by Oren Kadosh
On May 7th, LNS partners at the Public School Strong campaign hosted a virtual training on Healthy School Finance. Public School Strong brings together parents, educators, and community members organizing in their school districts for healthy, safe, fully-funded public schools. The workshop was facilitated by experts in climate, labor, and school finance, representing organizations such as the Climate and Community Institute and the Debt Collective. LNS and the Educators Climate Action Network (ECAN) helped to organize the event.
The virtual training presented attendees from dozens of States and school districts across the country with a framework and tools to critically understand how school finance, and therefore school facilities and instruction, are made toxic when forced to rely on extractive Wall Street debt and racialized budget scarcity. Getting to the fundamentals of how toxic finance is bound up with toxic, carbon-intensive school buildings, was a boost to public school organizers in thinking about how climate and healthy school investment can leverage up campaigns.
A recording of the training can be viewed here.