Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, Contributing Photographer

At the Board of Education meeting on Monday evening, eight local high school students each held up a body-sized paper heart. Together, their posters read, “Don’t break hearts again. Hire climate staff!”

One by one, the students — all members of the New Haven Climate Movement — listed the effects of climate change on their daily lives and called on the Board of Education to push the mayor to allocate $300,000 in the 2025-26 city budget for the hiring of three full-time climate staff. 

“We often tend to think of climate as a more abstract thing, but we hope to cement with our testimonies that there are local issues in our communities,” Manxi Han, a student at Wilbur Cross High School, told the News. “We really need to step up.”

In the weeks preceding the meeting, the students had brought the posters to eight high schools across New Haven, walking down hallways and encouraging students to pick up a black marker, sign their names and write the ways in which climate change breaks their hearts.

One message scrawled on a heart read “I want to live in a world without wildfires destroying schools and colleges.” Another student worried about houses “crumbling beneath [their] feet and going out to sea.”

“Isn’t it tragic that we’ve been able to fill eight entire banners of anxiety and heartbreak about our future?” Han asked the board.

While reading out selected quotes from the posters, students expressed concerns about the threats rising sea levels pose to a coastal city like New Haven as well as air pollution, high rates of asthma and warming summer temperatures that may prevent future generations from spending as much time outdoors.

Monday’s demonstration is far from the first time the New Haven Climate Movement has lobbied the Board of Education. In 2022, the board approved the group’s Climate Emergency Resolution, which recognized a climate emergency and resolved to allocate resources to fund projects and, potentially, climate staff. This week, over two years later, the students reiterated demands to hire energy, climate education and transportation and sustainability coordinators.

Adrian Huq YSE ’26, a co-founder of the New Haven Climate Movement, said that the organization prioritizes local action. They have long targeted the same city officials: the mayor, the Board of Alders and the Board of Education.

“We’ve asked for climate staff in previous years where there was a lot of federal funding, and now that’s dwindling, but I’m hopeful,” said Huq. “There have been climate staff hired on the city level, but we’re still hoping for more on the Board of Ed side. So I think maybe third time’s the charm.”

At the outset of the meeting, the board’s newly minted president, OrLando Yarborough III GRD ’06 ’10 ’14 reminded the audience that at public meetings, the board’s job was to listen to and take note of public comment but not to act immediately on any questions or concerns raised.