How Stockton high school students learn about climate change in the classroom

Whether it’s through the news or social media, kids are hearing about climate change.”I saw it on social media a lot but I only knew one friend that would talk about it,” said Dominick, a junior at Pacific Law Academy in Stockton.Now, Dominick and his fellow classmates are getting the chance to learn and talk about climate change in school. It’s all thanks to a new program with the Livermore Lab Foundation which is providing special climate change lessons to select science classrooms in California.”Our goal with this set of lessons is to bring that information in new and creative ways to different audiences,” Livermore Lab Foundation executive director Sally Allen said. “And what better way to do that than starting in the classroom.”Scott Jorgensen, a teacher at Pacific Law, started presenting those lessons to his science classes this year. He says he’s encouraged to see this material being added to the curriculum. “Science teachers, as a group, have been trying to teach climate change and that science forever,” Jorgensen said. “To have it be an explicit part of the curriculum is important.”Topics covered include climate change problems like ocean acidification and carbon emissions. But these lessons also encourage students to think critically about climate change solutions. “What I like about this curriculum is that since it’s forward-thinking, it gives me hope as a professional and it gives the students hope that we can engineer and build a way out of this,” Jorgensen said. And those engineering solutions will bring new kinds of jobs to California. Learning about climate change will help Jorgensen and many other Central Valley students be ready for those new career opportunities.”As a region, we can graduate from among the poorest counties in California and regain standards of living with the rest of the state,” Jorgensen said.But even before they are career-ready, Jorgensen’s students are grateful for the chance to learn about this massive, global problem in a friendly school setting. “Learning about this really does help me talk about it more with my peers, may parents and everywhere I go,” said Alex Santos, another Pacific Law junior.His classmate Dominick agrees: “This is our future, so this is stuff that we have to deal with later on.”