On the evening of Wednesday, May 21st, Earth Team interns from Antioch High School had the honor of presenting their Climate Literacy Framework to the Antioch Unified School District (AUSD) Board. This presentation marked a significant step forward in integrating environmental goals and climate change curriculum into district-wide education initiatives.
This Climate Literacy Framework was developed by AHS interns over the course of their second semester. Interns drew inspiration for the framework from their intimate understanding of community needs and the best practices in administering climate education.
Listing specific implementation steps for each of their proposals, interns organized their framework objectives around interactive hands-on training exercises that lead to skill development and real-world applications rather than solely promoting factual learning. The framework aims to equip students from elementary school through high school with the knowledge and tools they need to understand and respond to climate change—especially in the context of their own neighborhoods.
At the school board meeting, interns outlined how their framework emphasizes not just climate science, but also social and environmental justice, place-based learning, and community action. For example, referencing maps collected from the open source data tool CalEnviroScreen, interns revealed the extreme disparities in pollution burden between the census tracts of Northern and Southern Antioch, with the former showing concerningly higher environmental and health hazards.
Their presentation also included personal reflections on what climate literacy means and how they believe spreading awareness of climate change through education is the best way to establish not only a well-prepared population, but to empower people to make informed changes. The AHS framework supports both critical thinking and civic engagement for the purpose of incorporating greater sustainability across the AUSD campuses.
The AUSD Board responded with enthusiasm and appreciation for the interns’ work, as did many of the audience members. Several board representatives even took extra time out of the meeting to commend the interns for their overall professionalism and dedication to environmental sustainability, as well as the relevance of the presented framework to the District’s broader educational goals.
This recognition by the AUSD Board is not just a milestone for Earth Team’s Antioch program, it is also a powerful example of the real-world impacts youths can create when they are trusted to evaluate the systems that they experience first-hand. We look forward to future collaborations with AUSD to strengthen local climate literacy initiatives and provide more opportunities for environmental action.
