Climate Change’s Effects on Education
Last week we had four days in a row above 90, two of them at or near 100 degrees. Barring the fact that the number of days reached over 90 this summer used to not be normal at all, what’s less normal is getting into the school year with this kind of raging heat. While school stayed open as normal on the first near-hundred-degree days, Portland Public Schools got wise on the second day and closed schools early for those without air conditioning.
In Portland, that makes only 15 schools remaining open as normal out of the 81 in the entire district. You read that right. In the news, they had to list the schools with air conditioning because it was considerably shorter.
Given that my son’s school building is younger than him, it has been equipped with A/C, so he and his classmates were some of the few that got to have school as normal. And I can’t imagine on that ridiculous hot day when school did not close early that much learning was happening in the sweltering classrooms that are barely equipped with enough fans. We’re already in a budget crisis (that honestly Oregon schools have never not been in because lawmakers and voters of the past made some stupid-ass decisions that undercut our public schools, but that’s a whole other thing I won’t get into now), so throw a whole climate change wrench in there and we’re in a budget crisis of a whole other sort. This all made me think not just about our schools and students, but of how climate change is impacting education around the world.
It’s not just heat, of course, it’s all the extreme weather conditions that are just going to impact learning on a regular basis around the world. I’m thinking back to this time in 2020 when school was closed for an entire week because of off-the-charts bad air quality due to wildfire smoke–something that never happened in my own childhood.
“A 10-year-old in 2024 will experience three times more river floods, twice as many tropical cyclones and wildfires, four times more crop failures, five times more droughts, and 36 times more heat waves over their lifetimes in a 3°C global warming pathway compared to a 10-year old in 1970,” reads an April 2024 World Bank Report, The Impact of Climate Change on Education: And What to do About It.
What this means is that the everyday lives and education of children are going to be impacted more and more as the temperatures keep creeping higher. “Even the small learning impacts of slowly increasing temperatures could amount to significant cumulative losses over time, especially for those in hotter regions,” states the report summary. Meaning our early September heat wave is nothing compared to what other, hotter, places are experiencing.
This just shows that climate change and education are intrinsically linked. Unfortunately, it’s not often the school districts that have a say in climate resilience plans. According to a report by This is Planet Ed from the Aspen Institute, cities often overlook school districts in their climate action plans. This was both in not looking at schools’ output of greenhouse gasses, but also as essential to being a part of climate resilience plans and climate action beyond merely educating students about climate change.
What’s different about Portland, though, is that schools are very much a part of climate action. In fact, we’re one of the few (perhaps only?) public school districts in the country with an actual dedicated office for climate justice. I coincidentally happened to be getting coffee right after that super hot day with the woman who leads up that program, Kat Davis, the Portland Public School climate justice advisor (who I also talked with for the podcast last year). And our discussion gave a lot of hope.
While the state is still woefully underfunding education around Oregon (see this story I was actually interviewed for thanks to ed advocacy work I also do), the city of Portland is doing what they can with climate funding to make our city more climate resilient. And it’s also good to see that unlike the other cities noted in the This is Planet Ed report, school districts are not being overlooked.
A year ago, the Portland City Council approved a $750 million five-year climate investment plan which includes $50 million in investments towards schools through the Climate Friendly Public Schools program through the EPA. What is amazing about this funding is that not only will it go towards equipping schools to be more resilient (i.e. getting air conditioning into as many schools as possible) and to be more climate friendly (such as installing solar panels and energy efficient equipment, purchasing electric school buses, and planting trees to increase the tree canopy) but it will also fund student-led climate projects. This last program is what Kat mentioned to me when we were chatting–each high school, middle school, and K-8 school will get a pot of money each year for climate action projects completely led by students. It’s brand new so really the sky’s the limits and no one knows what students will end up doing. They could build windmills to power a watering system, they could do a zero waste clothing project, or even an art project with litter they find on school grounds.
Of course, I’m thrilled there will be investments to make schools more resilient and climate friendly (although admittedly it’s probably still not enough for all schools). But it’s exciting to see how funding can be used creatively to involve students in solutions to create a better and cleaner world. It’s moments like that when you feel the worries of rising heat but are met with the hopefulness of climate action.