All of the schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest district, have been closed for several days. School buildings in several areas have been damaged and destroyed by raging fires, but as The Los Angeles Times pointed out, children across Southern California are experiencing “a period of disruption, danger and fear.”
Images of the fires and their aftermath are terrifying and tragic. One photograph by Howard Blume in the LATimes captures the LAUSD superintendent climbing stairs to nowhere at a smoldering Palisades Charter High School.
As climate change leads to greater weather extremes and more frequent and devastating disasters, children and their education are suffering. Across the globe, more than 400 million students were shut out of schools due to events between just January 2022 and June 2024. Whether due to heavy snow or ice, extreme cold or extreme heat, high winds or hurricanes, flooding or wildfires, children are being forced from school buildings temporarily or permanently.
US media reports during disasters often include clips of homeowners and community leaders insisting they will rebuild. But rebuilding is a slow and costly process. It took a full eighteen years–until 2023–for the last school building to be reconstructed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina tore through the city and tore out its school system. After mega-disasters, not only are some schools not rebuilt, the displacement of families can lead to additional closures due to enrollment declines–meaning that even students whose schools were relatively unscathed by the weather event face further disruption.
All children are more vulnerable than adults to the physical and mental health issues arising from climate change. Trauma can be laid on trauma, especially for students from the lower income families who are disproportionately affected by climate disasters and receive less disaster aid from the US government.
Underinvestment in school infrastructure is contributing to the number of days American students are spending outside of school buildings—or struggling to learn inside of them. The main instructional buildings of US schools are on average a half-century old and many, especially in northern states, were built for “a different climate,” in other words, in the before times.
While pandemic monies and other school infrastructure funding under the Biden Administration enabled some improvements, too many school facilities are inadequate, particularly when it comes to heat waves, leading to children’s ill physical and mental health and academic underachievement. From CNN:
Heat isn’t just a health risk – it also challenges learning: A 2018 study from the Harvard Kennedy School showed that in schools without AC, students learning over the course of the year dropped 1% for every 1-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature.
The complexities and inequities of school funding combined with economically and politically-driven austerity makes it hard to fund safe, healthy infrastructure.
But it was just a moment ago, wasn’t it, that so many Americans seemed to agree that closed schools are their own disaster? While disagreement continues about how children could have been better protected during the pandemic, the consensus has been strong that avoiding disruptions to schools and learning should be a top priority.
It’s important then to see the pandemic as just one, albeit massive, disruption and to understand the many ways that schools and learning are being increasingly disrupted. Gun violence and privatization and other misguided reforms are also causes, but climate change is the monster we have unleashed to trash our schools, neighborhoods, and communities.
This monster poisons our air and water and threatens our children’s homes and schools, the places where they should be safest—the places where they are supposed to grow. We choose and choose again the monster-making politicians yelling, “Drill!” Forgive the pun, but this is no longer a drill. We may have forfeited our choice to kill the monster, but we can decide to shield our children, their education, and their future as best we can by slowing it down and by investing in better protecting their communities.