ever in climate change. Ever. Lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, leading the world to a clean energy future.”

But he didn’t mention any new investment in education to help people fill all those jobs.

The nearly $400 billion in new spending in the IRA, the climate and health bill signed into law by President Biden in August, will create 537,000 jobs annually for the next decade, according to an analysis by BW Research commissioned by the Nature Conservancy. And that doesn’t include jobs created by private investment, likely to be stimulated by the tax incentives in the bill. When those are added in, the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that the Inflation Reduction Act will produce more than 9 million new jobs over the next decade.

Green jobs were trending up even before the IRA passed last fall. LinkedIn reported in 2022 that in the previous five years, U.S. jobs in renewable energy and the environment posted to its platform grew by 237 percent, while oil and gas jobs grew just 19 percent. Renewables and environment jobs on LinkedIn are on pace to outnumber oil and gas jobs later this year. 

“There’s a huge shortage across the trades and there’s going to be even more.”

Sam Steyer, founder of startup Greenwork

LinkedIn is also tracking “green skills” that are increasingly being listed for industries not traditionally thought of as related to the climate at all, like sustainable sourcing and waste reduction in fashion.

This new economy will need to be powered by people. People with skills that, today, they largely don’t have, ready for opportunities they may not know about yet, don’t know how to train for, or don’t see themselves in.

“The hard truth is that right now we are nowhere close to having sufficient green talent, green skills or green jobs to deliver the green transition,” the LinkedIn report states. “Based on the current trajectory of green skills growth in the labour market, we are not going to have sufficient human capital to meet our climate targets.”

I spoke to education and workforce leaders about what we need to do to fill the gap. Here’s what they said.

1. Invest in green job pathways

Although huge amounts of public and private investment are thundering toward these greener pastures, education and workforce experts say very little of it is dedicated toward building up the human capital that will be needed to do the work. Union apprenticeship programs often have waiting lists, high school career and technical programs have been neglected for decades in favor of the college track, and many community colleges are facing budget cuts.

“If we could expand our programs by 80 percent tomorrow, we would fill every single one of our seats,” said Pedro Rivera, the president of Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, a public technical college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which currently enrolls roughly 1,300 students and expects 1,500 next school year. Among the skills students can learn in its programs are how to monitor water quality, repair electric vehicles, and install hyperefficient electric heating and cooling systems. But this kind of hands-on learning is expensive. “The only thing keeping us at the 1,500 number is the cost of building labs and materials and the supply chain itself,” Rivera said.

Many of the immediate needs for jobs in a greening economy are in the trades — fast-growing jobs like wind turbine technician and solar panel installer, and traditional trades like electrician and construction worker. These are areas the United States has long neglected, said green entrepreneur Sam Steyer.

Related: Long disparaged, education for the trades is slowly coming into fashion

“There’s a huge shortage across the trades and there’s going to be even more,” he said. His startup, Greenwork, is trying to fill the gap by helping climate-focused companies contract with existing skilled laborers, and provide these experienced workers some help preparing for green-energy jobs.

The country needs a lot more investment to both support and entice people to enter the trades, Steyer said. “We need to make the trades great jobs, and invest more nonprofit money in supporting people through apprenticeship. It’s a financial and emotional gantlet when they’re trying to get through and stick with it.” 

2. Reduce stigma

Part of pulling more people into “great jobs,” said Steyer, is increasing respect for the trades. This includes targeting idealistic young people who care about the climate but may not have considered working with their hands. His own team of software engineers and startup types volunteer with a Bay Area nonprofit, SunWork, doing rooftop solar and solar heat pump installations on some weekends.

“It’s frustrating being the best-kept secret,” said Rivera of Thaddeus Stevens, especially when that secret could benefit others: The school he leads has a job placement rate in the high 90s, and the jobs have livable wages.

“We struggle with the old trades stigma from a lifetime ago,” Rivera said. Although these attitudes might be starting to change, a 2020 poll found 54 percent of parents would ideally have their child attend a four-year college, and only 16 percent would want them to enter a hands-on field such as automotive repair.

3. Increase outreach

Julia Hatton is with Rising Sun Opportunity, a nonprofit in Oakland, California. The group’s Opportunity Build program helps formerly incarcerated and other adults underrepresented in the trades, especially women, enter trade apprenticeships. It offers participants a year of support pre- and post-apprenticeship. Their Climate Careers program. which has been around since 2000, employs 15- through 22-year-olds to help improve energy efficiency in homes in low-income communities.

Hatton said people need help to even understand what opportunities are out there. “In our region there are 28 building trades union affiliates. Each has their own entry requirements and specializations. How would you possibly know which one is for you?”  

“If we could expand our programs by 80 percent tomorrow, we would fill every single one of our seats.”

Pedro Rivera, the president of Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Lancaster, Pennsylvania

The City University of New York is trying a novel approach to pull more students into climate-related jobs: It enlists students to educate their peers. “We’ve had fantastic students, and what you really hear from them is a desire to do good, to make a contribution,” said Mindy Engle-Friedman at Baruch College, director of CUNY’s Climate Scholars program.

The program chooses students from four different colleges in the CUNY system, across different disciplines, from finance to journalism to waste management, to participate in a yearlong fellowship. These scholars do research in CUNY labs, complete an internship and learn about climate impacts and decarbonizing the economy from experts across sectors and even from other countries.

Then they share their findings, including climate job opportunities, in presentations to some 2,500 first-year Baruch students, as well as to middle and high school students. Along with the facts about jobs, the Climate Scholars are communicating their enthusiasm about the mission of preserving a livable future. It’s a message that needs to be amplified many times over to meet the need.

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

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