One day last spring, Lucas Lajeunesse and a friend were talking about climate change. They both kept up on the topic in the news, and like many of their peers at Hopkinton High, they were concerned. “We were just hanging out, and we came up with the idea that we should change our school to renewable,” Lajeunesse says. His friend was about to graduate, but Lajuenesse, who was a junior at the time, decided to take up the cause on his own. “I was just trying to think of solutions for how I could make a difference,” he says.

He drafted a petition to the school board and in less than a week 170 students had signed it—a significant number for a small-town school in New Hampshire. He also started researching renewable options that could work for his school, like solar.

Then Lajeunesse’s one-student campaign got some unexpected help. Two recent Hopkinton graduates, Simon Doneski and Cooper Kimball-Rhines, heard about what he was doing and decided to get in touch. Doneski and Kimball-Rhines were now attending out-of-state colleges, but the two friends had remained in contact. Like Lajeunesse, they were worried about climate change and had been brainstorming action they could take back home in Hopkinton, where they planned to spend the summer. 

Through a Sierra Club email list, Doneski had learned about 100 Percent Clean Energy School Districts, a campaign organized by Climate Parents that helps students, teachers, and parents mobilize to get their school districts to pass resolutions committing them to using renewable energy. When he saw an Instagram post about Lajeunesse’s petition, Doneski reached out and suggested he and Kimball-Rhines contact Climate Parents to see how they could help with Lajeunesse’s campaign. 

School districts are major sources of energy consumption. According to Climate Parents’ estimates, K-12 schools emit as much greenhouse gas altogether each year as 18 coal-fired power plants. If all schools switched completely to clean energy, it would be the equivalent of taking one-in-seven passenger cars off the road. Not only would this contribute to reducing a school’s carbon footprint, it would also be a win for public health. 

Outdoor air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels causes 4.2 million premature deaths globally each year. Exposure to air pollution is also linked to asthma, which is one of the most common reasons that students miss school—in 2015, asthma caused 13.2 million missed instructional days.

Aside from the environmental and health benefits, switching to renewable energy offers the practical benefit of saving school districts money. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, K-12 school districts spend $8 billion each year out of their general operating budgets on energy—it’s their second biggest expense after salaries. Energy efficiency measures alone could save school districts an estimated $2 billion per year.

This elementary school in Los Gatos, California has installed solar panels and heat pumps. Photo by Frank Spada.

The upfront costs for school districts to transition to renewable energy are not nearly as daunting as they once were. For one thing, California, Utah, Texas, Massachusetts, and a number of other states now offer incentives for switching to renewables. “One of the coolest things that I've learned over the last few months,” Kimball-Rhines says,” is that solar energy [in particular] has become so much more affordable in our lifetimes. It used to be ‘If you have $50,000 lying around, then put on solar panels.’ Now, there are so many grants available at the federal and state level that can help school districts to afford these large investments.”

Mechanisms like power purchase agreements, in which, for example, a company pays the cost of installing and maintaining solar panels in order to sell the electricity they generate back to the host site,  can also help school districts defray costs. In most states, districts can also sell excess power back to the grid. 

Administrators at many school districts already recognize the benefits of renewable energy: about 5,500 K-12 schools across the country rely at least in part on solar energy. In January 2012, Richardsville Elementary School in Kentucky’s Warren County Public School District became the first zero energy K-12 school in the country; in 2017, San Francisco Unified School District passed the Carbon-Neutral Schools Resolution, with the goal of transitioning off natural gas completely by 2040 and generating all of its power on site by 2050. 

Climate Parents is currently involved with campaigns in about 15 school districts across the country, including Los Angeles, the second largest district in the country, which is on track to pass a resolution in October. Word is spreading, Climate Parents director Lisa Hoyos says, “as “people hear about local wins and want to replicate the strategy.”

Thanks to the efforts of Lajeunesse, Doneski, and Kimball-Rhines, Hopkinton is one of these school districts. With the help of the detailed tool kit put together by Climate Parents, the three realized that they needed to organize a team of students to conduct research and draft a proposal. By now it was summer, but they decided to hold a student meeting anyway to gauge interest. “We were expecting to have three or four people show up at the first meeting,” Doneski told Sierra. “We had like 10 or 11.” 

Doneski, Kimball-Rhines, and Lajeunesse held a handful of subsequent meetings and when school began in August, Lajeunesse founded a student club, “Hopkinton Students for 100.” He says that there are about 15 students now who are committed to working on writing a proposal, with plans to submit it to the school district by early spring. Lajeunesse has also met with the superintendent of the school district, who he says has been very receptive to his ideas.

Kimball-Rhines and Doneski just started their fall semester back at college so they see themselves more as advisors than participants in the process from here on out. But watching the campaign evolve has left them both feeling inspired.

“The people who showed up to the first meetings were interested in combating climate change but had no idea how to get there and you could tell that everyone was a little uneasy,” Doneski says. “Then after two meetings we started to see a huge shift. Everyone believes that we can do it now.”

Kimball-Rhines agrees. “Over the last six months this idea has gone from something that I thought was crackpot and absolutely would never happen to something that's like, ‘We're hoping to have a vote on the proposal by April.’ It’s really starting to take shape.” 

 And what has been the takeaway for Lajeunesse? “I think it's really important that everybody knows that no matter who you are, you can make a huge difference,” he says. “You may not feel like you're the person who can do this, but you probably are the person who can do it.”