Officials with the Tucson Unified School District have voted to pass a student-crafted climate resiliency plan to be enacted over the coming several years.
The resolution calls for changes within TUSD like becoming zero waste by 2040, cutting emissions in half by 2030, ramping up climate-change education and creating heat resiliency plans for schools.
Ojas Sanghi is the Tucson co-Lead of the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition — the student group that crafted the document.
“There’s no template, no resolution out there that’s ever addressed all the points that we addressed, most of them only talk about electrification and energy efficiency for buildings and transportation,” he said.
Sanghi says this plan is more than a year in the making and it's the most comprehensive in the U.S. that’s been outlined for schools. He says he first become interested in climate-change issues and how they impact health and communities when his family moved to Delhi when he was 5 years old, and he got involved in local efforts in Tucson during high school. His group was part of the city's effort to craft its own climate resiliency plan, and he was looking for other local avenues to enact change.
"And that's when I started to realize that no one is really thinking about TUSD, no one is talking about schools and the potential for that here in Tucson in the climate circle that was involved in," he said.
TUSD board members passed the resolution in a 3-2 vote after community members and students testified their support.
Those opposed to the measure voiced their concern for an estimated $900 million cost to implement the plan. Sanghi says some of the funding is already there.
“Last November, the voters approved a $480 million bond for TUSD that pays for capital improvements, such as transportation, and buildings, and energy efficiency,” he said.
Sanghi says the estimate also doesn’t currently include a cost-benefit analysis and it would be a cost rolled out over the next 20 years.
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