Hi All,

Please watch this video called "Textbook Trauma" just published by the Yale Climate Connections website. As a 6th grade teacher, I am charged with sharing some of the "traumatic information" they describe with a group of bright, trusting young people each year. It is a terrible challenge to do so with both integrity and with a context of hope and optimism, especially given the socio-political events and climate-related disasters over the past several years. (I live in Sonoma County where 1500 students lost their homes to climate-related fires last year alone, so climate information is especially difficult to disentangle from visceral emotion and trauma response). No matter how thoughtfully I try to present the information and objective data, I see my students experience the range of reactions that the adult audiences described in this video experience.

However, unlike these adult audiences, my 6th graders and all students spend most of their waking hours within an institution which sends them very dissonant information than information about climate science and our national and institutional reaction to it. Embedded within my institution are core values (that get transmitted to students, explicitly and implicitly) such as:
+science is a useful tool for understanding the world
+clean up your messes
+elders take care of youngers
+speak up for what is right
+be fair
+work together to solve big problems
+our nation can be a force for good in the world

Morality, science, patriotism, justice, fairness, and problem-solving are core foundations of schools and classrooms, enshrined in California Ed. Code, as well as by years of practical insights teachers have gained in how to structure healthy learning communities. Climate science information combined with our national climate neglect combined with the education sector's institutional silence about the climate neglect which threatens our young people are simply too irreconcilable. They don't fit together within one mental framework or within a coherent narrative. They are incoherent. This incoherence may make it more likely that young people will experience the climate science as traumatic information than even the adult audiences described in this video. 

Here is an example of the dissonance between the educational sector aspirational and foundational values and the way we approach climate science, national climate neglect, and our own institutional climate silence. In June 2018, Kai (my fifteen year-old son) and I met with a long-time staffer of the California School Boards Association (CSBA). I asked him/her if the CSBA measured climate change impacts on California schools or California school kids. He/she laughed ironically, clearly frustrated. He/she said something along the lines of, "We don't and if we did, we would not be able to call it that. We'd have to call it 'air quality' or something like that. The words "climate change" are considered too controversial, too political around here."

June of 2018. Hundreds of thousands of California school kids have been exposed to potentially traumatic climate-related disasters this year alone, but there is evidence that the California School Boards Association may not be able to bring itself to speak honestly and openly about climate change. The CSBA may consider climate change too controversial to discuss and react to as an organization, but, as you know, teachers must share this same information with their students, if we are to have reasonable hopes of younger generations thriving and prospering in the future. This dynamic in the CSBA may be a very natural "disassociation" response to the traumatic facts about climate change and our (elder) generation's role in passing along such a terrible burden to young people. 

I have reason to believe that the National School Boards Association is also currently not ready to speak honestly and openly about climate change, it's impact on our schools and students, nor to advocate for commonsense, bipartisan national solutions which will protect young people. 

The leaders of both the CSBA and the NSBA are incredibly dedicated to schools and students. They work very hard to ensure educational equity and the success of all students. Likely, they privately believe that climate change is a generational justice issue. Likely, they hold the most reasonable belief that Congress should act quickly on climate change to prevent knowable risk, harm, and trauma for current students and future generations. However, they have likely been co-opted into silence because a substantial minority of local school board members are so disassociated from objective climate information that they hold a-scientific beliefs and doubts related to climate change. The silence of the CSBA and the NSBA may simply be the disassociation reaction by individuals writ large. Tragically, this silence may be dangerous to the very young people our institution exists to teach and nurture. And, the silence is also corrosive to our institutional coherence and moral integrity. 

You can help empower CSBA and NSBA leaders to speak up and send clear signals to school board members who may harbor a-scientific worldviews (despite being leaders in an educational institution founded on science). Clearly, in this era of deadly climate-related disasters to support kids also means we have to deal honestly with the information climate scientists are telling us.

The CSBA and the NSBA engage with and lobby national politicians every year. There is no reason that they cannot speak with one voice calling for bipartisan national climate action to protect our students. Silence from the CSBA and NSBA is likely an artifact of highly partisan disengagement from objective climate science and information. Speaking honestly and openly and responding to climate science by advocating for rational solutions is not partisan. It is, instead, the definition of being environmentally literate, which is something that all California school board members are tasked with supporting their schools and students to become. One of the most effective ways for California school leaders to model environmental literacy for their students is to demonstrate it themselves---by processing climate science and then reacting to it in a way that aligns with all of the important values we share...such as protecting young people and speaking up for justice.

Thanks for reading and please continue to share the link of this petition. Also, please contact your local school boards and ask them to pass their own climate action resolution to build non-partisan political will for commonsense national climate policies. If you get a local resolutions passed, please be sure to contact us at empower@schoolsforclimateaction.org. We are organizing youth-adult teams from school districts to take these resolutions to Congress in March 2019. 

Thank you for reading and for your work advocating for a safe climate for students and future generations. 

Park Guthrie