No excuses needed for this trip

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following letter was sent to teachers and faculty of schools where the authors’ children attend. Absences for the strike are being excused citywide.

As you know, we are in the midst of an environmental crisis of global proportions, and we must respond.

The city council in June declared a climate emergency calling for “an immediate emergency mobilization to restore a safe climate.”

For months, children around the world have been rising to the challenge. It started slowly with one girl outside the Swedish parliament every Friday (Greta Thunberg), then another at the United Nations (Alexandria Villaseñor), now more than 100,000 school children worldwide in a movement called Fridays For Future.

These children around the globe — and mine and yours here in the Bronx — are the last generation to effect the change necessary to thrive in the future, and first of the generation to live fully in a climate changed world.

On Sept. 20 — three days before the U.N. Climate Summit in New York City — young people and adults will strike all across the world to demand transformative action to address the climate crisis. That is why — after talking with each of my children, from ages 6 to 17 — I am notifying you that I support their leaving school on Sept. 20 to join the climate strike.

I will take them all out of school at about 10 a.m., on Friday, Sept. 20, to head to Foley Square, where we — and thousands of others — will march to a rally at Battery Park.

My children will certainly miss class time, but the lessons they will receive in collective action, in science, in civic empowerment, in free speech, in community building, will outweigh that. They will see that when there is a crisis, people can come together and demand action.

I hope that as educators and parents who work each day to empower children, you will support — and perhaps join — this movement.

Jessica Haller
Chad Haller

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