It’s April 22, Earth Day! With the past five years being the hottest on record, we need to get real about teaching our students about climate change. Our young children are the people who will be the most impacted and who will be living with this new reality for all of their lives.
We have addressed climate change education before here at La Comadre in relation to the California fires this past fall. When the fires are bad, schools are closed. When there is extreme weather such as massive rains that cause flooding, schools are closed and lives are interrupted.
We want to turn your attention to a report that came out on NPR today that shows that a majority of parents in the U.S. support teaching climate change in school. This is something that we need to demand, but it isn’t happening even though a majority of teachers who were polled support teaching climate change.
“NPR Ed found in an analysis that in just one semester, the fall of 2017, for example, 9 million U.S. students across nine states and Puerto Rico missed some amount of school owing to natural disasters — which scientists say are becoming more frequent and severe because of climate change.”
Instruction about climate change needs to be a priority and needs to be incorporated into the existing curriculum. Our kids deserve to understand what’s happening and should have an understanding of some of the solutions that are being implemented to lessen the impacts of this global crisis.