Written by Erin Bell- Communitopia VP

Covid-19 isn’t the only thing that’s complicating the country’s return to school. Across the globe, climate change is disrupting education and introducing new challenges for schools.

In New Orleans and some surrounding areas, public schools are closed indefinitely as a result of damages and power outages sustained in Hurricane Ida. Catastrophic damage to the city’s energy transmission system has left much of the area without electricity, meaning that remote learning is not an option either. The hurricane also brought heavy rains and dangerous flash flooding to the Northeast, causing numerous school closures in affected areas across the region.

Sophie Gavin, an operations manager at a New Orleans elementary and middle school, said, “The pandemic prepared us to be able to implement virtual learning, but there’s no way to implement that when the power is out for an indefinite period of time. Our kids are amazingly resilient, but they have been faced with so many upheavals within the last year or two. Kids thrive off a sense of normalcy and routine, and this is a complete disruption to that routine and is a disruption to the social network and services that kids have access to and rely on in schools, like meals and after school programs.”

She also added, “I think that schools at some point will absolutely have to consider contingency plans for being out of school for longer periods of time. Obviously you hope that also coincides with better planning on behalf of our governments and utilities to improve infrastructure and implement safety nets. We are in a definite changing educational landscape because of the pandemic, and [climate change] is becoming another thing that needs to be taken into consideration.”

New Orleans isn’t the only place facing challenges during the back to school period. In Columbus, OH, 20 city schools began school remotely due to a dangerous heat wave. Several buildings did not have access to adequate air conditioning, leaving the districts with no safe way to bring children into the classroom. On the West Coast, schools in parts of rural California are also facing crisis. Ongoing wildfires have destroyed at least one school and have endangered the reopening of countless others throughout Plumas, Butte, Lassen and Tehama counties. Evacuations, poor air quality and damage to the area’s infrastructure have forced schools to shut down for days at a time--many for the second year in a row-- as wildfires have ravaged nearly a million acres across the state. 

Natural disasters and extreme weather events across the globe are occurring at alarming rates (and with escalating severity), and global warming is a major factor. These events threaten virtually every aspect of living--from physical safety to housing and livelihoods as well as access to critical resources like food, water, power and, of course, education. 

Unless aggressive climate change mitigation measures are implemented quickly, it’s very likely that climate-related emergencies will continue to worsen and disrupt education on a global level. And while nobody is complaining about an occasional snow day, frequent school closures linked to dangerous weather is a scary “new norm” that we must start preparing for.

Educational leaders have a responsibility to do their part to plan for this “new norm”. While this isn’t easy, there are a number of resources available. An incredible compilation of resources compiled by Andra Yeghoian, along with the California Environmental Literacy Initiative, outlines some of the education sector’s opportunities connected to the August 2021 IPCC Report including the top 10 mitigation and adaptation strategies schools can implement. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Overview for Educational Leaders. It’s a must-read when preparing for mitigation and adaptation in the K-12 sector.