Now Is Our Chance to Rebuild U.S. Public Schools To Address Both Climate Change and Racial Inequality

When school facilities closed for in-person learning in early March 2020, the assumption was that the shutdown and pandemic would be temporary blips in the memory of our students. Some 16 months later, school facilities are finally preparing to re-open for in-person learning. We could go about business as usual, but after the devastation of the pandemic, and the increasingly widespread climate-change-linked weather disasters, it’s obvious we should not. Emerging from the crisis of COVID-19 gives us an opportunity to rethink our public schools, to simultaneously the structural inequalities that pervade the system, and prepare it for the climate emergency ahead. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Lawmakers have had difficulty grappling with the layering of immediate and longer-lasting crises. That’s where we think the Green New Deal for Public Schools, introduced to Congress by Representative Jamaal Bowman (NY) on July 16, comes in. Building on the research of our climate + community project, its basic premise is that we have to tackle our society’s gravest problems not one by one, but in their entirety, through ambitious physical and social investments that lift up the workers and communities that have suffered the most disinvestment throughout American history. We want to fight systemic racism, poverty, and environmental breakdown with comprehensive, holistic policies. The legislation authorizes $1.4 trillion in spending over the next decade to upg...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change COVID-19 Source Type: news