Texas schools need to be teaching climate change.

Opinion by Mackenzie Matwick

Imagine feeling your summers get increasingly hotter year by year until even a day at the pool can’t cool you off. Winters that you pray for every August turn into weeks without electricity, power or water. Do you blame God? Mother Nature? Fossil fuels? You probably wouldn’t think to blame your childhood public school system.

Starting in fall of 2024, eighth graders in Texas will be learning about climate change as a part of their science curriculum.

This means that it’s time to pick new textbooks, and members of The State Board of Education may be making their decisions based on partisan lines. However, climate change is not an inherently political issue.

I have lived in Texas my entire life – except for an 18 month stint in Detroit, in which I was itching to get back to the bluebonnet state. Now, I am a senior at the University of Texas at Austin.

In my four years at college, I have endured multiple snowstorms, one of which brought record-low temperatures to the state and left more than 4.5 million Texans without electricity. I remember it taking weeks for the sidewalks near campus to thaw, making it impossible to walk anywhere. My dorm was taking in students from across the university because they were without power and water, and we were on boil water notice on and off for weeks.

While I was grateful for the days off  school, this was nothing I had seen living in Texas thus far.

I have also lived through summers like 2023, where July marked the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. Cities like Austin, Houston, San Antonio and more saw weeks of triple digit heat that seemed like it would never end. In 2022 alone, at least 300 Texans died of heat-related causes according to Texas Health and Human Services.

These higher temperatures can aggravate pre-existing health conditions – particularly ones relating to heart function. Pregnant women are especially susceptible to heat illness putting them at further risk of high blood pressure and premature labor, leading to birth defects. And overall, high temperatures can disincentivize regular exercise, which isn’t healthy for any of us.

My point being in all of this, is that if you live in Texas, you have felt the effects of climate change. It’s real, it’s going to continue to be an issue, and my generation and the ones that follow are going to be dealing with it the rest of our lives.

Texas is one of the few states that doesn’t already require eighth graders to be taught climate change in science class. This is Texas’ time to choose textbooks that give students a comprehensive understanding of how this issue affects our planet.

Most states in the U.S. use curriculum from Next Generation Science Standards whose mission is to give students a comprehensive science education “that will serve them throughout their educational and professional lives,” according to their website.

Those words – educational and professional lives – describe a key issue in not teaching students about climate change. Even if students don’t bat an eye while they lazily flip through textbooks, it’s important that they are at least presented with the information they need to be more well-rounded citizens.

Next Generation Science Standards is used by all but six states, one of those being Texas, and it emphasizes how climate change is real, severe, caused by humans, and can be mitigated if we work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If I were on the State Board of Education, I would consider joining the rest of the country in using this curriculum.

In 2020, the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund gave Texas an F letter grade on its addressing of climate change in its science curriculum. They said that Texas earned a failing grade on preparing students for study of climate change in higher education, and for responsible participation in civic deliberation on it.

There are ways to fix this before students grow up and realize they missed learning about an issue that will define the rest of their lives. A changing climate might affect where they choose to live, what they study in school, future profession, or even their desire to raise kids in a world that seems to be falling apart.

Students of all ages deserve to be a part of the conversation about how to save our planet. They may even be the ones to fix it in their lifetime. Let’s give our public schools systems the curriculum to do that.