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Idaho Stripped Climate Change From School Guidelines. Now, It’s a Battle.

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By Livia Albeck-Ripka

Feb. 6, 2018

The political fight over global warming has extended to science education in recent years as several states have attempted to weaken or block new teaching standards that included information about climate science. But only in Idaho has the state legislature stripped all mentions of human-caused climate change from statewide science guidelines while leaving the rest of the standards intact.

Now teachers, parents and students are pushing back, hoping to convince the Republican-controlled Idaho Legislature to approve revised standards, which science proponents say are watered down but would still represent a victory for climate-change education in the state. The Idaho House education committee could vote as soon as Wednesday on whether to allow the revised language into the state’s curriculum.

“We’re hopeful that we can put a final bow on this,” said Scott Cook, the director of academics at the Idaho State Department of Education, who helps lead a committee of teachers, parents and scientists urging that climate change be included in the standards.

The battle started in early 2016, when Idaho was working to update its decade-old science standards for kindergarten through 12th grade, which outside education groups said were out of date. Lawmakers rejected a new set of standards, which were closely modeled after national guidelines developed by a consortium of states and science organizations and included information on climate change, saying more input from the public was needed.

Last year, the House education committee accepted the new standards, but only after scrubbing five sections related to climate change. The passages about climate change were “surgically removed,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, which monitors anti-science legislation.

Now, Mr. Cook’s committee has reworked those passages in an effort to win approval from lawmakers. The revised standards include natural causes of climate change alongside those driven by humans, and, in response to lawmakers’ requests, they emphasize potential solutions to climate change.

“The committee took a true course between the rocks on one side and the whirlpool on the other,” Mr. Cook said, describing how it had been difficult to strike a balance between language that was scientifically accurate but was satisfying to lawmakers. Where the original standards placed a stronger emphasis on human activity as the primary cause of climate change, the revised standards note that both “human activities” and “natural processes” can affect the Earth’s temperature.

“Although this is not exactly untrue, to say this in the context of a discussion of ‘current changes in climate’ is to suggest a significant role of natural activities in current climate change, which is misleading,” Mr. Branch said in an email. Still, he said he hoped the revised standards would be approved.

While Idaho teachers can still choose to include climate change in their lesson plans — and many do in places like Boise, the state’s capital and biggest city — science educators said they were concerned for teachers in districts where climate change was considered more controversial. Without state standards, those teachers might choose not to teach climate change at all, said Christopher Taylor, the science supervisor for the Boise School District.

Mr. Taylor said he was not worried about his own district. “It’s these small rural districts,” he said. “They will do what the state says.”

Even in Boise, “When you teach environmental science, you’re constantly being discredited,” said Erin Stutzman, a science teacher at Timberline High School in the capital, which, along with other schools nationally, has been mailed anti-science materials from the Heartland Institute, a group that denies the reality of human-induced climate change.

“If the community opposes it or thinks it’s some kind of propaganda, it puts those children coming out of those districts at a major disadvantage,” Ms. Stutzman said. “It’s an equity issue.”

Only 24 percent of Republicans in solid-red Idaho agree with the scientific consensus that climate change is caused mostly by human activities, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the lowest percentage of any state.

“It’s a political issue, and it shouldn’t be a political issue,” Mr. Taylor said.

The public response to the new proposal appears to be largely positive. House lawmakers heard testimony last week from 28 people, all of whom spoke in favor of the revised standards. And roughly 1,000 comments were received during the public comment period, only five of which were negative, Mr. Cook said.

Emily Her, 17, a student of Ms. Stutzman’s, testified at the hearing and is leading a petition that supports the teaching of climate change in Idaho. She said she was not afraid to speak up about the standards in Boise, but worried about people her age in districts where climate change may not be part of the curriculum. “It really puts the students at a disadvantage when the teachers have fear,” she said.

After mentioning climate change in her testimony, Ms. Her was cut off by the chairwoman of the education committee, Julie VanOrden, who asked Ms. Her to stick to talking about the standards.

“This is not a hearing on whether we have climate change, or we don’t have climate change,” Ms. VanOrden said later in the hearing.

“When the chair said that, I felt sick,” Ms. Her wrote in an email. “The lack of these science standards is really just the deliberate censorship of facts,” she added in an interview. “This is our future, and it’s in their hands.”

Ms. VanOrden initially agreed to an interview but did not immediately respond to attempts to schedule one.

In some states, state departments of education and local boards of education have the authority to approve educational standards without the legislature weighing in.

Gov. C. L. Otter, a Republican, said in a statement that he supported efforts to implement the revised standards.

Mr. Cook said the Education Department would not allow lawmakers to change the science of climate change. “If they come back and say, we’re going to pull this out and say backyard barbecuing or volcanic activity is the cause, that would be a bridge too far,” he said.