Why Schools Can’t Ignore Climate Crisis

Greg Libecci, a former sales executive at Fortune 500 companies, decided to make public schools more sustainable fifteen years ago. Since 2010, he’s been the energy and resource manager for the Salt Lake City district, tasked with minimizing the district’s use of energy and natural gas.

Slow progress.

Libecci initially focused on what he calls “low-hanging fruit”—encouraging staff to turn off lights more often and shutting down HVAC systems during holidays and weekends. When he wanted to make bigger changes, such as replacing or converting fluorescent lights to LED bulbs, administrators told him it would be too expensive, or that it wasn’t the highest priority.

This all changed in the early 2020s. High school students in environmental clubs started asking him, Why aren’t you doing more to minimize the district’s carbon footprint? As policymakers and advocates are starting to realize, schools all over the country contribute a large portion of the harmful emissions that are driving climate changes at an alarming rate.

“I was almost embarrassed,” Libecci said.

Armed with a ToolkitStudents created a Sierra Club project with the help of the non-profit Sierra Club. Detailed research was done on the presentationAnd arrived at the April 2020 School Board Meeting with a concrete request. Could the district make a commitment to completely clean energy by 2030 for its 40+ buildings? By 2040, eliminate fossil fuels as heating and transport.

Two months later, all members of the board voted yes. That gave Libecci the backing he’d never had before to work with colleagues and students on a plan of action.

The final draft of the plan. Unveiled last year, culminated in a contract to reduce the 21,000-student district’s carbon emissions by 30 percent. The entire district will be equipped with LED lights. Six schools buildings will get new solar panel systems. Two elementary school buildings, on the other hand, will get new mechanical systems.

The money saved by reducing the district’s energy consumption in the long-term will pay for the construction that makes those energy savings possible.

“I’ve been pushing the snowball uphill for long enough and only sliding backwards,” Libecci said. “To see it go from student to school board and then push back on me was Christmas in my world.”

His success story is both a lesson and a warning for school districts that are taking bolder action in addressing the climate crisis. It’s possible for a school district to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus that Humans are causing the planet’s heat to riseTake action now and make a commitment to change it.

But it’s also possible for years to pass while climate change falls beneath school districts’ more immediate priorities—even when the people involved are well-intentioned and believe the science. School and district leaders have a lot on their plates already: COVID-19 mitigation, political controversies, staffing shortages, building maintenance, technology upkeep, enrollment fluctuations, unfunded state mandates, budget shortfalls, and above all, serving students’ increasingly wide-ranging and complex academic, emotional, and physical needs.

Among the nation’s 13,000 public school systems, strong commitments to address climate change are relatively few and far between. Only 30 percent of respondents to an EdWeek Research Center survey indicated that their districts have a facility plan that considers climate change. Just four percent said they’ve set targets for reducing their district’s carbon footprints.

“When you’re trying to decide, ‘Should kids be wearing masks tomorrow?’ worrying about the ramifications of what’s going to happen in 20 years is harder to do,” said Erika Kitzmiller, an assistant professor of education and inequality at Barnard College.

In many communities, simply convincing everyone of humans’ role in climate change is a hurdle that will be difficult to overcome. Roughly 14 percent of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, and 30 percent don’t believe humans are causing it, according to a 2021 Summary of public opinion pollsFrom the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Fifteen percent of the 960 educators who answered the EdWeek Research Center survey said they believe climate change is real, but that it won’t affect their school or district anytime in the foreseeable future.

Another 8 percent believed climate change was not real.

Catastrophic consequences are right around the corner

School districts, and the communities they serve, don’t have the luxury of time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN body that includes 195 countries) warned in its Recent report last month that “it’s now or never” to slash greenhouse gas emissions and shrink humanity’s carbon footprint. Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that analyzes global temperature changes, estimates the planet’s average temperature As early as 2033, temperatures could rise by 1.5 degrees.

Many devastating global effects, including wildfires and stronger hurricanes, as well as food and water shortages, can occur at this point. more frequent pandemicsThis would be irreversible. Many of these consequences will directly impact the mental and physical health of teachers and students, as well as disrupt learning time.

K-12 schools can’t fight this battle on their own, but they have a major role to play. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, schools are thriving. Annual energy expenditures total $8 billion, and emit an estimated 72 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—equivalent to the output of 18 coal plants, or more than 8 million homes, according to an AnalyseOf Agency dataGeneration180 is the advocacy group.

Their emissions don’t stop there. A 2019 World Wildlife Fund Study According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, school districts waste nearly 2 million tons of carbon dioxide each year.

According to the non-profit Diesel Technology Forum, close. 95 percent of the nation’s 560,000 school busesDiesel fuel is the only fuel that can be used, according to the federal government Exhausts dangerously high levels carbon dioxideAnd Pollutes the air. Diesel fuel can also be purchased. Increased cancer riskAccording to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, it is.

And schools play a unique role in helping shape attitudes about climate and the environment that the nation’s 50 million K-12 students carry with them the rest of their lives.

Despite that, Green New Deal for Public SchoolsThe proposal of Jamaal bowman, a former high school principal and current U.S. Rep. Jamaal Johnson, a Democrat representing New York, to spend $1.4 Trillion over 10 years to address the climate change in public schools seems unlikely to pass anytime soon.

“School districts are some of the largest landholders in most communities,” said Anisa Heming, director of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Center for Green Schools. “It’s kind of baffling” that schools aren’t more central to discussions of mitigating climate change, she said.

School districts don’t have to wait to act

Interviews with school leaders, experts on climate change and school building, and student advocates reveal some striking truths.

• Many people in districts underestimate the difficulty and cost involved in preparing for the effects of climate changes on students and staff.

• Sometimes, all it takes is one or two people to make climate change a priority.

• Addressing climate change should be an integral part of a school district’s mission, not an extra thing to add to a daunting to-do list.

“It should be the number one thing that everyone is talking about,” said Debra Duardo, who oversees 80 districts as superintendent of the Los Angeles County schools.

Duardo began researching after being asked by the Aspen Institute to be a member of a national committee to address climate change in schools. She was astonished at how little she knew about schools’ contributions to climate change. She’s now made addressing climate change a CenterpieceHer county leadership role, shepherding a Comprehensive climate curriculumHelping to develop a K-12 Climate Action PlanThe Aspen Institute uses its expertise to support districts across the country.

“People need to realize, as busy as we are, as challenging as it may be, it has to be a priority or we’re not going to be able to survive on this planet,” Duardo said.

Advocates like Heming say they’ve been heartened in recent years by an increasing number of schools that have incorporated clean energy initiatives into their strategic plans, developed robust climate change curricula to help students and staff grasp the stakes, and hired administrators, like Libecci in Salt Lake City, to oversee sustainability efforts full-time.

Meanwhile, high-profile weather calamities—like wildfires that destroyed school buildings and shut down instruction in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Tennessee; Rising sea levels forced school building relocations Alaska; and hurricanes that destroyed communities in Louisiana, New Jersey, Texas—have made the tangible effects of climate change more difficult to ignore. Over 40% of Americans lived in a climate-related extreme weather area last year, while 80 percent experienced a heat wave. Washington Post reported.

The federal government and close to a dozen states don’t provide any recurring funds for school districts to upgrade their buildings. In order to sustain a low-income or rural area, school districts would need to increase taxes, apply for grants, or sacrifice staff and programs in order to be perpetually understaffed and underresourced.

Even where commitments have passed and climate change plans have been commissioned, there’s a lot of work to be done—and money to be spent—before the commitments come to fruition.

Some activists believe that districts must move faster.

For climate activists, progress can feel frustratingly slow.

Nick Limbeck, a 6th grade bilingual writing and social studies teacher in Chicago, helped spearhead his teachers’ union’s Climate Justice Committee after seeing a TV news report about the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. The Chicago Teachers Union, which has a long-standing dispute with the district’s administration, is pushing city officials and administrators to take serious action on climate change.

Chicago’s recent heat wave saw temperatures exceedingly high at 90 degrees, making it difficult to ignore the impacts of climate change. Parents and teachers raised concerns about the lack of air conditioning in several schools during the recent heat wave. Block Club Chicago Report. A spokesperson for the district stated that leaders were aware and working to address the issues.

Educators have also been pushing for More robust courses in environmental science are available to students. And students at the district’s George Washington High School joined environmental activists in 2020 and 2021 to Protest the planned construction of a scrap metal plantThey are located in a predominantly Black and Latinx area, just blocks from their school building. The city was incorporated last May. halted the project’s permitAfter the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency raised concerns over toxic emissions being added to an already polluted area.

The Chicago district has taken steps towards addressing the environmental impacts of climate change. It hired a sustainability coordinator in 2020. Filling a 5-year vacancy. And last year, the nation’s third-largest school district released a cLimote You can find more information atction pLanThis includes pledges to convert 100% to renewable energy by 2025, and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030, and completely by 2050. Eleven of the district’s 600-plus schools got grants to install solar panels.

“CPS is open to collaborating with the Chicago Teachers Union on any formal demands related to our climate action plan,” said Sylvia Barragan, a spokesperson for the district, in an email. She also pointed to the district’s commitment to conduct energy audits at school buildings.

“Ultimately, the district’s mission is to conserve, protect, and sustain resources to provide healthy and high-performing facilities that meet or exceed energy efficiency standards while preparing students to advance in a more sustainable, resilient, reliable, and equitable environment,” Barragan wrote.

Limbeck and his colleagues aren’t satisfied.

“It’s kind of like the bus is leaving, and you’re walking slowly to the bus stop as the bus rolls away,” Limbeck said. “When this is a race against time, they’re treating it as a stroll in the park. It’s a good step in the right direction, but we need to accelerate this.”

The union’s Climate Justice Committee is pushing for the board of trustees that oversees the district’s teacher pension program to divest from fossil fuel companies; and for the district to begin work to address nearly $2 billion in backlogged facilities maintenance including abatement of mold, lead, and asbestos; and immediately begin modernizing and solarizing all its buildings.

“We don’t need feel-good advertisements from the district,” Limbeck said. “We need massive accelerated action.”

The committee is calling for increased taxes on corporations and wealthy by the state and federal governments. They also advocate for the passage of federal Build Back Better Acts and Green New Deal investment packages to pay for this.

Still, the district is facing pressing challenges around meeting students’ academic and emotional needs, which were exacerbated during the pandemic and lengthy school closures. The 340,000-student district’s finite operating budget of $4 billion has to make room to address all of these challenges, and anticipate future ones as well.

Limbeck suggested that the district take advantage of new federal and state funding streams. Rebates for electric school bussesTo get your ideas rolling.

Barragan stated that the district will apply for Department of Energy funding later in the year to improve indoor air quality, retrofit buildings for energy efficiency and other related projects.

Sometimes, the only thing that can make a difference is one person.

Some school districts in recent years have ramped up efforts to address climate change by cutting down on emissions and updating curricula—or at least vowing to do so in the future.

Boards of education Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Eau Claire, Wis., Green Bay, Wis., Lake Tahoe, Calif., Madison, Wis., Montgomery County, Maryland, Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore.They have approved plans for their respective districts to aim to rely on 100 per cent clean energy by 2030 and 2050. Several more districts, including in Iowa CityIowa, and Sebastopol, Calif., have passed resolutions to form a committee or develop a climate plan. There are hundreds of districtsElectric school buses are now being used as an alternative fuel to diesel. More than half of all states are now using electric school buses. Earned a B+ or higherIn a 2020 National Center for Science Education Review of Climate Change in Public School Curricula.

Michelle Wu, the Democratic mayor in Boston, announced a $2 billion deal just this month Green New Deal for Boston Public SchoolsInvestment package with the goal of modernizing all 100-plus buildings within the district in the next ten years. While introducing the plan, Wu said schools account for nearly half the city’s emissions.

Sometimes one person within a school community who cares deeply about climate change can ignite others to act.

Breck Foster, a social studies and Spanish teacher in Oregon’s Lake Oswego district, got interested in tackling climate change five years ago after hearing a talk by the activist and thinker Naomi Klein. Foster became frustrated that her district hadn’t made any commitments to reduce emissions or even established a green team or an environment club. Foster’s social studies colleagues were reluctant to discuss this topic, even amongst themselves.

Foster created a student-led green team and urged her principal to look at ways to make school more energy efficient and to incorporate climate change into classroom discussions. Since then, she’s run a compost program, started a sustainability committee, and overseen the process to get her school building and others in the district certified as Oregon Green Schools. She’s also Collaboration with educators from across the state to lobby lawmakers to infuse climate change topics throughout the state’s K-12 curriculum.

Her district began this year to take a more active approach in tackling climate change. Its strategic plan includes sustainability commitment, and the hiring of a staff member whose sole purpose is to supervise sustainability efforts around curriculums and facilities.

That staff member is Larry Zurcher, who’s relishing his chance to help corral the district’s staff, students, and administrators toward common goals of reducing emissions and raising climate change awareness. He’s helping teachers recognize the connections between climate change and their curricula; setting up systems to track the district’s energy consumption; and pushing for nutrition staff to focus on reducing cafeteria waste.

“It’s not just putting lip service so this is something we can check off and say we did it on our report card,” said Zurcher, whose title is sustainability teacher on special assignment. “It’s one of our core values.”

Foster still has hopes for more. She warned that the enthusiasm of the district’s staff could quickly fade if they lose interest or leave. The vast majority of staff members in the district don’t have sustainability as part of their job descriptions, and she’s done much of her climate change work as a volunteer, on top of her regular duties. She said that there are many other districts in the area that are doing less.

She collaborated with Zurcher and others to pitch for funding a part-time, paid school sustainability coordinator at her campus. They’re still awaiting the district’s verdict.

“Imagine if every school had these principles embedded in job descriptions and were funded,” Foster said. “What could we do?”

Students are ready to see their schools step up

Students are eager for the adults who determine their futures to begin this work—and sometimes they’re the ones driving it. Thunberg’s 2018 school strike movement was partly responsible for the success of Thunberg.K-12 students have helped to catalyze climate action by presenting at school boards. Petition circulated, organizing rallies, Walking out of class, and even You can sue state officials.

In 2017, Emily Her was a senior at Timberline High School in Boise, Idaho, when her teacher gave a lecture that she couldn’t shake, about the urgency of addressing climate change and the possibility that Idaho state lawmakers would strike the term “anthropogenic climate change” from the state’s K-12 science standards. She said she was shy and not very outspoken during most of her childhood. However, she felt compelled by her peers to testify before the state legislature. The term was kept.

She’s since gone on to lobby for the district to mimic the city’s clean energy commitment, which it did. Boise State University was where she earned her degree in global studies, sustainability and passion for climate activism.

In addition to the hard work of students like Her over the years, the Boise school system has also developed a formidable sustainability committee that now includes 50 students. The committee’s projects include a new environmental field trip for 6th grade students, drought-tolerant grass on a playground, and a garden on a high school campus that uses native plants and natural fertilizer to capture more carbon than the average garden.

Sometimes the students want more than the district can deliver right away, said Chris Taylor, the district’s science and sustainability supervisor.

“It’s never going to get easier for a school district to start on some of these things,” he said.

His advice for districts who aren’t as far along? “Just start.”