Ithaca school district approves climate action plan

ITHACA, N.Y. — The Ithaca City School District Board of Education voted Tuesday to approve the district’s first climate action plan.

The plan, proposed as a “living document,” establishes a number of goals for the district with the purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and creating healthier, more sustainable learning environments for students. 

The unanimous and enthusiastic vote comes after two years of work by a group of students and local sustainability advocates. Armin Heurich, a librarian and teacher at Ithaca High School (IHS) who is in the group, said the effort is rooted in sustainability efforts that go back over a decade. 

“Those efforts largely were focused around things like recycling, composting gardens and things like that,” Heurich said. 

Heurich said he thinks this is the state’s first public school district climate action plan. While New York City has a similar directive, it is a city-wide policy. 

The document is a significantly pared down version from the one ICSD sustainability advocates presented last year around this time. While the plan as approved affirms the importance of certain sustainability goals, it omits target dates and specific tasks, which were included in last year’s draft.

The climate action plan also formalizes and expands sustainability projects that have been ongoing within certain schools for several years, such as composting and recycling efforts. 

Some of the larger goals outlined in the document are also already part of existing district planning. For instance, a plan to replace conventional heating and cooling systems with geothermal systems at IHS and Boynton Middle School is a large part of the district’s next capital project plan. Voters approved the bonds to fund the $4.8 million project in an election on May 19.

During Tuesday night’s board meeting, multiple people called on board members to adopt the plan, including Ithaca Teachers Association President Kathryn Cernera.

“Both the students and the teachers responsible for designing the Climate Action Plan have gone to extensive lengths to create a plan that acknowledges that climate change is real, that it disproportionately disenfranchises communities of color and poor communities, and that mitigating its negative effects requires strategic, robust action towards systemic change,” Cernera told the board. 

Lehman Alternative High School (LACS) student Julian Gardner-Stockstill, who represents his school as a non-voting member of the board, said the final draft was reflective of the dialogue between the school board and those involved with developing the action plan.

“The core tenets are still there,” Gardner-Stockstill said. “Even if there’s not exact direction, the goals are still set and there will still be follow up and there will still be accountability to get these things implemented.”

Finding compromise

School board President Sean Eversley Bradwell said at a May 26 meeting that when he first saw the “ambitious” draft plan, his concern at the time was that it could lock the district into challenging financial responsibilities and commitments. 

“Folks worked diligently to keep the heart and the core of the climate action plan and modify the language slightly, which says ‘while doing this next step we will keep this under consideration at all times,’” Eversley Bradwell said. “So, it does not lock the district in, but it does require us to keep it at the forefront of any budgetary vote, facilities vote, curriculum vote, health vote.”

When the initial plan was presented in summer 2025, district leaders had been contending with a more uncertain financial and political landscape. The year prior, voters had rejected a more expensive district budget and elected board members who promised to limit spending. 

At the time, school board members ultimately opted to create an advisory group with the task of revising the draft. Some board members cited concerns that taxpayers would be unwilling to bear the costs of implementing the plan. 

Among the items that changed in scope were plans for the district’s grounds maintenance. The previous draft called for gas-powered mowing and snow removal equipment to be replaced by battery-powered devices, creation of “no-mow” zones and pollinator gardens as well as implementing a strategy to minimize fertilizer runoff. 

The same section in the final plan instead calls on the district to “to protect and enhance ICSD’s natural areas and minimize environmental impacts” but does not list specific action items.

Lehman Alternative High School science teacher Sarah Brumberg, who worked on developing the plan, said that by eliminating specific goals, which may or may not have to be pushed back because of financial obstacles, the plan is “more enduring.”

Brumberg said she was “overjoyed” the board adopted the plan, not in spite of it being pared down, but rather because it reached a realistic compromise. 

“I think in a funny way, it’s going to have a longer impact,” she said. 

Ambitious goals that stayed in

Some of the draft plan’s more ambitious goals were also in the adopted plan, including electrifying the district’s entire school bus fleet by 2035 and reducing the amount of waste going to landfills.

While the goal to electrify the fleet would put ICSD ahead of a statewide mandate, the district may not make much progress this year. The district’s upcoming school bus purchases, approved by voters last month, will be for ten “ultra-low emissions” propane buses but no electric buses.

The plan also reinstates annual district energy usage and carbon emissions data analysis. The district has not collected data to analyze building performance since 2023, according to the 2025 plan. 

Data presented during the May 2025 meeting shows the district overall scores below the national average in its Energy Star rating, which measures energy efficiency.

Among the lowest scoring schools are IHS and the Belle Sherman Elementary Annex, while the most efficient schools include Fall Creek Elementary and DeWitt Middle School.

The plan goes beyond creating more sustainable and healthy schools, however. It also sets broad goals to bring the climate response into classrooms and curriculums.

“As a school district preparing students for the future, we need to be responsive to their growing awareness of the climate crisis and concerns about how it will impact the challenges they will face in the future,” the plan reads.

The climate action plan includes a survey of Boynton Middle School students to gauge their perception and awareness of climate issues. 

According to the survey of 76 eighth-grade students, nearly 80% said they were either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about climate change. However, 96% of respondents agreed that it was possible to take actions to slow down or reverse its effects.

Developing curriculum

The plan, as passed, includes a “Curricular Development” section, which calls for the district to expand curriculum writing opportunities related to sustainability and expresses support for existing education on the subject. It also added a goal of incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing into certain subject areas.

Teaching about the climate crisis in school is not new for Ithaca teachers. Heurich said he’s presented on the climate crisis hundreds of times, and he’s not the only teacher taking on that work.

During a May 26 presentation to the board of education, IHS teacher Cindy Kramer said she sees sustainability education not as an add-on, but a fully integrated part of the curriculum.

“When teaching last week about climate action […] in a social studies class, it was really exciting to be able to announce to the students a recent proposition that passed that would be shifting us off of fossil fuels to geothermal energy for Boynton and Ithaca High School,” Kramer said. “There were these smiles and glimmers in their eyes.”

IHS student Asher Kolodji told board members last month that he sees climate change as a class struggle as well as an environmental struggle, because climate change tends to have disproportionate impacts on disadvantaged communities.

“Today, the climate action plan is our best way of facing the climate crisis head on, using the relatively few resources at our disposal to make a disproportionate impact,” he said. “Any feared costs, or potential setbacks, are far outweighed by the impact this plan will have on future Ithacans, and on disadvantaged students living across the district.”

Implementation

Now that the plan has been approved, an advisory council of students, teachers and district leaders will take on the responsibility of coordinating implementation of the plan and assessing the district’s progress. The plan includes a requirement to form the advisory council every year.

The New York State budget, which was finalized in May, includes some additional funding available to schools looking to “reduce energy use and improve the energy efficiency of their buildings while minimizing exposure to extreme heat.”

Awarded districts can receive up to $500,000 each, with an Aug. 18 deadline to apply. If awarded, the funding would be in addition to existing “building aid”, which reimburses districts about 50% of the cost of any capital projects.

Meanwhile, Heurich said his hope is that as the school district continues to work towards the goals outlined in the plan, the state will make even more funding available to support its initiatives.

Megan Zerez contributed reporting to this article.