It feels like the world is falling apart right now — the coronavirus, police violence and a groundswell of protests against it, to name a few — and it's easy to forget that climate change continues apace. HuffPost partnered with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit education news outlet, to investigate how the U.S. is teaching kids about climate change and through its effects. Sometimes, it means schools explaining it in clear terms. Other times, it means them failing to mention it at all, or doing so obliquely. We learned about kids leading on the issue themselves and schools struggling to cope after climate-related disasters wreaked havoc on their communities. We looked at flooding, health effects and more.
It was an ambitious project that took nearly a year. Rebecca Klein, a HuffPost senior reporter who covers education, was a lead on the project and shares how it came together.
How did this project come about?
We have long worked with The Hechinger Report on ambitious projects (two outlets are better than one!). In the past, we’ve done series on police in schools, special education graduation rates and the foster care system. This time we decided to tackle climate change in education. It’s not something you hear much about, but is obviously something that is only increasingly important.
One of the pieces looks at textbooks to see how they address — or don't address— climate change. Were you surprised at what you found?
I think we had no idea what we would find. It seemed like there was an equal chance that the textbooks would be absolutely terrible or totally fine. What we found was somewhere in the middle. Some textbooks were fine. Others were openly misleading or inaccurate.
You worked with partners on the project. What was it like working with outside reporters, and how did you pull it together?
It can take a long time when you’re working with someone at a different outlet with potentially different pacing or priorities. We had weekly or biweekly calls on the topic for, I think, close to a year before we finally had something to show for it. Before the pandemic hit, the reporter I was working with started coming to our office. It was a slow and steady process, but toward the end, working with someone else kept me more accountable to our deadlines!
What do you hope readers take away from the series?
It’s not a matter of when climate change upends our school — it’s already happening in vulnerable communities. And one of the things COVID-19 has shown is that our schools and families are totally unprepared for wide-scale education disruptions.
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Plus, a quick update on last week's Must Reads: We previously featured Rowaida Abdelaziz's piece on two Yemeni men detained at the U.S. border. Since then, there's been some huge news on their cases: both were granted new interviews and are able to pursue protections they were initially denied. | 
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