This story is a collaboration between Grist and High Country News and is reprinted with permission.

On a wet spring day in June, fog shrouded the Mission Mountains on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. Silver beads of rain clung to blades of grass and purple lupine. On a ridge overlooking St. Mary’s Lake in the southeastern corner of the reservation, the land was mostly cleared of trees after state-managed logging operations. Some trees remained, mainly firs and pines, spindly things that once grew in close quarters but now looked exposed without their neighbors.

Viewed from the sky, the logged parcel was strikingly square despite the mountainous terrain. It stood in contrast to the adjacent, tribally managed forest, where timber operations followed the topographic contours of watersheds and ridgelines or imitated fire scars from lightning strikes.

“It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”

This nearly clear-cut, 640-acre parcel is state trust land and is a small part of the 108,886 state-owned acres, above- and belowground, scattered across the reservation — this despite the tribal nation’s sovereign status.

The Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees that remained in the square would thrive on the occasional fire and controlled burn after logging operations, benefiting the next generation of trees. Instead, the area was unburned, and shrubs crowded the ground. “I see this stand right here looking the exact same in 20 years,” said Incashola. It’s his first time being on this land, despite a lifetime on the reservation — because it’s state land, the gate has always been locked.

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State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.

States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.

But the Flathead Reservation is just one reservation checkerboarded by state trust lands. 

To understand how land and resources taken from Indigenous peoples and nations continue to enrich non-Indigenous citizens, Grist and High Country News used publicly available data to identify which reservations have been impacted by state trust land laws and policies; researched the state institutions benefiting from these lands; and compiled data on many of the companies and individuals leasing the land on those reservations.

Altogether, we located more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations in 15 states that are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. In at least four states, five tribal nations themselves are the lessees — paying the state for access to, collectively, more than 57,700 acres of land within their own reservation borders.    

However, due to instances of outdated and inconsistent data from federal, state, and tribal cartographic sources, our analysis may include lands that do not neatly align with some borders and ownership claims. As a result, our analysis may be off by a few hundred acres. In consultation with tribal and state officials, we have filtered, clipped, expanded, and otherwise standardized multiple data sets with the recognition that in many cases, more accurate land surveying is necessary.

The state trust lands that came from sanctioned land grabs of the early 20th century helped bolster state economies and continue to underwrite non-Indian institutions while infringing on tribal sovereignty. “The justification for them is very old. It goes back to, really, the founding of the U.S.,” said Miriam Jorgensen, research director for the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. The goal, she said, was to help settlers and their families gain a firmer foothold in the Western U.S. by funding schools and hospitals for them. “There’s definitely a colonial imperative in the existence of those lands.”

Although tribal citizens are a part of the public those institutions are supposed to serve, their services often fall short. On the Flathead Reservation, for example, Indigenous youth attend public schools funded in part by state trust lands inside the nation’s boundaries. However, the state is currently being sued by the CSKT, as well as five other tribes, over the state’s failure over decades to adequately teach Indigenous curriculum despite a state mandate to do so.  Arlee High School is a public school on the Flathead Reservation. Six tribes, including CKST, have sued the state of Montana for failing to implement its Indian Education for All curriculum in public schools over the past few decades, despite a mandate to do so.

Related: Climate change is sabotaging education for America’s students – and it’s only going to get worse

Since 2022, the CSKT and the state of Montana have been negotiating a land exchange in which the tribe will see some 29,200 acres of state trust lands on the reservation returned, which could include the logged, 640-acre parcel near St. Mary’s Lake. In the trade, Montana will receive federal lands from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, or potentially both, elsewhere in the state. Such a return has been “the want of our ancestors and the want of our tribal leaders since they were taken,” Incashola said. “It’s not a want for ownership, it’s a want for protection of resources, for making us whole again to manage our forests again the way we want to manage them.”

Tribal nations and states have struggled with state and federal governments over jurisdiction and land since the inception of the United States, says Alex Pearl, who is Chickasaw and a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. But the potential return of state trust lands represents an opportunity for LandBack on a broad scale: an actionable step toward reckoning with the ongoing dispossession of territories meant to be reserved for tribes. “The LandBack movement that started as protests has become a viable policy, legally,” Pearl said. 

The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation is one of the largest reservations in the U.S., stretching 4.5 million acres across the northeastern corner of Utah. But on closer look, the reservation is checkerboarded, thanks to allotment, with multiple land claims on the reservation by individuals, corporations, and the state of Utah. Altogether, the Ute Tribe oversees about a quarter of its reservation.

The state of Utah owns more than 511,000 surface and subsurface acres of trust lands within the reservation’s borders. And of those acres, the Ute Tribe is leasing 47,000 — nearly 20 percent of all surface trust land acreage on the reservation — for grazing purposes, paying the state to use land well within its own territorial boundaries. According to Utah’s Trust Lands Administration, the agency responsible for managing state trust lands, a grazing permit for a 640-acre plot runs around $300. In the last year alone, the Utes have paid the state more than $25,000 to graze on trust lands on the reservation.

Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, almost all of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing. 

The Pueblo of Laguna, Zuni, part of the Navajo Reservation, and Ramah Navajo, a chapter of Navajo Nation, are located in the state of New Mexico, which owns nearly 143,000 surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands across a total of 13 reservations. The Navajo Nation leases all 218 acres of New Mexico state trust lands on its reservation, while the Ramah Navajo leases 17 percent of the 24,600 surface state trust land acres within its reservation’s borders. The Pueblo of Laguna leases more than half of the 11,200 surface trust land acres in its territory, while the Zuni Tribe leases 37 of the 60 surface trust land acres located on its reservation. The nations did not comment by press time.

Cris Stainbrook, president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, said that for tribes, the cost of leasing state trust lands on their reservations for grazing and agriculture is likely lower than what it would cost to fight for ownership of those lands. But, he added, those lands never should have been taken from tribal ownership in the first place.

“Is it wrong? Is it fundamentally wrong to have to lease what should be your own land? Yes,” said Stainbrook. “But the reality of the situation is, the chances of having the federal or state governments return it is low.”

In theory, tribal nations share access to public resources funded by state trust lands, but that isn’t always the case. For example, Native students tend to fare worse in U.S. public schools, and some don’t attend state-run schools at all. Instead, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools, a system of nearly 200 institutions on 64 reservations that receive funding from the federal government, not state trust lands. 

Beneficiaries, including public schools, get revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations, and commercial projects. Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.

While state agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, the process is complicated by the state’s legal obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. Still, some states are attempting to create statewide systematic processes for returning trust lands. 

At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue.

Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for fighting climate change

That’s the case with Washington’s Trust Land Transfer program, which facilitates exchanges of land that the state’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, deems unproductive. Those lands are designated as “unproductive” because they might not generate enough revenue to cover maintenance costs, have limited or unsustainable resource extraction, or have resources that are physically inaccessible. A 540-acre plot of land that was transferred to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in a 2022 pilot program was considered financially unproductive because “the parcel is too sparsely forested for timber harvest, its soils and topography are not suitable for agriculture, it offers low potential for grazing revenue, it is too small for industrial-scale solar power generation, and it is located too close to the 20,000-acre Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge for wind power generation.”

Currently, Washington’s state constitution does not allow for the exchange of subsurface acreage; the DNR retains mineral rights to state trust lands even after exchange. Transfers are funded by the state, with the Legislature paying the DNR the value of the land to be exchanged so the agency can then purchase new land. The value of all the lands that can be exchanged is capped at $30 million every two years.

Even that money isn’t guaranteed: The legislature isn’t obligated to approve the funding for transfers. Additionally, the program is not focused solely on exchanges with Indigenous nations; any public entity can apply for a land transfer. Through the pilot program in 2022, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, and Kitsap County received a total of 4,425 acres of federal land valued at more than $17 million in exchange for unproductive trust lands. All three entities proposed using the land to establish fish and wildlife habitat, natural areas, and open space and recreation. None of the proposed projects in the pilot program had tribes listed as receiving agencies for land transfer. However, six of the eight proposals up for funding between 2025 and 2027 would be transferred to tribal nations.

In North Dakota, the Trust Lands Completion Act would allow the state to exchange surface state trust lands on reservations for more accessible federal land or mineral rights elsewhere. The legislation made it through committee in the U.S. Senate last year and, this fall, state officials hope to couple it with bigger land-use bills to pass through the Senate and then the House.

But one of the legislation’s main caveats is that it, like Washington, excludes subsurface acres: North Dakota’s constitution also prohibits ceding mineral rights. North Dakota currently owns 31,000 surface and 200,000 subsurface acres of trust lands on reservations. State Commissioner of University and School Lands Joe Heringer said that returning state trust lands with mineral development would be complicated because of existing development projects and financial agreements.

Right now, the only mineral development happening on reservation-bound state trust lands is on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the state’s northwestern corner, with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. 

Initial oil and gas leases are about five years, but they can stay in place for decades if they start producing within that time. “There’s already all sorts of leases and contracts in place that could get really, really messy,” Heringer said.

By design, subsurface rights are superior to surface rights. If land ownership is split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources, even though the process might be complicated, regardless of what the surface owner wants.

“It’s not worthless, but it’s close to it,” Stainbrook said of returning surface rights without subsurface rights. 

Still, Stainbrook acknowledges that programs to return state trust lands are meaningful because they consolidate surface ownership and jurisdiction and allow tribes to decide surface land use. Plus, he said, there’s a lot of land without subsurface resources to extract, meaning it would be left intact. But split ownership, with tribes owning surface rights and non-tribal entities holding subsurface rights, prevents tribes from fully making their own choices about resource use and management on their lands. And states are not required to consult with tribes on how these lands are used.

“In the sense of tribal sovereignty, it has not increased tribal sovereignty,” Stainbrook said. “In fact, I mean, it’s pretty much the status quo.”

Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribal governments of 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011. These awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.

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

In 2023, a wildfire swept the Flathead Reservation, just west of Flathead Lake. Afterwards, the CSKT and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which manages the state’s trust lands, discussed salvage timber operations — in which marketable logs are taken from wildfire-burned forests — on two affected state trust land parcels, both inside the reservation. The tribe approved a road permit for the state to access and salvage logs on one parcel, but not the other, since it wasn’t as impacted by the fire. Later, the tribe found out that the state had gone ahead with salvage operations on the second parcel, bypassing the need for a tribal road permit by accessing it through an adjacent private property.

That lack of communication and difference in management strategies is evident on other state trust lands on the reservation: One logged state parcel is adjacent to a sensitive elk calving ground, while another parcel, logged in 2020, sits atop a ridgeline and impacts multiple streams with bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. The uniformity and scale of the state logging — and the prioritization of profit and yield — do not align with the tribes’ forestry plans, which are tied to cultural values and use of land, Incashola said. “Sometimes the placement of (trust lands) affects cultural practices, or precludes cultural practices from happening on those tracts,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it, because they have the right to manage their land.” 

Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation did not make anyone available to interview for this story, but answered some questions by email and said in a statement that the department “has worked with our Tribal Nations to ensure these lands are stewarded to provide the trust land beneficiaries the full market value for use as required by the State of Montana’s Constitution and the enabling legislation from Congress that created these trust lands.”

Since the 1930s, the CSKT has prioritized reclaiming land, buying private and state trust lands back at market value. Today, the tribe owns more than 60 percent of its reservation.  

While logging used to be the tribe’s main income source, it has diversified its income streams since the 1990s. Now, the tribe’s long-term goal is for its forests to return to pre-settler conditions and to build climate resiliency by actively managing them with fire. The state’s Montana Climate Solutions Plan from 2020 acknowledged the CSKT as a leader on climate and recommended that the state support tribal nations in climate resilience adaptation. However, that suggestion remains at odds with the state’s management of, and profit from, reservation lands. The 640-acre parcel near the Mission Mountains that Incashola had never been able to visit because of the locked gate, for example, abuts tribal wilderness and is considered a sensitive area. Since 2015, the state has made $775,387.82 from logging that area.

The legislation that included the Montana-CSKT land exchange passed in 2020, but progress has been slow. The exchange doesn’t include all the state trust land on the reservation, which means the selection process of those acres is ongoing. The lands within the tribally protected areas, as well as those near the Mission Mountain Wilderness, are of high priority for the CSKT. There are some state lands that are ineligible, such as those that do not border tribal land. But the state has also interpreted the legislation to exclude subsurface acres that could be used for mining or other extractive activities. The tribe is steadfast that subsurface acres are included in the legislation. The impasse has complicated negotiations.

“It’s out-and-out land theft,” said Minnesota State Senator Mary Kunesh of state trust lands on reservations. Kunesh, a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has authored two bills that returned state land to tribes, each with a decade or more of advocacy behind it.

On the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s reservation in Minnesota, for example, the tribe owns only about 5 percent of the reservation, although federal legislation recently returned more than 11,000 acres of illegally taken national forest. Meanwhile, the state owns about 17 percent. That ownership has an impact. Tribes in Minnesota do not receive revenue from state trust lands on their reservations, nor do tribal schools, Kunesh says. “Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that could have perhaps been used to educate, to create housing, to create economic opportunity have been lost to the tribes,” Kunesh said. Still, “it’s not that the tribes want money. They want the land.”

Land return is contentious, but Kunesh has seen support for it from people of all backgrounds while working to pass legislation. “We do need our non-Native communities to stand up and speak the truth as they see it when it comes to returning the lands, and any kind of compensation, back to the tribes.”

But those land returns will also require political support from senators and representatives at both the state and federal level. “Ultimately, it is up to Congress to work with States and other affected interests to find solutions to these land management issues,” the National Association of State Trust Lands’ executive committee said in an email.

In some states, legislators have indicated strong resistance. Utah lawmakers passed a law this year that allows the state’s Trust Land Administration to avoid advertising state land sales. The law gives Utah’s Department of Natural Resources the ability to buy trust land at fair market value, ultimately avoiding possible bidding wars with other entities, like tribes. The legislation came after the Ute Indian Tribe outbid the Department of Natural Resources when trying to buy back almost 30,000 acres of state trust land on their reservation.

“It’s going to have to take the general public to get up in arms over it and say, ‘This is just morally wrong,’” said Stainbrook of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “We haven’t gotten to that point where enough people are standing up and saying that.”

Near the southeast edge of the Flathead Reservation is a place called Jocko Prairie — though it hasn’t looked like a prairie for some time — with stands of large ponderosa pines and other trees crowding in, a result of federal fire-suppression practices on tribal lands. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have worked to restore the prairie by keeping out cattle, removing smaller trees, and reintroducing fire. Land that was once crowded with thickets of brush is now opening up, and as more sunlight reaches the ground, grasses and flowers have come back. 

This year in early June, a sea of blue-purple camas spread out on the ground under the trees, reactivated by fire after decades of lying dormant. It was a return.

This story is a collaboration between Grist and High Country News and is reprinted with permission.

This story was reported and written by Anna V. Smith and Maria Parazo Rose. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose, Clayton Aldern, and Parker Ziegler. Aldern and Ziegler also produced data visuals and interactives.

Original photography for this project was done by Tailyr Irvine. Roberto (Bear) Guerra and Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Luna Anna Archey designed the magazine layout for High Country News. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.

This project was edited by Tristan Ahtone and Kate Schimel. Additional editing by Jennifer Sahn and Katherine Lanpher. Kate Schimel and Jaime Buerger managed production. Meredith Clark did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the project’s data. Copy editing by Diane Sylvain.

The post Trust issues: How schools profit from land and resources on tribal nations appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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109 on the first day of school?

That was the case this year in Palm Springs, California, where parent Cyd Detiege has been campaigning to delay the start of the school year because of extreme heat.

Palm Springs Unified District officials haven’t budged, but administrators elsewhere in the country are shifting school calendars to keep kids from commuting to school in high heat and learning in sweltering classrooms, according to a new Hechinger story from writer Erin Rode.

The neighboring Desert Sands Unified School District, after studying which weeks are typically hottest, decided to postpone its first day from the third to fourth week of August and push the last day of school further into June.

Other districts that have experimented with delaying the start of school because of heat are Denver, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. At best, though, the schedule shakeups are a stopgap. “Just thinking about the shift in our climate across our planet, shifting the calendar isn’t going to be as helpful as it was three years ago,” said Carrie A. Olson, Denver school board president. The solution for her district, she said, is going to be more air conditioning and heat mitigation strategies in schools.

Climate change has certainly scrambled how I think about seasons. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I used to love July and August. Now it feels like fall is the new summer, the time to finally escape outdoors and enjoy being outside.

Related reads

How extreme heat is threatening education progress worldwide. New UNICEF data demonstrates how hot temperatures are unraveling education gains globally, writes The New York Times’s Somini Sengupta. One in five kids today experiences twice as many extremely hot days as their grandparents did.

Canceled classes, sweltering classrooms: How extreme heat impairs learning. I wrote about kids suffering in school buildings without air conditioning or being sent home early for “heat days,” and how high temperatures deepen racial divides in education.  

As climate change fuels hotter temperatures, kids are learning less. The 19th’s Jessica Kutz covered how policymakers are taking notice of how higher temperatures mean dehydrated, exhausted students. 

The interview

I spoke with Shiva Rajbhandari, 20, who just stepped down at the end of a two-year term this month on the Boise School Board, in Idaho. Rajbhandari ran and won at age 17 on a climate change platform. He’s now a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an organizer for the Sunrise Movement, helping to lead its push for a Green New Deal for Schools. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You ran for school board on comprehensive climate education and energy efficient schools. How much progress were you able to make on those issues?

I’ve been really impressed with the progress in the Boise school district. We have conducted a districtwide, scope one through three carbon audit, using a private contractor, and have identified easy ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save money in the process. Now we are putting together a long-term plan on greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and also on water conservation, waste reduction and climate education.

What do you want to see happen in the next two years?

I hope that we can pass a comprehensive climate action plan this school year. A lot of these changes, especially with money coming from the EPA and Inflation Reduction Act, are changes that we can begin implementing immediately. We now have a grant to purchase electric buses. There’s a lot of stuff around energy efficiency and the way we build our new buildings especially, where it’s really easy to, say, install an electric heater instead of a natural gas heater. I’m also looking forward to an upcoming bond in 2028 when I think we’ll put a lot of these climate infrastructure projects on the ballot.

Do you feel like your other school board members took you seriously?

Not at first. I think there was an attitude of, I’m here and I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I think I changed that over the course of my term. And I do think that I’ve expanded student voice. My fellow trustees, many of them didn’t have kids, they are not interacting with kids on a day-to-day basis who are in our school district. I do think people begin to underestimate young people and the students in our schools. And I think I helped to change that.

You had pushed for a permanent student non-voting position on the board but that didn’t happen. Is that something you’ll keep pushing for?

Yes, absolutely. We just saw last week in New York the signing of legislation requiring all school districts to have at least one non-voting student member on their school board. We have other states and districts where that is the case. I think that, fundamentally, students bring a perspective that is needed in the boardroom. They’re on the ground in the classroom every day and they are the ones seeing the implementation of the policies and the budgets that school boards are voting on.

What are the biggest barriers to progress on these climate and education issues?

I think it’s a belief gap. There is kind of this old guard that thinks schools are the place to teach reading, writing and math. And that’s absolutely true. But there’s so much more of a role that schools have to play in modern society. We have schools that are feeding America’s kids, schools are providing child care, they are agents of socialization. It’s really the place where most people in this country interact with government on a day-to-day basis. Schools are keystone entities in our community and they have a lot of power to shape what our communities look like. And I think when it comes to stopping the climate crisis, that’s the ultimate superpower of our schools. When a school has installed solar panels, it shows everyone else in that neighborhood that solar panels work and are saving our district money. When a school in Phoenix, Arizona, can provide heat relief when it is 110 degrees, it shows our communities what climate resilience looks like. But the belief gap exists out there that we don’t have the technology to solve climate change, that it’s really expensive, and it’s not schools’ place.

Help a reporter

My colleagues and I were struck by a recent Guardian story on four high school football players who died in August for what appears to be heat-related causes. The news outlet notes that 77 heat-related athlete deaths have been recorded since 2000, of which 65 percent were teens. At Hechinger, we want to learn what training coaches and teachers need to keep kids safe in a hotter world. What do you think about kids playing sports in extreme heat? Do we need new rules and regulations on outdoor sports? Let us know your thoughts at newsletter@hechingerreport.org

Resources and events

• How districts are spending Inflation Reduction Act dollars to green their schools: Undaunted K12, a nonprofit group that advocates for schools to reduce their climate toll, recently shared an interactive map that shows which school districts use federal tax credits to defray the costs of clean energy projects. Some examples: The Menasha Joint School District in Wisconsin expects to receive $3.8 million in tax credits to help build a new carbon neutral middle school that includes solar panels and energy storage. Hasting Public Schools in Nebraska is using the federal dollars for ground-source heat pumps, while North Carolina’s Clinton City Schools are investing in solar.  

• How to protect vulnerable Americans — including children — from extreme heat: That’s the topic of an event on Sept. 18 hosted by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Speakers include Levar M. Stoney, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia; Rev. Terrance McKinley, a vice president with the National Black Child Development Institute; John M. Balbus, director of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity for the Department of Health and Human Services; and David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at George Washington University.

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

The post Too hot for school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

With five children aged 11 to 24, Cyd Detiege has sent her kids to Palm Springs Unified School District in Southern California for nearly two decades.

“It’s gotten hotter,” she said, noting record-breaking temperatures in the desert city, which hit an all-time high of 124 degrees this July. The first day of school in Palm Springs this year was August 7, when temperatures reached 109 degrees. Since around 2019, Detiege says she’s contacted district officials, spoken at meetings, and posted on local Facebook pages with one goal: moving the first day of school to after Labor Day.

Related: Interested in climate change and education? Sign up for our newsletter.

Across the U.S., climate change is influencing discussions about how, and when, kids are educated. School districts, teachers, parents, students and experts are all considering how extreme heat is transforming education, and what changes need to happen for schools to adapt to extreme heat. In some places, this now includes reshaping what “back-to-school” means, as districts attempt to schedule the academic year around extreme heat.

America’s schools are vastly underprepared for extreme heat: An estimated 36,000 public schools don’t have adequate HVAC systems, and the combined costs of upgrading or installing necessary HVAC systems by 2025 is estimated at $4.4 billion nationally, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Even school districts with air conditioning may be exposing kids to excessive heat, allowing kids to play on hot outdoor blacktops without adequate shade for recess and lunchtime.

As districts work through the lengthy process of financing and planning these infrastructure upgrades, some hope that pushing back the first day of school could reduce school closures and other effects of extreme heat on students.

The impacts of heat on students’ health and learning is well-documented; studies have found that without air conditioning, every 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature during a school year reduces the year’s learning by 1 percent. Unexpected school closures can leave parents scrambling for child care, and in some cases might send students to homes that are also hot and un-air conditioned.

Since the early 1970s, demand for cooling during the back-to-school season has increased by an average of 32 percent, according to an analysis of 231 locations by the nonprofit Climate Central.

“It’s not just that we get extreme weather. It’s that our summers are literally longer,” said Joellen Russell, Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Integrative Science at the University of Arizona and member of Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists who are also moms.

Most school districts are left on their own to plot out their state-dictated minimum days of instruction onto a calendar, while planning for holiday breaks and end-of-year testing, and balancing input from parents, teachers and students.

In Palm Springs Unified School District, this calculation has landed students with a start date in the first week of August for the past several years, according to Joan Boiko, the district’s coordinator for communications and community outreach. This allows for a three-week winter break and a two-week spring break, and allows high schoolers to finish exams before winter break.

“While it is certainly warm here in the desert in August, it is typically just as hot in early September,” wrote Boiko in an email. Detiege, meanwhile, said she remains “very disappointed” in the calendar.

The neighboring Desert Sands Unified School District made a different decision. According to Jordan Aquino, assistant superintendent for business services at the district, planning for this school year included looking into what weeks are typically hottest. As a result, the district moved its first day back from the third to fourth week of August, pushing the last day of school further into June.

The two California desert districts have air conditioning, so students are primarily affected by heat on their way to and from school, at recess, during P.E. and at lunchtime. But in other regions of the country, districts are grappling with a need for air conditioning that didn’t exist when school buildings were first constructed. Nationwide, an estimated 41 percent of districts need to update or replace HVAC systems in at least half of their schools, according to a 2020 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In recent years, the lack of adequate HVAC systems has led to school closures and early dismissals as classrooms become too hot for students. School district leaders hope that proactively planning the school year around extreme heat will reduce some of these unexpected closures.

Carrie A. Olson taught in classrooms without air conditioning for three decades in Denver Public Schools. When the weather got warm, she’d leave her classroom windows open overnight, allowing cool air to flow in. But this tactic is less effective with the climate change-driven rise in nighttime temperatures.

In 2020, Denver voters approved a bond measure that set aside funding to install air conditioning at 24 schools. “But it still wasn’t everybody, and that rollover from when the bond was passed to when everything would be implemented was time-consuming,” said Olson, who has a doctorate in curriculum and instruction and now serves as president of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education. Pushing back the first day of school by a week seemed like an interim solution, so the district did just that starting in the 2021-22 school year.

“At that time, it seemed like things were cooling off in mid- to late-August, and a week later would really help,” said Olson. A total of 29 schools are still without air conditioning in the district, and another bond measure is going before voters this fall.

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

In Milwaukee, where only about one-fourth of public school classrooms have air conditioning, the district took a similar approach this year. Previously, Milwaukee’s high schools and most middle schools started in August and most elementary schools started in September. But when the district surveyed employees, parents and students about the academic calendar last year, the biggest concern was air conditioning.

Moving all students to a September start date “would put the district in the best position to avoid excessive heat days during the upcoming school year,” said Milwaukee Public Schools Chief Human Resources Officer Adria Maddaleni during a December 2023 meeting. The change seems to have staved off some unexpected cancellations for the district, at least this school year: Heat indexes rose above 100 degrees in Milwaukee during the last week of August, forcing some private schools that were already in session to cancel classes.

“The reality is that it’s an okay solution, but it’s not perfect, because there are many school districts where you could get 100-degree days in November,” said V. Kelly Turner, associate director of the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles, who also leads the new Center of Excellence for Heat Resilient Communities. “But the other thing is that the heat season isn’t just shifting, it’s getting longer.”

That brings up questions of how adjusting school calendars might affect summer break and students who don’t have air conditioning at home, said Turner. For example, for a student without air conditioning at home, spending a longer portion of the hottest days of summer at home would just mean staying in a hot home or apartment.

In Philadelphia, heat also came up as one of the biggest topics of discussion when the district planned the 2023-24 and 2024-25 calendars, with survey responses from parents, students, teachers and others showing a preference for a post-Labor Day start date. “Beginning school after Labor Day avoids possible school closures due to excessive heat,” according to a document prepared for a February 2023 school board meeting. The board voted that month to start 2023-24 after Labor Day, but to begin the 2024-25 school year in August due to scheduling limitations. The district now aims to start after Labor Day “whenever possible,” while also working to expand cooling systems, according to the board meeting document. 

The School District of Philadelphia has made gains in cooling its aging buildings, including through a donation from Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts that added air conditioning units to 10 schools this year. But 63 schools still lack adequate cooling and close early when weather is expected to reach 85 degrees by noon, according to Monique Braxton, deputy chief of communications for the district.

Philadelphia dismissed schools early in 2023 and 2024 due to heat during the first week of school. Last year, 73 schools received early dismissal during the entire first week of school after Labor Day, and this year, the 63 remaining schools without adequate cooling dismissed early on Aug. 27 and Aug. 28.

Related: Canceled classes, sweltering classrooms: How extreme heat impairs learning

Experts on heat and schools say scheduling academic calendars around extreme heat comes with limitations. In much of the country, August typically experiences hotter days than June, but pushing back the first day of school still risks pushing the school year further into June, which also experiences temperatures high enough to cancel school. And with temperatures projected to keep getting higher on both ends of the academic calendar, relying on scheduling alone to address extreme heat would be a constant shuffle.

“I think that the degree that you would need to push back the school year will become greater and greater every year, unless we figure out how to adapt the structures that kids are learning in, and make the investments in updating this older infrastructure, because temperatures will continue to increase,” said Lindsey Burghardt, chief science officer at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

The University of Arizona’s Russell called the strategy a “temporary stopgap” to extreme heat.

Federal money is available now for HVAC upgrades; the Inflation Reduction Act included a provision that will reimburse schools that install heat pumps and other clean energy technologies, according to Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Undauntedk12, an organization focused on supporting schools’ transition to clean energy. Some districts also used federal Covid-relief aid to improve HVAC systems, according to Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, although she said it’s hard to know for sure how many districts used the funds for those upgrades due to different reporting requirements in each state.

In Denver, Olson said the board hasn’t considered pushing the start date back even further into August or September.

“Just thinking about the shift in our climate across our planet, shifting the calendar isn’t going to be as helpful as it was three years ago when we passed this,” said Olson. “The solution is going to be to get more heat mitigation strategies and air conditioning in our schools with an eye toward sustainability.”

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

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Imagine engineering students retrofitting campus buildings to make them more energy efficient. Or students in a human behavior class applying what they’ve learned to encourage cafeteria visitors to waste less food.

Efforts like these are part of an instructional approach known as the “campus as a living lab,” in which classroom teaching mixes with on-the-ground efforts to decarbonize campuses. Earlier this year, I visited the State University of New York to see the living lab model in action.

During my trip, I sat in on a business class as students pitched their proposals for greening the New Paltz campus. They’d researched topics including solar energy and composting, acquiring skills in project management and finance as they developed their business plans. Students I spoke with said the fact that the projects had a chance of becoming reality — thanks to money from a university “green revolving fund” — helped the lessons stick.

“A lot of projects are kind of like simulations,” Madeleine Biles, a graduating senior, told me. “This one was real life.”

I was struck by how professors in fields as diverse as theater, economics and architecture were participating in the “living lab” model. Former NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz writes about a related trend in her latest column for Hechinger: Colleges embedding climate-related content into all sorts of classes — sociology, history, English literature, French.

“We want every major to be a climate major,” Toddi Steelman, vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability at Duke University, told Anya. “Our responsibility is to ensure we have educated our students to capably deal with these challenges and identify the solutions. Whatever they do — preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, legislators — if they have some sort of background in climate and sustainability, they will carry that into their first job and the next job.”

Research take

This is Planet Ed, the Aspen Institute initiative on climate and education, highlighted strategies like these and more in its recent plan for how colleges and universities can respond to the climate crisis. The report talks about higher ed’s role primarily in four areas:

• Educating and supporting students: Higher ed can ensure all students obtain a basic level of climate literacy and also prepare students for jobs in renewable energy and related fields. One example: The Kern Community College system, in California, is attempting to move away from training students for oil jobs to jobs in carbon management.
• Engaging people in communities where colleges are located: Higher ed can convene and support community leaders as they develop climate plans. For example, the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University has worked with predominantly Black communities in the Gulf Coast to mitigate environmental harms.  
• Developing solutions for climate mitigation: Colleges must reduce their own climate footprint and prepare their campuses for climate risks. Some examples: Arizona State University has a “campus metabolism dashboard” that allows students, faculty and staff to track their resource use, while at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, 85 percent of its 41 campus vehicles are electric.  
• Putting equity at the center of their climate work: Colleges can prioritize support for students most affected by climate and educational inequities, and historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, and other institutions that serve such individuals must be part of climate planning. The HBCU Climate Change Consortium, for example, strives to diversify the pipeline of environmental leaders.

The interview

I spoke with John B. King Jr., chancellor of the State University of New York and co-chair of This is Planet Ed, about higher ed’s role in fighting climate change and how it’s reshaping childhood. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What are you doing at SUNY to combat climate change?

One of the first things I did was name a chief sustainability officer, Carter Strickland. He has convened a task force that is developing a system-wide climate action plan to address campus sustainability practices and educate students around climate issues and for green jobs. He also has worked with our campuses on their clean energy master plans. Each of our state operating campuses has identified what steps they need to take to get to the 2045 net-zero [greenhouse gas emissions] goal. We changed our algorithm for prioritizing capital projects to build in climate, so we are doing a number of projects that involve geothermal.

According to the nonprofit group Second Nature, only about 12 universities are carbon neutral. Why can’t SUNY and other universities move faster to reduce their carbon footprint?

It really comes down to capital. For our state-operating campuses, we project it’s going to take something like $10 billion in capital investment to get to our net zero targets. We also have a substantial critical maintenance backlog of $7 billion or $8 billion dollars. One way we’re trying to reconcile this challenge is as we do renovations of buildings, we are taking steps to make them as energy efficient as possible. We are adding more charging stations, we’re moving our fleets to electric, we’re changing out light fixtures, we are phasing in a ban on single-use plastic. We do think the Inflation Reduction Act may be a help because of the direct pay provision [which provides universities and other nonprofits payment equivalent to the value of tax credits for qualifying clean energy projects].

Could this result in students having to pay more to attend SUNY schools?

No. Our hope is that the governor and legislature will work with us to develop a comprehensive capital plan.

How is climate change already reshaping childhood?

Sadly. We already see school being disrupted regularly by extreme weather events, whether that’s hurricanes or heat waves. There is growing data on the negative impact of high temperatures on student learning. We already are seeing the negative consequences of climate change for the student experience. If you think about being a kid in Phoenix where it’s well over 100 for days, you’re not going to be able to play outside. But I do think increasingly you are seeing K-12 trying to engage students in how they can be a part of the solution — and students are demanding that.

Resources and events

• As this summer — the hottest on record — nears an end, I’m looking forward to several sessions on education happening Sept. 24, 25 and 26 as part of Climate Week NYC. Say hi if you’re going, too.
• EARTHDAY.ORG, a nonprofit that supports environmental action worldwide, recently released a “School Guide to Climate Action.” On Oct. 9, in Washington, D.C., the group will hold a workshop for educators on the guide and climate instruction in schools. Email walker@earthday.org with questions or to sign up.
• A new World Bank report argues that climate action has been slow in part because people don’t have the necessary knowledge and skills. Policy makers need to invest in education as a tool for fighting climate change, it says.
• New research in the journal WIREs Climate Change examines the fossil fuel industry’s extensive involvement in higher education. Oil and gas companies and their affiliated foundations finance climate and energy research, sit on university governance boards and host student-recruitment events on campus, the report notes. 

What I’m reading

The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton. This novel tells the story of a family trying to survive in a Florida of the not-so-distant future that’s been ravaged by climate change. There’s an education angle: Storms and floods have driven away most residents of the fictional town of Rudder, including the only friend of 10-year-old Wanda, for whom school has become a hostile place. I found this book absolutely gutting but it also provides a glimpse of how people can persevere and even thrive in a world that looks very different from the one we’ve known.

Thanks for subscribing — and please let me know your thoughts on this newsletter and what you’d like to see me cover!

— Caroline Preston

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

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Environment and Sustainability in Enlightenment France. Modeling for Energy and Infrastructure Project Finance. Adirondack Cultural Ecology. Perspectives on the Amazon.

These courses, offered at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania; Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry; and Duke University in North Carolina, respectively, illustrate how institutions are rethinking the study of sustainability at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The new Higher Ed Climate Action Plan from the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor) identifies the need to educate and support students as a top priority. No surprise there. 

The plan further calls for this learning to be broad, interdisciplinary and future-oriented, giving students a path to a sustainable workforce.

“The scale of the challenges we face demands that all people have baseline understanding” of climate, the plan says. “[H]igher education must advance a learning agenda…with cross-disciplinary educational offerings.”

In a 2022 global survey, 60 percent of higher education institutions said that climate-related content is found in fewer than 10 percent of their courses. But a vanguard of colleges and universities are looking to change that. Each of these diverse institutions has their own unique method and mission. They are all taking the strategy of integrating sustainability content as widely across the curriculum as is feasible. They are breaking out of traditional silos and disciplines, and ensuring that these courses are encountered by as many students as possible.

Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for fighting climate change

Toddi Steelman, former Stanback Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke, was a member of  the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed Higher Ed Task Force. Duke introduced a wide-ranging climate commitment in 2022 that spans operations, research grants and partnerships, including with the New York Climate Exchange.

But “education is our superpower,” Steelman said. “We want every major to be a climate major. Our responsibility is to ensure we have educated our students to capably deal with these challenges and identify the solutions. Whatever they do – preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, legislators – if they have some sort of background in climate and sustainability, they will carry that into their first job and the next job.”

Accordingly, each of the ten schools within the university is working to define for itself what it means to be aligned with what Duke calls a “fluency framework.” The framework spans skills, behaviors and attitudes that uphold climate and sustainability understanding.

Allowing each school to find its own way, rather than mandating a shift to climate content by fiat, will take time. Steelman is advocating for fluency for all undergraduates by 2028, she said, but “We’re working through a committee process and we’ll see what sticks.”

The hope is that this process, honoring faculty expertise, results in more ownership and more meaningful integration of climate content. Steelman says the schools of nursing and medicine have been out in front, along with, fascinatingly, the French department.

“They are introducing climate change issues into conversational French,” she said. “They are also thinking about research about how you conjugate verbs. The way you talk and think about the future has consequences for climate change.”

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

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse was ranked number one in the nation (along with two other schools) for its sustainability curriculum in 2023.  So it’s perhaps surprising that it doesn’t have a single course that focuses solely on climate change. At least not yet.

“We don’t necessarily teach specifically about climate change, at least at the introductory level,” said Stephen Shaw, the chair of the Environmental Resources Engineering department.

“We definitely teach the fundamentals that let people understand the science of it, and what it means to do climate adaptation, and mitigation,” he added. Students can even work with one professor to directly build instruments that measure greenhouse gases in the field.

The faculty, said Shaw, is now debating adding an interdisciplinary, introductory course that answers questions like: “What is the basic science? What are the impacts? What are the impacts to people? What are the impacts to habitat, recreation, all across the board?”

Related: Changing education can change the climate

Dickinson, a liberal arts college of just over 2,000 students in Pennsylvania coal country, mandated in 2019 that every student take at least one sustainability course as a requirement for graduation. In practice, said Neil Leary, Dickinson’s associate provost and director of the Center for Sustainability Education, “over 50 percent of students who graduated this past May had taken four or more such courses, and one in four had taken more than six.”

Dickinson offers more than 100 sustainability courses per semester, in departments from business to architecture. The college’s “Mosaic” courses, offered once or twice a year, are of particular interest. They are co-taught by professors in different disciplines and often include an independent study and a travel component. In a recent offering, on the energy transition in Germany, students studied representations of the environment in German literature and culture, and also traveled to Germany to see its adoption of solar and energy efficiency in practice.

Like Duke with its fluency framework, Dickinson follows a broad definition of sustainability, Leary says. He cites the Global Council for Science and the Environment, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to advancing environmental and sustainability education and research, which has identified five key competencies in the field: Systems thinking, future-thinking, collaboration skills, strategic thinking and values-thinking.

“This is not value-neutral education,” Leary said. “Sustainability has a set of values that includes taking all people’s needs into account.”

Related: COLUMN: Colleges must give communities a seat at the table alongside scientists if we want real environmental justice

For now, institutions that go all-in on sustainability are rare enough that it can serve as a selling point in the competition for students, faculty and donors. Leary says 40 percent of undergraduates Dickinson surveyed recently agreed that this was a major factor that brought them to the college.

But if leaders in the sector have their way, an all-sustainable curriculum will shift from a nice-to-have to table stakes. Bryan Alexander, author of Universities on Fireand an educational futurist with a particular focus on climate change, said, “My slogan is, climate change is the new liberal arts.”

This column about sustainability courses 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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DURANGO, Colo. — For three dozen high schoolers, summer break in this southwest Colorado city kicked off with some rock climbing, mountain biking and fly-fishing.

Then, the work began.

As part of a weeklong institute on climate and the environment, mountain researchers taught the students how to mix clumps of grass seed, clay, compost and sand for seedballs that they threw into burned areas of the Hermosa Creek watershed to help with native plant recovery. The students upturned rocks — and splashed each other — along the banks of the Animas River, searching for signs of aquatic life after a disastrous mine spill. They later waded through a wetland and scouted for beaver dams as part of a lesson on how humans can support water restoration.

Each task was designed to prepare them for potential careers connected to the natural world — forest ecologist, aquatic biologist, conservationist. Many of the students had already taken college-level environmental science courses, on subjects such as pollution mitigation and water quality, at local high schools and Fort Lewis College.

Other students in and around Durango were taking a summer crash course in the health sciences, and this fall can earn college credit in classes like emergency medical services and nursing. Still others were participating in similar programs for early childhood education and for teacher preparation.

“I like the let-me-work-outside model,” said Autumn Schulz, a rising sophomore at Ignacio High School. Every day this past school year, she rode a public transit bus, passing miles of high desert terrain, to take an ecology class at Bayfield High School, in another district. She’d already completed internships at a mountain research nonprofit and a public utility to explore environmental and municipal jobs in her preferred field.

“It’s my favorite subject,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite things.”

None of this would have been possible before 2020. Back then, the Bayfield, Durango and Ignacio school districts operated largely independently. But as the pandemic took hold and communities debated whether to reopen schools after lockdown, a newly formed alliance of nine rural districts in southwest Colorado attempted to extinguish their attendance boundaries and pooled staff and financial resources to help more students get into college and high-paying careers.

Across the United States, rural schools often struggle to provide the kinds of academic opportunities that students in more populous areas might take for granted. Although often the hub of their communities, rural schools tend to struggle with a shrinking teaching force, budgets spread too thin and limited access to employers who can help. Rural students have fewer options for advanced courses or career and technical education, or CTE, before entering the workforce.

But clustered near the Four Corners in Colorado, the coalition of nine rural districts has partnered with higher education and business leaders to successfully expand career and college pathways for their students. A nonprofit formed by the districts conducts job market analysis and surveys teenagers about their interests. Armed with that data, academic counselors can advise students on the array of new CTE and college-level classes in high-wage positions in the building trades, hospitality and tourism, health sciences, education and the environment.

Teachers working in classrooms separated by 100 miles or more regularly meet in-person and online to share curriculum and industry-grade equipment. More than five dozen employers in the region have created ways for students to explore careers in new fields, such as apprenticeships, job shadows and internships. And some students earn a job offer, workforce certificate or associate degree before they finish high school.

Collectively, the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative has raised more than $7 million in private and public money to pay for these programs, and its work has inspired similar rural alliances across the state. The collaborative’s future, however, is uncertain, as federal pandemic relief funds that supported its creation soon expire. Advocates have started to campaign for a permanent funding fix and changes in state policy that would make it easier for rural schools to continue partnering with one another.

Jess Morrison, who stepped down at the end of July as the collaborative’s founding executive director, said the group — and others like it in Indiana and South Texas — demonstrates the strength of regional neighbors creating solutions of their own, together.

“It’s about our region not waiting on people to save us,” she said.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

Nationally, more than 9.5 million U.S. students — or about 1 in 5 students — attend a rural school. The National Center for Education Statistics has found that, compared with the U.S. average, students in rural schools finish high school at higher rates and even outperform their peers in cities and suburbs. But only 55 percent of rural high schoolers enroll in college, a much lower share than their urban and suburban counterparts. Rural students make less money as adults and, compared to suburban students, are more likely to grow up in poverty.

In this part of southwest Colorado, where about half of students qualify for subsidized meals at school, employers have struggled to find enough workers but also to provide a liveable wage. Hoping to steer more high schoolers into high-skill and high-wage jobs, educators and superintendents from five school districts — Archuleta, Bayfield, Durango, Ignacio and Silverton — started to meet with representatives from Fort Lewis College and Pueblo Community College. In early 2019, they began working with the nonprofits Empower Schools and Lyra Colorado to formally create a regional collaborative and visited a similar project in South Texas.

Covid briefly disrupted much of that work, but in June 2020, tapping federal relief dollars for education, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced a nearly $33 million fund to close equity gaps and support students affected by the pandemic. Already poised to work together, the collaborative secured the largest award — $3.6 million — from the governor’s fund to help students explore environmental science and the building trades, two areas in which the number of jobs was projected to increase.

Despite that demand for workers, none of the school districts offered a single class in HVAC, electrical or plumbing, according to Morrison, nor did any of the nearby higher ed institutions. “We were a complete desert,” she said.

In 2022, the collaborative began piloting summer institutes, employers started hiring students directly from those programs and Pueblo Community College began offering electrical certification at its southwest campus. Woodworking instructors from different districts started to gather monthly, comparing lesson plans and creating wish lists for new classes and equipment. New CNC routers, laser cutters and electric planers arrived at teachers’ classrooms. Soon, teachers will pilot an HVAC course for high schoolers.

Over time, the collaborative added four additional school districts: Dolores, Dove Creek, Mancos and Montezuma Cortez. It also formally partnered with two tribal nations, Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute, while expanding its college and career tracks to include education, the health sciences and hospitality/tourism.

As of 2023, nearly 900 students across the nine districts — of about 13,000 total for the region — had participated in environmental, agriculture and outdoor recreation courses, according to the collaborative’s annual report. Approximately 325 students have completed a building trades course, with 40 so far earning industry certificates. Another 199 students finished a welding course, and 77 students also took college-level classes in that field.

Joshua Walton just finished his 11th year teaching science at Bayfield High School. He’s seen the changes firsthand: His classroom today has clinometers, game cameras and soil-testing equipment on its shelves. Walton often reserves the collaborative’s mobile learning unit, a 14-passenger van converted into a traveling science lab, so students can run experiments along the Animas River. He also prepares students to get their certification in water science.

“We’re giving students the opportunity where they can be an aquatic biologist or get a job doing water testing pretty much right after they graduate,” said Walton.

Tiffany Aspromonte, who works as academic advisor at Mancos High School, grew up in town and has raised her two children there. Her oldest son, a rising senior at Mancos High, regularly changes his mind about his future, she said.

He already earned a mini-certification in welding, and he’s taken courses in drones and — when he wanted to become an eye doctor — medical terminology. Now, he’s in love with hands-on engineering classes, but hates the bookwork, Aspromonte said. This fall, her son will spend Friday nights at Pueblo Community College for a wildland fire class.

“He’s not the exception,” Aspromonte said. “Just in our small school, a lot of kids can go really in-depth so they can get an idea of what they do or don’t want to do.”

And, she added, the rural brain drain — of ambitious students leaving a small town for college or better jobs — seems less pressing.

“There’s no pressure to leave home, unless you really want to,” Aspromonte said.

Related: MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students

Along the way there have been challenges. Since 2020, all but one of the founding five superintendents left their positions, reflecting the nationwide churn of school leaders during the pandemic. Deciding how to divide money among districts hasn’t always been easy, said Morrison, the collaborative’s former director.

Student enrollment in shared courses never reached a point that would justify added costs, such as transportation. This fall, the alliance will limit the classes that high schoolers can take across district lines to education and health sciences. (Students can still take the courses in the building trades, environment and hospitality/tourism in their own high schools and at the local colleges. Each track will continue to include work-based learning.)

“We needed to simplify our approach,” Morrison said. “We started grand with all five pathways across all nine districts.”

And working with local business leaders has at times been challenging too, said Patrick Fredricks, the collaborative’s deputy director. Employers often want to give students tours of their businesses but, with the collaborative’s nudging, they can create real-world lessons: A popular bar and grill in Cortez reopened on a day off so students could host a pop-up restaurant. Dove Creek schools sent 20 kids to practice with staple guns and X-ray machines in the paramedic wing of the regional hospital.

Today, the collaborative regularly hosts career fairs with local businesses, matches students with employers to shadow on half-day visits to the workplace and helps arrange longer-term internships as well. Last school year, more than 200 students shadowed business leaders at 16 different job sites, including the local hospital, ski resorts and a cattle ranch.

The Colorado Education Initiative, a Denver-based nonprofit, has studied the impact of the pandemic relief money on students and plans to release initial findings this fall. In an early review of the data, released last November, the nonprofit found that projects funded by the governor’s office, including those of the collaborative, generally improved academic and social emotional outcomes.

The collaborative model has started to spread. Three remote districts in eastern Indiana recently created a “rural alliance zone” to get students into IT, advanced manufacturing, marketing and other career clusters. Last year, the Texas legislature overwhelmingly approved the creation of an annual $5 million pot of money to incentivize the creation of rural alliances in that state.

Back in Colorado, political allies of the collaborative have pitched the idea of dedicating state money for such partnerships or reducing the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork needed to share funds among school districts. Eric Maruyama, spokesman for Gov. Polis, said in a statement that the Colorado governor “is committed to creating educational opportunities that give students the skills needed to thrive and fill in-demand jobs” but declined to say if he would take specific action.

Taylor McCabe-Juhnke, executive director of the Rural Schools Collaborative, a national network that operates in more than 30 states, said she’s optimistic that successful partnerships in rural communities like southwest Colorado will convince philanthropic and public funders to invest.

“It’s not very sexy to fund or make time and space for relationship building,” she said. “It’s also the right thing to do to benefit broader rural community vitality.”

In Silverton, an old mining town near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, kayakers called to the students sitting on rocks along banks of the Animas River. The teenagers circled around ice trays brimming with river water and tried to classify the swimming macroinvertebrates.

“Is that one squiggly like a worm?” BreAnna Bennet, a rising senior from Durango High School, asked her group.

At the start of the summer program, Bennet said she had no desire to do any job in the outdoors. By the third day, she often tailed the instructor and supplied a stream of questions about wetland restoration efforts and wildlife in the backcountry.

“This is fun. I like this,” Bennet said, looking up from the ice tray. “Your activity is my favorite so far.”

This story about Colorado rural schools alliances 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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NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — At the end of a semester that presaged one of the hottest summers on record, the students in Associate Professor Michael Sheridan’s business class were pitching proposals to cut waste and emissions on their campus and help turn it into a vehicle for fighting climate change.

Flanking a giant whiteboard at the front of the classroom, members of the team campaigning to build a solar canopy on a SUNY New Paltz parking lot delivered their pitch. The sunbaked lot near the athletic center was an ideal spot for a shaded solar panel structure, they said, a conduit for solar energy that could curb the campus’s reliance on natural gas. 

The project would require $43,613 in startup money. It would be profitable within roughly five years, the students said. And over 50 years, it would save the university $787,130 in energy costs.

“Solar canopies have worked for other universities, including other SUNY schools,” said Ian Lominski, a graduating senior who said he hopes to one day work for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “It’s well within the realm of possibility for SUNY New Paltz.” 

Sheridan’s course is an example of an approach known as “campus as a living lab,” which seeks to simultaneously educate students and reduce the carbon footprint of college campuses. Over the past decade, a growing number of professors in fields as diverse as business, English and the performing arts have integrated their teaching with efforts to minimize their campuses’ waste and emissions, at a time when human-created climate change is fueling dangerous weather and making life on Earth increasingly unstable. 

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Engineering students have helped retrofit buildings. Theater students have produced no-waste productions. Ecology students have restored campus wetlands. Architecture students have modeled campus buildings’ airflow and worked to improve their energy efficiency. The efforts are so diverse that it’s difficult to get a complete count of them, but they’ve popped up on hundreds of campuses around the country.

“I think it’s a very, very positive step,” said Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University and author of the book “Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis.” “You’ve got the campus materials, you’ve got the integration of teaching and research, which we claim to value, and it’s also really good for students in a few ways,” including by helping them take action on climate in ways that can improve mental health.

That said, the work faces difficulties, among them that courses typically last only a semester, making it hard to maintain projects. But academics and experts see promising results: Students learn practical skills in a real-world context, and their projects provide vivid examples to help educate entire campuses and communities about solutions to alleviate climate change.

From the food waste students and staff produce, to emissions from commuting to campus and flying to conferences, to the energy needed to power campus buildings, higher education has a significant climate footprint. In New York, buildings are among the single largest sources of carbon emissions — and the State University of New York system owns a whopping 40 percent of the state’s public buildings. 

About 15 years ago, college leaders began adding “sustainability officers” to their payrolls and signing commitments to achieve carbon neutrality. But only a dozen of the 400 institutions that signed on have achieved net-zero emissions to date, according to Bridget Flynn, senior manager of climate programs with the nonprofit Second Nature, which runs the network of universities committed to decarbonizing. (The SUNY system has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045, per its chancellor, John B. King Jr.) 

Campus sustainability efforts have faced hurdles including politics and declining enrollment and revenue, say experts. “Higher ed is in crisis and institutions are so concerned about keeping their doors open, and sustainability is seen as nice to have instead of essential,” said Meghan Fay Zahniser, who leads the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. 

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

But there’s change happening on some campuses, she and others noted. At Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, a net-zero campus since 2020, students in statistics classes have run data analyses to assess why certain buildings are less efficient than others. Psychology students studying behavior change helped the campus dining hall adopt a practice of offering half, full and double portions to cut down on food waste. Physics students designed solar thermal boxes to boost renewable biogas production on an organic farm owned by the college. 

Neil Leary, associate provost and director of the college’s Center for Sustainability Education, teaches classes in sustainability. Last fall’s students analyzed climate risks and resilience strategies for the campus and its surrounding county and then ran a workshop for community members. Among the recommendations emerging from the class: that athletic coaches and facilities staff receive training on heat-related health risks. 

Similarly, at SUNY Binghamton, Pamela Mischen, chief sustainability officer and an environmental studies professor, teaches a course called Planning the Sustainable University. Her students, who come from majors including environmental studies, engineering and pre-law, have helped develop campus green purchasing systems, started a student-run community garden and improved reuse rates for classroom furniture. 

And across the country, at Weber State University in Utah, students have joined the campus’s push toward renewable energy. Engineering students, for example, helped build a solar-powered charging station on a picnic table. A professor in the school’s construction and building sciences program led students in designing and building a net-zero house. 

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

On the leafy SUNY New Paltz campus about 80 miles north of Manhattan, campus sustainability coordinator Lisa Mitten has spent more than a decade working to reduce the university’s environmental toll. Among the projects she runs is a sustainability faculty fellows program that helps professors incorporate climate action into their instruction. 

One day this May, Andrea Varga, an associate professor of theatre design and a sustainability fellow, listened as the students in her honors Ethical Fashion class presented their final projects. Varga’s class covers the environmental harms of the global fashion industry (research suggests it is responsible for at least 4 percent of greenhouse emissions worldwide, or roughly the total emissions of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined). For their presentations, her students had developed ideas for reducing fashion’s toll, on the campus and beyond, by promoting thrifting, starting “clothes repair cafes” and more. 

Jazmyne Daily-Simpson, a student from Long Island scheduled to graduate in 2025, discussed expanding a project started a few years earlier by a former student, Roy Ludwig, to add microplastic filters to more campus washing machines. In a basement laundry room in Daily-Simpson’s dorm, two washers are rigged with the contraptions, which gradually accumulate a goopy film as they trap the microplastic particles and keep them from entering the water supply.

Ludwig, a 2022 graduate who now teaches Earth Science at Arlington High School about 20 miles from New Paltz, took Varga’s class and worked with her on an honors project to research and install the filters. A geology major, he’d been shocked that it took a fashion class to introduce him to the harms of microplastics, which are found in seafood, breast milk, semen and much more. “It’s an invisible problem that not everyone is thinking about,” he said. “You can notice a water bottle floating in a river. You can’t notice microplastics.”

Around campus, there are other signs of the living lab model. Students in an economics class filled the entryway of a library with posters on topics such as the lack of public walking paths and bike lanes in the surrounding county and inadequate waste disposal in New York State. A garden started by sculpture and printmaking professors serves as a space for students to learn about plants used to make natural dyes that don’t pollute the environment. 

In the business school classroom, Sheridan, the associate professor, had kicked off the student presentations by explaining to an audience that included campus facilities managers and local green business leaders how the course, called Introduction to Managing Sustainability, originated when grad students pitched the idea in 2015. The projects are powered by a “green revolving fund,” which accumulates money from cost savings created by past projects, such as reusable to-go containers and LED lightbulbs in campus buildings. Currently the fund has about $30,000. 

“This class has two overarching goals,” said Sheridan, who studied anthropology and sustainable development as an undergraduate before pursuing a doctorate in business. The first is to localize the United Nations global goals for advancing sustainability, he said, and the second is “to prove that sustainability initiatives can be a driver for economic growth.” 

In addition to the solar canopy project, students presented proposals for developing a reusable water bottle program, creating a composter and garden, digitizing dining hall receipts and organizing a bikeshare. They gamely fielded questions from the audience, many of whom had served as mentors on their projects.

Jonathan Garcia, a third-year business management major on the composting team, said later that he’d learned an unexpected skill: how to deal with uncooperative colleagues. “We had an issue with one of our teammates who just never showed up, so I had to manage that, and then people elected me leader of the group,” he said later. “I learned a lot of team-management skills.”

The solar panel team had less drama. Its members interviewed representatives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Central Hudson Gas & Electric and a local company, Lighthouse Solar, along with Mitten and other campus officials. Often, they met three times a week to research and discuss their proposal, participants said.

Lominski, the senior, plans to enroll this fall in a graduate program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse. Before Sheridan’s class, he said, he had little specific knowledge of how solar panels worked. The course also helped him refine his project management and communication skills, he said. 

His solar panel teammate Madeleine Biles, a senior majoring in management, transferred to New Paltz from SUNY Binghamton before her sophomore year because she wanted a school that felt more aligned with her desire to work for a smaller, environmentally minded business. 

An avid rock climber whose parents were outdoor educators, she’d developed some financial skills in past business classes, she said, but the exercises had always felt theoretical. This class made those lessons about return on investment and internal rate of return feel concrete. “Before it was just a bunch of formulas where I didn’t know when or why I would ever use them,” she said. 

This summer, Biles is interning with the Lake George Land Conservancy, and hopes to eventually carve out a career protecting the environment. While she said she feels fortunate that her hometown of Lake George, in New York’s Adirondack region, isn’t as vulnerable as some places to climate change, the crisis weighs on her. 

“I think if I have a career in sustainability, that will be my way of channeling that frustration and sadness and turning it into a positive thing,” she said. 

She recently got a taste of what that might feel like: In an email from Sheridan, she learned that her team’s canopy project was chosen to receive the startup funding. The school’s outgoing campus facilities chief signed off on it, and, pending approval from the department’s new leader, the university will begin the process of constructing it.

“It’s cool to know that something I worked on as a school project is actually going to happen,” said Biles. “A lot of students can’t really say that. A lot of projects are kind of like simulations. This one was real life.” 

This story about campus sustainability 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. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Angela Girol has been teaching fourth grade in Pittsburgh for over two decades. Over the years she’s noticed a change at her school: It’s getting hotter.

Some days temperatures reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit in her classroom which, like many on the East Coast, isn’t air-conditioned. When it’s hot, she said, kids don’t eat, or drink enough water. “They end up in the nurse’s office because they’re dizzy, they have a headache, their stomach hurts — all because of heat and dehydration,” she said.

To cope with the heat, her students are now allowed to keep water on their desks, but that presents its own challenges. “They’re constantly filling up water bottles, so I have to give them breaks during the day for that. And then everyone has to go to the bathroom all the time,” she said. “I’m losing instruction time.”

The effect extreme heat is having on schools and childcare is starting to get the attention of policymakers and researchers. Last week, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, published a report on the issue. In April, so did the Federation of American Scientists a nonprofit policy organization.

“The average school building in the U.S. was built nearly 50 years ago,” said policy analyst Allie Schneider, co-author of the Center for American Progress report. “Schools and childcare centers were built in areas that maybe 30 or 15 years ago didn’t require access to air-conditioning, or at least for a good portion of the year. Now we’re seeing that becoming a more pressing concern.” Students are also on campus during the hottest parts of the day. “It’s something that is really important not just to their physical health, but their learning outcomes,” she said. 

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Last April, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released its own report detailing some of the effects heat has on kids. It notes that children have a harder time thermo-regulating and take longer to produce sweat, making them more vulnerable than adults to heat exhaustion and heat illness.

Kids don’t necessarily listen to their body’s cues about heat, and might need an adult to remind them to drink water or not play outside. Kevin Toolan, a sixth-grade teacher in Long Island, New York, said having to constantly monitor heat safety distracts him from being able to teach. “The mindset is shifting to safety rather than instruction,” he said. “Those children don’t know how to handle it.”

To keep the classroom cool, he’ll turn the lights off, but kids fall asleep. “They are lethargic,” he said.

To protect kids, schools have canceled classes because temperatures have gotten too high. Warmer temperatures also lead to more kids being absent from school, especially low-income students. And heat makes it harder to learn. One study from 2020 tracked the scores of students from schools without air-conditioning who took the PSAT exam at least twice. It found that increases in the average outdoor temperature corresponded with students making smaller gains on their retakes.

Both Toolan and Girol said that cooling options like keeping doors and windows open to promote cross ventilation are gone, thanks to the clampdowns in school security after 9/11 — and worsened by the threat of school shootings. Students and teachers are trapped in their overheating classrooms. “Teachers report leaving with migraines or signs of heat exhaustion,” said Toolan. “At 100 degrees, it is very uncomfortable. Your clothes are stuck to you.”

The Center for American Progress report joins a call by other advocacy groups to create federal guidance that schools and childcare centers could adopt “to ensure that children are not forced to learn, play and exercise in dangerously hot conditions,” Schneider said. Some states already have standards in place, but they vary. In California, childcare facilities are required to keep temperatures between 68 and 85 degrees. In Maryland, the recommendation is between 74 and 82 degrees. A few states, like Florida, require schools to reduce outdoor activity on high-heat days. Schneider says federal guidance would help all school districts use the latest scientific evidence to set protective standards.

Related: Canceled classes, sweltering classrooms: How extreme heat impairs learning

In June, 23 health and education advocacy organizations signed a letter making a similar request of the Department of Education, asking for better guidance and coordination to protect kids. Some of their recommendations included publishing a plan that schools could adopt for dealing with high temperatures; encouraging states to direct more resources to providing air-conditioning in schools; and providing school districts with information on heat hazards.

“We know that school infrastructure is being overwhelmed by extreme heat, and that without a better system to advise schools on the types of practices they should be implementing, it’s going to be a little bit of the Wild West of actions being taken,” said Grace Wickerson, health equity policy manager at the Federation of American Scientists.

A longer term solution is upgrading school infrastructure but the need for air conditioning is overwhelming. According to the Center for American Progress report, 36,000 schools nationwide don’t have adequate HVAC systems. By 2025, it estimates that installing or upgrading HVAC or other cooling systems will cost around $4.4 billion.

Some state or local governments are trying to address the heat issue. In June, the New York State Legislature passed a bill now awaiting the governor’s signature that would require school staff to take measures like closing blinds or turning off lights when temperatures reach 82 degrees inside a classroom. At 88 degrees, classes would be canceled. A bill introduced last year and currently before California’s state assembly would require schools to create extreme heat action plans that could include mandating hydration and rest breaks or moving recess to cooler parts of the day.

Some teachers have been galvanized to take action, too. As president of the Patchogue-Medford Congress of Teachers, Toolan was part of an effort to secure $80 million for infrastructure upgrades through a bond vote. Over half will go to HVAC systems for some 500 schools in his district.

And Girol is running for a state representative seat in Pennsylvania, where a main plank in her platform is to fully fund public schools in order to pay for things like air-conditioning. She was recently endorsed by the Climate Cabinet, a federal political action committee. “Part of the reason climate is so important to me is because of this issue,” she said. “I see how it’s negatively affecting my students.”

This story about heat and schools was produced by The 19^th and the reprinted with permission. 

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On Earth Day, 2024, the Biden White House announced “Major Steps” toward the “Landmark American Climate Corps Initiative, Mobilizing the Next Generation of Climate Leaders.”

What that amounts to thus far is a website, currently in beta, that, on day one, listed under 2,000 jobs. Many, if not most, already existed at other agencies. Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell, the ACC’s point person at AmeriCorps, told me, “We are using existing authorities and funds to start the American Climate Corps.” Translation: There is no big new bucket of federal money for this program, yet.

So, why make the announcement now? At the risk of sounding cynical, it might have something to do with shoring up the youth vote, where Biden seems to be slipping.

During the last Presidential election cycle, the Sunrise Movement, Green New Deal Network, and other groups pushed Biden to guarantee more good, green jobs. Saul Levin, political and campaigns director at the Green New Deal Network, is one activist who told me the White House announcement is a win: “We certainly would like to see it dramatically scaled up, but I’m really optimistic. Any program has to start somewhere.”

To be fair, this really is just the beginning. Throughout the first year, there will be 20,000 total American Climate Corps positions, ranging from summer jobs to one-year slots, Shaheen-McConnell said; 200,000 are planned within five years. Some of these will be created through three newly announced “corps” partnerships with AmeriCorps and other federal agencies and nonprofits: one for forests, one for climate-smart agriculture, and one for communities transitioning away from coal and other fossil fuel-based economies. In addition, Shaheen-McConnell said, 13 states thus far have launched their own climate corps, most of which rely on some AmeriCorps funding.

Sally Slovenski, the program director for Campus Climate Action Corps, told me a national call to action is “really critical.” She said it would “definitely help raise awareness and recruit.” Her group is the first nationwide AmeriCorps program focused only on campus-based and community-led climate action initiatives, and the source of many listings on the current American Climate Corps site.

Carla Walker-Miller, CEO of Walker-Miller Energy Services, a Michigan-based energy efficiency company, is one business leader who’s excited about the recruitment potential of a national climate service program. “The new workforce demands training and innovation to support the new economy,” she said. “I really appreciate the fact that the Climate Corps exists. There has to be an easily accessible online clearing house – a one stop shop.”

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There’s some fuzziness, though, about what, exactly, makes something a climate job. Does wildfire fighting count? What about trail maintenance? Or educating park visitors on “stewardship”? Shaheen-McConnell said her agency intentionally took a “broad lens” because “every community is facing different climate challenges.”

That wide focus may be confusing to potential applicants. “Young people don’t understand how climate-related service work falls into what I call ‘the 4 Rs’ – reduction, response, recovery, and resilience/preparedness work,” said Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who studies climate and social movements. AmeriCorps and other federal agencies have given her research funding to evaluate their climate-related service work and help them build it out in an effective way.  For example, she’s developing a curriculum to help participants better understand how their service work relates to climate change.  

Rebecca Tarczy is a current AmeriCorps member with the Campus Climate Action Corps, Slovenski’s organization. Tarczy loves animals; she graduated with an environmental studies degree in fisheries and wildlife, and pictured herself working outside. Instead, her position at College of the Atlantic in Maine entails doing community education on energy efficiency.

So far, she’s installed insulation in campus buildings, and held three public information sessions on and off campus, each of which had fewer than 10 attendees. She said it’s been a bit of a letdown for herself and peers in similar positions. “I think we were all a little disappointed that it was home-energy based.” For what it’s worth, by Fisher’s definition, this is very much a climate-action job; buildings account for around 29 percent of U.S. carbon emissions.

Tarczy, 30, is also pretty strapped for cash. AmeriCorps pays her an $18,000 salary, plus some student loan forgiveness benefits. She gets subsidized housing, too: $640 a month, including utilities and Wi-Fi. “Recently my car died and I kind of had to sell my soul to get a new one,” she said, adding that when she applied for an auto loan, “They were like, ‘Is that your correct salary?’”

The stinginess of AmeriCorps stipends has been a long-time issue that critics say prevents the program from being as equitable as it could be. “We can do so much better,” said Walker-Miller, who notes that her own employees start at $19 an hour. “I think that all jobs should compensate people at a reasonable minimum wage.”

Shaheen-McConnell said the president is calling on Congress to raise the minimum living allowance for AmeriCorps members to at least $15 an hour (which would be approximately $30,000 as an annual salary, although AmeriCorps positions vary in duration and hours). The American Climate Corps is also seeking partnerships with philanthropies to provide support like childcare for those who need it.

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

The American Climate Corps is a clear historical callback to the Civilian Conservation Corps, created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression to put people back to work. But it’s a lot smaller. For nine years, CCC employed around 300,000 people per year, at a time when the U.S. population was about 40 percent of its current size. Those young people, all men, planted 2 billion trees, built over 125,000 miles of roads and trails, and fought forest fires (some say they went overboard in fire suppression).

Standing up a big new public jobs program from scratch hasn’t been done in a long time. Fisher, of American University, said that growing the corps through a “distributed, federated” approach instead of one big, new program poses difficulties that could get in the way of the program’s effectiveness. Seven different federal agencies, with vastly different goals and mandates, signed the American Climate Corps Memorandum of Understanding: the departments of Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, Labor and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and AmeriCorps.

States, especially those with Republicans in charge, may have their own, very different view of what a climate job is.

But hopefully, Fisher said, these differences can be overcome by careful evaluation and coordination. “I am a huge supporter of the ‘let many flowers bloom’ approach,” she said, “as long as they are all blooming to solve the climate crisis.”

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

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At a national park in Virginia on Monday, President Joe Biden announced that people can start applying to the American Climate Corps, a program that is expected to connect workers with more than 20,000 green jobs. 

“You’ll get paid to fight climate change, learning how to install those solar panels, fight wildfires, rebuild wetlands, weatherize homes, and so much more that’s going to protect the environment and build a clean energy economy,” Biden said at the Earth Day event. 

The American Climate Corps (ACC) is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to employ men in environmental projects on the country’s public lands — projects like trail building, planting trees and soil erosion control. Nearly 3 million people were put to work in an effort to address both Depression-era unemployment and to shore up national infrastructure.

But it wasn’t very diverse. Although Black and Native American men were allowed to enroll, the work was segregated. And women could not apply. For a brief time, a sister program created by Eleanor Roosevelt — mockingly called the “She-She-She camps” by its detractors — trained 8,500 women in skills like typing and filing.  

The Biden administration is adamant that this iteration of the program will attract a more diverse conservation and climate workforce, promising that the program will “look like America” and expand pathways into the workforce for people from marginalized backgrounds.

On Monday, Biden announced the launch of a long-awaited job board where applicants can look for opportunities. Some positions were created through the American Climate Corps partner agencies like the Forest Service, which announced the Forest Corps — 80 jobs in reforestation and wildfire mitigation — or the USDA’s Working Lands Climate Corps, with 100 positions. At the same time, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy announced a new project that will place corps members in priority energy communities — places that have historically been the site of coal mining and power plants — for work in community-led projects like environmental remediation. All of these positions have a term limit, although they vary; some listed on the website are seven-months for example, others are over a year long. 

Other jobs listed on the site are compiled from existing conservation corps programs; either state-run programs like the California Conservation Corps or those run by nonprofits like Conservation Legacy. These provide opportunities for young people in local communities to do everything from prescribed burning on public lands to solar panel installations on schools. 

So far, there are 273 listings on the website, ranging from working on trail crews to invasive plant management to wildland firefighting positions. There is also an “ag literacy” position to teach kids about where their food comes from, and a posting for a climate impact coordinator who will help a Minnesota nonprofit develop climate resilience projects. That’s a far cry from the administration’s goal of 20,000 jobs.

But supporters of the program say opportunities to expand ACC are endless — from home weatherization positions to planting tree canopies in urban areas. The question is whether these mostly taxpayer-funded jobs will attract and retain a diverse workforce and benefits women and LGBTQ+ workers, as well as people of color. 

“We know that it is going to take everybody to solve the climate process and we need to field the whole team. That’s exactly the way we’ve thought about building this program,” said Maggie Thomas, special assistant for climate to Biden.

Because the program is working with The Corps Network, a national association of about 140 conservation groups, there is already some data on how modern-day organizations operate, said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of the network. “They collectively engage almost 25,000 young people a year and are very diverse — young people from urban areas to rural areas. There is a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and education level.”

According to the organization’s data from 2023, the most recent year available, 44 percent of their members were women and 3 percent were gender non-conforming or gender expansive.

Fifty-nine percent identified as White, while 14 percent were Black, 23 percent were Latino, 4 percent were American Indian, 3 percent were Asian and 2 percent were Pacific Islander. 

Sprenkel sees those numbers as progress. “What has evolved out of the original CCC has naturally become much more diverse in terms of member opportunities. And so building on that for the ACC, I think it will naturally happen,” said Sprenkel. 

In addition, any of the jobs created through federal agencies in collaboration with the ACC must adhere to the administration’s Justice 40 initiative, which means 40 percent of the benefits must go to marginalized communities, in this case either through job creation, or through the projects being funded through monies like the Inflation Reduction Act. 

One aspect of parity will be how well these jobs pay. Many of the positions listed on the ACC site are funded through AmeriCorps, which pays modest living stipends that have been criticized as “poverty wages.” AmeriCorps “was designed for middle class White people who could get support from their parents to have this opportunity,” Sprenkel said. But the Biden administration wants to ensure that all young people can serve, she continued, not just those who can afford to take lower-paying positions.

Sprenkel said the administration is aiming for positions to pay a living wage — with some wiggle room that allows for lower wages as long as housing and other benefits are provided. “[They’ve] said we would like for programs to strive to pay their members $15 an hour, but if that is the result of a package where you’re providing housing and transportation, that’s OK.”

One way the administration has aimed to increase pay transparency is to list an hourly wage equivalent for the jobs posted on the ACC website, said Thomas. This number could factor in stipends for transportation, living expenses and educational awards. Many jobs currently listed go above the $15 minimum — though some require more than entry-level experience. 

There are also efforts in the works to increase the low stipends of current AmeriCorps members. “The president has called on Congress to raise the minimum living allowance for all of our crew members to at least $15 an hour as a starting point,” said Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell, senior advisor for AmeriCorps. In the interim, she said, many corps positions have been able to offer packages equivalent to $15 an hour through public and private partnerships with states and outside organizations.

Madeleine Sirois, a research analyst with the left-leaning think tank Urban Institute, has been researching workforce development pathways in the clean energy transition. She said offering paid opportunities to enter a new career is a good starting point. “So many people want to upskill, they want to get new credentials, and maybe change career paths. But then they can’t leave their current job that maybe only pays 10 bucks an hour,” she said. 

But other benefits are important, too, if the program is going to be equitable in its rollout, said Sirois. “It’s been mentioned on the portal that there are health care, child care, transportation and housing available, but it does say only some opportunities will offer that,” she said. “So it leaves me with the question of: Who has access to that and who doesn’t?” 

Among the initial 273 listings posted on the ACC site, The 19th found only four that listed child care as a benefit, though Shaheen-McConnell said that eventually more of the positions will offer it. 

Sirois said another important aspect of the ACC will be whether it will lead to actual jobs in clean energy and climate work after corps service ends. She was heartened by Monday’s announcement that the ACC had partnered with the North America’s Building Trades Alliance TradeFutures program, which will provide every ACC member access to a free pre-apprenticeship trades readiness program. Trades jobs make up the foundation of the clean energy transition, but have historically gone to men. Just 4 percent of women are trades workers in the United States. 

“These are all really important, especially for getting women and people of color into these jobs, and apprenticeships that will lead into quality careers that are unionized in many cases. So I think that’s fantastic,” said Sirois. However, while the administration has also touted that ACC positions will offer workforce certifications and skill-based training, Sirois said those are only offered for some corps members. Getting clarity on how many of these jobs will lead to improved employment opportunities will be key. 

It’s going to take time to see how the program plays out, she said, and learn if it will be successful in placing women and people of color in trades jobs, despite historic discrimination.

“When we talk about moving people into jobs, it’s making sure we’re very specific about what kinds of jobs in terms of the quality,” she said. “It’s about opportunities for advancement, having meaningful work, a workplace free from discrimination and harassment, and feeling that you have a voice on the job.” Sirois hopes the administration will collect data on corps members that tracks completion rates and job placements after service, and that the data can be disaggregated by gender and race.

Thomas said American Climate Corps jobs should be considered the earliest stage of the workforce development pipeline — leading to better paying jobs down the line. “This is an opportunity for young people to take action right now in communities across the country, on climate projects that we know have a tangible impact today.”

This story was originally published by The 19^th and reprinted with permission.

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