Smoke fills my lungs as I open my front door. Everything around me is illuminated by an eerie orange glow. At school, kids wear bandanas tied around their faces in a desperate attempt to filter out the smoke. Between wildfires and the nearby freeway, the air pollution has become extremely dangerous. One girl is crying. Another is frantically checking the air quality index on her phone.
The climate crisis is here, it’s hurting us, and our schools are not prepared.
Each year, fires rage larger, storms grow stronger, and heat waves become more fatal. Schools today are more segregated than they were in the 1960s, and they are critically underfunded, particularly in Black and brown communities. Billionaires barely pay taxes on their soaring wealth, but working-class families are forced to choose between paying the rent and sending their kids to school with enough to eat. While the severity of the climate crisis continues to be minimized by politicians and in textbooks, communities are left shattered by extreme weather, without the means to respond when disasters fracture neighborhoods and devastate school systems. As it is, students are choking on hot air in their classrooms.
Too many adults are asleep at the wheel, proposing “solutions” that fall far short of the scale we need and prioritizing special interests over real people, but our generation is wide awake.
Imagine this: It’s 2030 and you're walking into your first-period class. Gone are the days of crumbling buildings and lead-contaminated water fountains. As a country, we’ve finally invested in public education, paying good wages to teachers, providing free and healthy lunches to students, making our schools places of vibrant community. We’re learning the truth about the climate crisis in classrooms, and our schools are no longer influenced by far-right politicians and greedy billionaires, but by everyday students like us.
Also imagine that when climate disasters strike, our schools are prepared. At the start of your sophomore year, you sign up for an internship to help hand out masks and supplies during the next wildfire. You’re getting paid to learn about climate resiliency and help your community, and you can already see the impact of your labors as pollution-related illness rates fall lower and lower. Soon, the school’s entire grid will be electrified. Your older brother can’t wait to start his apprenticeship installing solar panels.
After school, you and your friends ride the bus for free to your favorite cafe, laughing and scheming for the next student town hall, where the whole school will provide input on next year’s curriculum and policies.
You are living in the age of the Green New Deal for Schools, and you are thriving.
Slated to be reintroduced to Congress later this month by Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), the Green New Deal for Schools is a visionary plan to transform our school system and invest in Black, brown, and working-class communities. There is federal legislation ready to make our dreams possible.
This is about confronting the climate crisis, but it’s also about an opportunity to undo decades of structural wrongs. We will demand an end to the racist policies that keep us divided, and instead unite in the fight for our shared future. When we win the Green New Deal for Schools, we will assure that all students have access to a safe and healthy future, no matter their zip code or the color of their skin. We will leave no one behind.
But let’s be honest, achieving this future isn’t going to be easy. The adults in power will say their hands are tied: Our dreams are unrealistic, they don’t have the money. We won’t fall for these lies. We know that the most costly choice is not to act at all, and as climate disasters worsen, our schools need to be prepared. Transforming our school system will take work, and it will take all of us coming together across race and class to force our government to act. We’ll need to organize — hard.
Almost every major movement for progress in this country has been led by the youth, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Dreamers’ fight for immigrant justice, and the list goes on. Young people have an extraordinary power to dream and to go to bat for what we deserve. We are not constrained by what adults think is “politically possible.” We have the moral clarity to see that building a world that works for all of us is not only achievable, it is necessary.
Over the next year, the Sunrise Movement has a plan to put the Green New Deal for Schools front and center in American politics. We started this summer, when hundreds of high schoolers came together at a summer camp in southern Illinois to strategize and dream about what we can do together. Now, we’re launching nationally.
Already, hundreds of students across the country are petitioning dozens of local school boards to pass a Green New Deal for Schools. From California to Minnesota, the Gulf South to the Northeast, districts everywhere will be forced to reckon with our generation and the power we are building.
In the coming spring, with the 2024 presidential election around the corner, we’ll escalate. We’ll be marching, taking over our school buildings, and walking out of school. And we’ll send a clear message to our elected officials: If you want Gen Z on your side, you have to be ready to fight alongside us.
Starting now, we will take back our schools, reclaim our dreams, and build the future that we know is possible. This won’t be an easy fight, but we’re ready to do whatever it takes, whether it’s shutting down our school districts for multiple days or winning school board elections ourselves.
This is the project of our generation. As students remake our schools to take on the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced, we will pave the way for the rest of society to follow. These are our schools, our lives, and our futures. We are the generation of the Green New Deal, and we are ready to take over. Are you?
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