By Melissa Harden

On May 6, five additional members of Congress showed their support for environmental education and added their names to the list of co-sponsors of the No Child Left Inside Act (NCLI).  This brings the total number of co-sponsors for the legislation in the House of Representatives to 103!  The Senate version of the bill also has 19 co-sponsors.  Check to see if your representative or senators have agreed to become co-sponsors.

NCLI would authorize $100 million in new grants to schools, universities, local education and natural resource agencies, and non-profits to support environmental education for students and professional development for teachers. 

While we are excited that so many members of Congress have agreed to support NCLI, we also know that it can take quite a while for Congress to pass a bill, if they pass it at all.  As a result, Project Learning Tree (PLT) and its national sponsor, the American Forest Foundation (AFF), have been working with the NCLI coalition to get Congress to include NCLI in a larger piece of education legislation.  The House and Senate education committees are holding hearings and working behind the scenes to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which you’ll also recognize as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  PLT/AFF is urging the education committees to incorporate NCLI in their recommendations for the reauthorization. 

NCLB dramatically changed public education by requiring states to set and meet rigorous standards in core subjects and, as an unintended consequence, many schools were forced to cut environmental education to focus on reading and math.  Incorporating NCLI into the reauthorization of ESEA would secure a place for environmental education in our school’s K-12 curricula, support core subjects, and help prepare students for future jobs in a green economy. 

It’s great to see so many of our leaders in Washington, D.C. come to realize what we have known all along and show their support for NCLI!  We hope they will now incorporate NCLI into the reauthorization of ESEA, so teachers and school administrators would be provided with the resources (both time and money!) for environmental education programs, like PLT, and more students would learn to think critically about the environment and the role they play in conserving our natural resources.