Summer’s winding down and teachers are preparing for class in the fall. By this time next year, public school students will have a new learning requirement: climate change education.
At The Green Read Bookstore in Crystal Lake, Pam King rearranges cows on a watershed model she likes to bring into sixth grade classrooms. It’s about the size of a classroom desk and looks kind of like a farm town in Illinois with row crops, a few cows and creeks running through it. She says the students love the chocolate chips she puts just behind the cows to represent their waste. She'll explain in her demo that the waste ultimately ends up in waterways when it rains. She playfully squirts the ‘rain’ from a spray bottle.
King's the director of the McHenry County School Environmental Education Program. The organization has been around since the 1980s, where educators were originally focused on recycling. Now, they visit K-8 schools all over the county, going directly into classrooms with environmental lessons. She’s been invited to the bookstore as they showcase resources for teachers like laminated posters, lesson plans, and models.
King says environmental educators have a pretty heavy lift.
"I said the only future is in education," King said. "And those of us who teach have enough guts to go and look the future in the face every single day. I have lots of hope for the future. I think multi-faceted problems require multi-faceted solutions. You've got to be ready, and you've got to be open to the fact that there are these 'invisibles' that the Earth provides. The sooner we start that understanding, the more likely it is to have an effect — small nudges produce trajectories that are unforeseen."
Making environmental education engaging
At the bookstore, teachers mill about sifting through the materials, stooping to examine classroom toys and flipping through environmental books.
Then King shows off the pièce de résistance: Recycle Rita. It's a sock puppet with soup cans for eyes.
These engaging lessons will become particularly important next fall. In the 2026-2027 school year, all public schools in the state will be required to provide instruction on climate change. That includes lessons on the impacts of climate change on communities and looking at solutions. Illinois is among a handful of states with similar requirements.
Training teachers ahead of the new requirements
Brekke Bounds is the executive director of the Environmental Education Association of Illinois. The group has been supporting educators since the 1970s, offering professional development, resources, and a place to build community.
"[The law is] pretty narrow and specific," Bounds said, "but it feels like a really big win considering there was nothing like that before.”
She says the state hasn’t offered schools any financial appropriations to prepare for the climate education mandate. Her organization is trying to help.
"Teachers aren't faced with that reality just yet," she said, "but there is not currently, to my knowledge, any appropriations for there to be any training for teachers on that work. And so that's a that's a gap we really are trying to fill.”
Ultimately, the goal is to increase environmental literacy for all.
“There's a piece of environmental education that specifically leads to higher environmental literacy," Bounds said. "It's not just that you're learning about the systems, but you're learning about your place in them. You're understanding what that means for the wider world."
Small interactions can lead to large impact
Back at The Green Read, Pam King says students in the county interact with the McHenry County School Environmental Education Program once a year, at most. King says kids recognize her as ‘the recycling lady’ showing the impact educators can have on the future generations and that enthusiasm keeps her motivated.
“I got a note the first year I did this," said King, "from a little girl in Chesak Elementary School in Huntley that said, ‘Don't forget me.’ I never have, and I was in there one day. We don't know the impacts we can make. We will never see them.”
She says for educators who are intimidated by environmental lessons, they can start small with what they know — if it’s gardening or backyard birds or anything else. Illinois educators are also working on a dashboard where any teacher, regardless of subject, can visit and find full lesson plans that fully comply with state standards.