In late February, Undaunted’s co-founders Jonathan Klein and Sara Ross met up in New Orleans to attend the 2023 Green Schools Conference.

Over the last several months, a statewide coalition of nearly 50 experts – including doctors, medical and environmental health researchers, educators, youth and community groups – worked together to explore the challenges of climate change from the perspective of children’s health and education. Our insights and recommendations were published in Climate-Resilient California Schools: A Call to Action.

The Green Schools Conference (GSC) is the only event to bring together all the players involved in making green schools a reality: people who lead, operate, build and teach in schools.

“HVAC Choices for Student Health and Learning,” shares big ideas relating to school HVAC technology, offers a framework for evaluating costs and obtaining funding, and provides an overview of the benefits that come with all-electric HVAC systems.

Read our latest OpEd written with Jason Acosta Espinosa, a student at Dartmouth College and a former Massachusetts climate fellow at Our Climate.

The Inflation Reduction Act is an important and badly needed step towards protecting future generations from the worst impacts of the climate crisis. UndauntedK12 is deeply thankful for the climate activists and climate justice advocates who have persevered for decades to reach this milestone, and we know our work is not done. Schools have a tremendous role to play in combating climate change and in educating tomorrow’s climate leaders. We will continue to advocate for climate action in the places where all young people live, learn, and play.

One out of every 6 Americans visits a school daily but they are conspicuously absent from Massachusetts’ recent landmark climate bill. While the legislature acknowledges that school buildings play an important role in addressing the climate crisis, this bill falls short of making an action plan.

In “Clean and Healthy Schools are Electric: Aligning California’s School Infrastructure Investments with our Climate and Health Goals,” our new report with Rewiring America and UC Santa Barbara, we make the case for upgrading to all-electric HVAC systems with advanced filtration. This transition can deliver enormous educational and health benefits to California’s students and school staff, all while cutting operating costs.

In our guest post on NextGen Policy’s Climate 100 blog, we urged California’s lawmakers to align every dollar spent in K-12 infrastructure with building an equitable zero carbon future and ensure that our current actions work towards, and not against, the state’s 2045 goal.

Section 82 of H.5060 calls on a group of key state agencies to collaborate to assess the current state of our school buildings with an eye to eliminating fossil fuels and to recommend standards and strategies for advancing healthy, green schools. Here’s a quick take from us on some of the important passages in the bill.

Our co-founder Sara Ross appeared on the Massachusetts Climate Action Networks podcast “The Climate Minute” to talk to the host Ted McIntyre about how bills get a final vote in the Massachusetts’ legislature. Listen as they discuss one of many items up for consideration — a plan to examine how green and healthy our schools are.

We collaborated with HEET to perform a first-ever analysis of the prevalence of leaks in gas mains and service lines at school properties. (NOTE: All of the hazardous leaks we report on in this report have be repaired.)

Read our latest OpEd with a call to action for political and district leaders across the country to lead use this opportunity to lead on climate resilient schools.