Organizing for green schools on the ground
An old friend who’s been doing work at the intersection of organizing, school finance, and climate change recently sent me a panel that they’d organized with People’s Action on green schools. It’s awesome. One of the reasons it’s so great is that it features organizers talking about the strategies, tactics, and tensions they’re encountering as they work for a Green New Deal for Schools in the post-Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) era.
I’ve been wondering whether and how people at the state and district level have been doing this kind of work and the panel is a fantastic cross-section. Listening to it gives you a sense of what’s happening in five places, what’s working, and what’s coming up on the terrain. You can watch the panel here, but this week I wanted to do little summaries of the campaigns with relevant links, plus note some interesting wrinkles mentioned in the presentations.
The campaigns
In St. Paul, Minnesota a group called TakeAction Minnesota w/St. Paul federation of educators has a Healthy Green Schools Campaign. They wanted to get IRA demands into the teachers’ contract negotiation process, a kind of bargaining for the common good approach, but that didn’t work. The district did agree however to create a climate justice stakeholder work group, so their organizing continues there.
Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada has an IRA campaign coordinator, working for solarization of Clark County schools. The goals, they say, is to save money on utilities each year and put that money into maintenance as heat waves slam the region. These savings projections are compelling enough to the district officials in Clark County that they’re very open to making these changes, even though they don’t believe in climate change.
In El Paso, Texas there’s a campaign called Escuelas Frescas through the Amanecer People’s Project. They did canvassing to talk to people in El Paso about issues with schools and it turns out many schools don’t have adequate HVAC. For a campaign on that issue, organizers talked to parents about these facilities issues when they picked up their kids from school. They call it a pickup lines tactic, which is smart. They got contact information from those conversations to do turnout for a school board meeting and demand IRA funding for fixes.
One Northside in Chicago, IL has a Green Schools for Chicago campaign to create decarbonization centers in city schools. They’re pointing to $14 billion needed to rectify environmental injustices. They have mayoral support, a movable school board, and a big school board election coming that the left has a candidate it. Like in St. Paul, this group worked with the Chicago Teachers Union to bargain for green school facilities updates using Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure bill money.
In Milwaukee, Citizen Action Wisconsin has a campaign to secure funding for green facilities updates to specific schools. They have very specific numbers: $30 million in federal grants, a 10 year climate mitigation plan with $20 million in rebate tax credits projected. They’re also calling for a revolving green fund that reinvests savings into other planned projects. Their organizer said that they’re “doing this because our schools are under attack,” which is exactly the framing I think we should use.
Some comrades of mine who follow climate finance politics in the US have said that the IRA is anti-populist. I think that’s largely right. But what we have here in these presentations are examples of movement groups navigating that ruling-class quality of the law, which can ultimately benefit the working class. This tension does show up in some tensions the presenters mention that I wanted to highlight.
Ruling class wrinkles
There’s an interesting moment when the El Paso organizer is talking about financing, specifically how the group is messaging the complex machinations of the funding available for green school infrastructure. They mention that, because the IRA works through rebates, the initial financing in El Paso will have to be through bonds. The organizer says this requires building trust with parents on this, since it can mean increases in taxes that they’ll have to pay.
Another wrinkle I noticed is when the Chicago organizer talked about how the state’s green bank is controlled by the Illinois Finance Authority, which they say is governed by 40% corporate interests, while the rest are non-community NGOs and other government actors. This might be a hindrance since, even though it’s a public investment body, it might not be serving the public’s best interest—or at least the public understood as the diverse working class, since it doesn’t have representation in its leadership. But, the organizer mentioned that the Coalition for Green Capital is proposing to route federal money from the IRA to the ICB to get around the IFA.
As always, one has to contend with the ruling class when fighting for diverse working class goals like a Green New Deal for Schools, which takes up and takes on thoroughly ruling class institutions like the municipal bond market and various carbon-emitting infrastructure industries.
These two wrinkles are examples of the possibilities and limitations of the IRA for school districts viz. the ruling class and their institutions as obstacles. The IRA is a rebate system that reimburses districts for infrastructure expenses, which relies on municipal bonding. Remember that the Green New Deal for Schools legislation introduced by Jamaal Bowman in 2022 provided more than $1 trillion in grants, disbursed through the Title 1A system, which may have challenged this reliance. The IRA doesn’t.
The green banking aspect of the IRA is one of the more powerful challenges to the municipal bond market in the legislation. Yet if the green banks that the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund capitalizes are captured by groups that don’t represent diverse working class interests, then this challenge to the bond market may not challenge the ruling class.
Still, this is very much a terrain and this panel was a fascinating look at how organizers are operating on that terrain.