PORTLAND, Oregon —
More than 150 youth organizers with the Sunrise Movement, including several from Portland, fanned out across Washington. D.C. on Thursday as they rolled out a new campaign called the "Green New Deal for Schools."
The campaign, with chapters in roughly 50 school districts across the country, aims to spur climate action at both the local and national level, according to Adah Crandall, a 17-year-old graduate of Grant High School in Portland and one of the organizers behind the campaign.
Crandall said the campaign is a response, in part, to recent efforts by conservative lawmakers to clamp down on the education system.
“The Green New Deal for Schools campaign is really, in a lot of ways, a response to the attacks that the far right is making on our schools, trying to regulate our curriculum, trying to ban books,” Crandall said. “The far right has really waged this battle where they are trying to prevent us from learning about things like climate change and systemic racism.”
Organizers released a list of demands, including school buildings free of fossil fuels, free and healthy lunches for all students, training for green jobs, a more robust climate curriculum and for districts to develop disaster response plans to help students navigate the increasingly common extreme weather events that are exacerbated by climate change.
Some of those demands have already been met by Portland Public Schools, which has its own Climate Crisis Response Policy, passed in 2022. That includes a prohibition on fossil fuel infrastructure in new district buildings and a robust climate curriculum.
Despite having one of the strongest climate policies in the country, Crandall said the district still has a long way to go.
“It's not enough,” Crandall said. “The bar for being the strongest climate crisis response policy in the country was very, very low. We are calling on them to go farther and pass an actual Green New Deal for Portland Public Schools.”
Kat Davis, adviser for climate justice with Portland Public Schools, said the district fully supports the students push for more climate action in schools. Davis said the climate policy passed in 2022 should be seen not as an end goal, but as a starting point from which to expand.
“We're really eager to take our policy, which is really our baseline for how we want to move forward, and deeply engage with critical questions around what it looks like to have a future of climate solutions for our students, our communities, teachers and staff to thrive despite a changing climate,” Davis said.
Crandall and other organizers took their message to the U.S. Capitol Thursday morning, with some organizers lobbying lawmakers and others staging a sit-in outside of the offices of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
At least 18 of the activists were arrested, though it wasn’t immediately clear what charges they were facing.
PHOTOS: Student activists take to U.S. Capitol to push 'Green New Deal for Schools'
By midday, many of the organizers joined Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) as they introduced the Green New Deal for Schools Act at a press conference outside the capitol.
Crandall said the campaign aims to galvanize local efforts into action at the federal level.
“We need people at every level of government, in every generation, to be doing everything that they can to reduce our emissions and stop the climate crisis,” she said. “The federal government is the only entity that has the resources to stop this crisis at this speed and scale that we need.”