When Hurricane Helene slammed into a swath of the Southeast a year ago, Rachel Smith was tracking the storm with her fifth-grade students as part of their weather curriculum.
“We had no idea it was going to end up hitting us,” said the math and science teacher at Evergreen Community Charter School in Asheville, North Carolina.
After the storm, Smith’s school was closed for a month as residents mopped up from a storm that killed 86 people in the state alone. And when they came back, they didn’t have clean water for over a month.
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“The things that have been less urgent in terms of ‘How do I talk to my students about this?’ last year, it really became like, ‘I have to figure it out now,’” said Smith.
With the hurricane’s one-year anniversary coming up, Smith said she noticed “signs of stress” in her students, many of whom experienced personal loss.
As a teacher, she wanted to figure out how to “teach this [climate justice] without scaring my kids.”
That’s when she came across the University of Minnesota’s Center for Climate Literacy’s upcoming institute, which aimed to host 24 K-12 educators from around the country for a two-week in-person training on how to teach climate literacy and justice to students.
The institute was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal funding agency.
But, just a few days after the institute sent out acceptance letters to the teachers who had applied, the grant was terminated.
Like many cancelled grants at the U, the news of termination came suddenly and unexpectedly. “I was at the gym on the stair climber when I got the email, and I was like, ‘I’m going to just go until I throw up’,” said Nick Kleese, the associate director of community engagement at the Center for Climate Literacy and one of the facilitators of the institute along with Marek Oziewicz, director of The Center for Climate Literacy.
Kleese and Oziewicz’s climate literacy institute was one of at least seven NEH-funded grants at the U that was disrupted, according to a list obtained by Sahan Journal in a public records request to the university.
It was also one of at least 1,200 NEH grants terminated across the nation in the recent wave of federal cuts to education. The grants, which were already approved by the Congress for financial year 2025, were cancelled citing a change in the funding agency’s priorities under the current administration.
In a statement, the agency said it will not be funding projects that “promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.” Last month, a federal judge ruled that the cuts were unlawful.
The NEH website states that future awards will be towards projects “that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.” Its latest awards of about $35 million will fund projects that will focus on presidents, statesmen, and the celebration of America’s 250th birthday, as per President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
In June, Minnesota joined a multistate lawsuit against the administration over its “unprecedented and unlawful attempts” to cut essential education and research funding. The case has not been decided.
The grant, titled “Teaching Climate Justice with Young People’s Literatures and Media”’ aimed to offer what Kleese called “a more holistic Earth civics” for young people through literature and media, be it picture books, movies, games or apps.
“Ideally we’d have federal policy that provides that support and a mandate to do it. We don’t have that, but young people deserve to have this education so that we can all live to learn well in a climate changing world,” said Kleese. Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration took down the 2024 climate literacy guide from its website.
“It’s not only about temperatures, or about weather,” said Oziewicz, explaining what climate literacy entails. “Science is important, but really, it is about values, attitudes and behaviors.”
Oziewicz added that climate literacy aims to answer questions like: “How should we organize? What should people know? How do we teach them that we’re crew on this spaceship called Earth?”
The educators attending would’ve ranged from science teachers to librarians, phy ed teachers to special educators across grade levels seeking ways to discuss climate change and justice in a way that inspires hope and inspiration in students instead of overwhelming them, like Smith had hoped to.
“Our education is built on a lot of outdated, 19th-century assumptions of stable planetary conditions for people to be born, grow up, eat, breathe, live and die. But this assumption is no longer true, and this assumption will be increasingly challenged going forward,” said Oziewicz.
According to Kleese, the grant terminations are just one manifestation of a larger agenda, “which in our specific case, would be attempts to repress any sort of climate education, specifically, climate justice education.”
Having grown up on a farm in southern Iowa, he has seen firsthand how lack of climate education impacts communities. “It infuriates me to know that there are communities like mine all over the nation who are being denied the ecological support interventions they need. The administration is pretending it’s not a problem but people’s health is on the line”, he said. “Young people want this education. Teachers want this education, caregivers want this education.”
After the grant was terminated, Kleese and Oziewicz could only put together a pared-down version of what they had planned with the help of bridge funding from the university. Three weeks of training, two in person and one virtual, had to be condensed to 15 hours of Zoom training for the educators who were selected, and a three-day webinar for everyone who had applied.
Smith says that even though she feels a sense of loss for the institute-that-never-was, the virtual training helped guide her lesson plans and teaching approach this school year. “That community [of educators] really helped me to shift my mindset from disaster relief to proactive measures of trying to create change, and I can only imagine what I would have been able to take away if we had all been together.”
In New Mexico, a librarian and phy ed teacher at a Christian school on the Navajo reservation hoped to have similar takeaways from the institute. Duane Yazzie has been teaching at Rehoboth Christian School for five years. For Yazzie, too, climate justice isn’t just theory. His community has been dealing with health and water issues due to uranium mining and strip mining from coal for a long time.
“A lot of our students don’t know the history of what has happened, and the impacts that it’s had, some of them in their own families; they don’t realize that in our own backyard, we’ve had to deal with uranium issues,” he said.
Thanks to the virtual training, Yazzie put together book sets for third- to fifth-graders on topics like deforestation, eco grief, and global warming for reading sessions. “I have to be at least one of those change agents to give that information and to expose them to that, and hopefully, push them a little bit further, to say, ‘You know what, you do have the capacity to help impact positive change for the future.’”
One of the institute’s goals was to make “ambassadors” out of these teachers who would then train other educators on ways to incorporate climate justice education in their classrooms. That’s what Elisa Herrera hoped to do after the institute.
A sixth-grade teacher at The Paideia School in Atlanta, Herrera said she had already planned a workshop for other teachers over the summer. But, like the institute, that didn’t happen either.
Herrera wanted to learn how to incorporate children’s picture books to talk about climate change, and was looking forward to meeting the authors of the books as well as other educators at the institute. “It gave old teachers a chance to work with new teachers across the nation and age levels; that doesn’t happen that often,” she said. “I will keep my fingers crossed, but at this point, it’s kind of a devastating loss.”
For many educators, paid training opportunities like these — the institute would’ve paid each selected educator about $3,000 for the training — are few and far between, and they fear it’s only getting bleaker. “I am sad that this went away, and I’m worried that it’s not going to ever come back,” said Herrera.
The educators were slated to share the lesson plans they developed for their respective classrooms, and publish it in an open access journal supported by The Center for Climate Literacy. Instead, the journal’s latest issue sheds light on the educators’ reactions to the cancellation of the institute, but leaves out their names and any identifying details because “there is political pressure in some communities against offering this kind of education to their students,” said Kleese.
The funding for the institute might have been terminated, but Kleese and Oziewicz say that they are only more fired up to continue their work, even though the uncertainty about funding sources is high. “We are certain that we cannot look to the federal government for the foreseeable future, and given the budget crunch at the university, we don’t want to count on that, too,” said Kleese.
“Maybe in like 10 years, I’ll think of this as having a badge of honor. “Oh yeah, you know, we got cut.” We’ll make T-shirts or something,” Kleese joked.
