Welcome! This is our original motivation...

This is the originally submitted version of the proposed Resolution, but upon consultation with a Board member and staff, we were urged to cut it by a lot. So to keep our idea living in the community, we decided to share it here. Please feel free to comment on it in emails to our committee.

Whereas:

Each year more of our students are coughing, wheezing, sweating, nauseated, closed up in homes, even in schools due to heat and fossil fuel smog, often eating food without fresh sweet fruit, crunchy fresh greens and deliciously flavorful veggies, and sometimes even drinking water and playing in places that are polluted. Very possibly linked to all this, many have faced disproportionate COVID burden, caring for and burying family members and friends. On top of it all, families face housing bills and utility cutoffs that further threaten their well-being. The 90.4% of LAUSD students who are people of color, especially those in the schools that are designated Title I and further designated with the SENI 2.0 as high needs schools, live in areas historically redlined, consistently permitted for toxic industries, and neglected for greenspace and parks, which is confirmed by the high Pollution Burden Scores as seen in CalEnviroscreen.

Most LAUSD schoolchildren are in disadvantaged communities of color, centered for help by the American Rescue Plan.

Every one of these experiences, including COVID, have roots in climate change and each one impacts the learning environment, the learning abilities, and the engagement of our students. Our students’ education is harmed by: increasing heat, which all by itself is correlated with lower test scores;4 lower nutrition as crop plants adjust to excess CO2; more lost instructional time due to illnesses correlated with pollution burdens, an injustice that worsens with heat; loss of outdoor activities and play time due to unhealthy air and heat; loss, as we have so painfully experienced this last year, of precious interactions with peers, which are so important to a child’s social and emotional development, due to illnesses caused by migrating pathogens and “zoonotic” diseases like COVID 19 spilling over from climate-stressed ecosystems;1,2 and, most importantly, increasing academic disengagement due to loss of hope about their futures in a hotter, less stable climate.

Facing such traumatic uncertainty, LAUSD students need to start right away to learn about climate change in much more depth and breadth across subject matter. This will help them be a part of a community that cares about them and the future. In turn, they will feel that they are a valuable part of the mechanism to help solve the problem

Who is supporting our students’ education and holistic health under these circumstances?

Parents infuse their cultural understanding of family, community, health, work, the land, waters and air, morals, duty, and more through their traditions and ceremonies. They often come with stories of exceeding toughness in the face of adversity, and values pinpointed to help their children thrive despite harsh situations. Our students’ siblings and friends, following in these traditions, support each other’s mental health, creating their new communities with their evolving views on how to be in the rapidly changing world.

Community groups have worked tirelessly for decades, bettering environments, providing awareness and leadership about excessive pollution usually from fossil fuel infrastructure, illuminating the dire processes of environmental racism and climate injustice, organizing to preserve schools and homes in the way of freeway or train building plans, establishing community gardens, getting families out to the beach or the mountains, organizing sports leagues, dance troupes, youth leadership trainings, and much more. Most of these groups are aware that some options are closing off due to climate change and they are seeking answers. Community advocates show many ways our students can better their environments and their lives.

Exposure and connection to the natural world through field trips, unstructured explorations (allowing soft fascination), community gardening, creation of greenspace and restoring of natural habitats promote extraordinary improvements in emotional health, clear thinking, and love of life on Earth.5 The trees, grasses, kelp, birds and other animals are involved in healing Earth. They are our children’s most active allies.

Most of all, and are our schools. We must carefully and quickly shift our focus to the key problem of the 21st century: living well and justly and with responsibility for a healthy sustainable Earth. Schools are the venue where all the resources can be brought together in a rigorous way. Teachers help students access tough, complex material, to think it through critically for themselves. Teachers lead students to open their talents, and all teachers and students can contribute, directly or indirectly, to the many developing solutions for the unfolding unsustainability of our energy, transport, materials, agricultural and sociopolitical systems. Our teachers are in the unique position to influence young minds facing an unfolding planetary and humanitarian crisis, inform future voters and policymakers, make space for curiosity and novel, critical, deliberative and innovative thinking in all fields, and encourage moral responsibility for equitable habitability for all life. Our goal is to slow, and eventually stop the progression of climate change, while adapting to inevitable changes, and set equitable policies for sharing these burdens.

If given sufficient training, support, and paid planning time, teachers can incorporate climate urgency and relatable, local problems into their subject areas, in ways that are age-, developmentally-, and culturally appropriate. The key here is to support teachers as we make and coordinate the shifts in our framing and teaching, and as we develop interdisciplinary approaches. Support must be encouraged by and gradually coordinated across the District, as schools develop curricular frames that illuminate pathways forward in this unprecedented challenge. Schools that develop climate action plans that are successful at engaging all the students’ support systems, will become a resource for other schools to use.

LAUSD can take the lead in preparing our students for the work, careers and jobs of the 21st Century. Careers involving environmental sustainability represent some of the fastest growing local and global occupations of the 21st Century 6, 7, 8 and the City of Los Angeles has a Sustainability Plan whose targets include 400,000 green jobs by 2050. This is an accelerating process. The second-graders of today will graduate from schools that are 100% clean energy schools, a goal they help achieve, kindergarteners of 2028 will graduate in 2040 into jobs and universities that deepen the cultural shifts, and the LAUSD high school Class of 2050 will be entering a wholly transformed world, a City devoted to restoring our ecosystems, in which new green job skills and global connectedness will be highly valued.

LAUSD has the authority to approve additional education funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to improve educational equity, address environmental injustice and increase climate readiness, especially in disadvantaged communities of culture.

There you have it! Our motivations.