New York City kids want to skip school for the very best reason. And as was just announced, they have an excused absence to do so on Friday, September 20. Why? To participate in the youth climate strike. Now that NYC let 1.1 million public school students know they can participate in this enormous demonstration, people across the country are hopeful that their local districts will follow suit. Seattle, Cambridge, and Los Angeles are among the bigger contenders weighing the decision.
In practice, this means that elementary school students will need to be signed out of school by a parent. Middle and high school students will need to get permission. Parents and guardians can consent by calling or writing the school, the same way they normally would excuse an absence.
This news was also announced on Twitter:
For New Yorkers, a crowd of youth climate leaders will speak at around 12 PM ET on Friday in downtown Manhattan. Among them is, of course, sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg who recently made national news for traveling from the United Kingdom to New York by boat. She’s also the teenager whose constant protesting inspired the original student walkouts for climate change while she was in school herself in Sweden.
Thunberg is leading the New York strike, which makes the experience all the cooler for the students who get to attend. “If you can’t be in the strike, then, of course, you don’t have to,” Thunberg told Teen Vogue. “But I think if there is one day you should join, this is the day.”
It’s not just the United States participating in these strikes, either. London, Sydney, Tokyo, Moscow, and São Paulo, among other massive cities, are participating in parallel strikes. And in terms of schools, Amnesty International Secretary General Kumi Naidoo reached out to 30,000 schools across the world, asking administrators to let students join their local climate strikes. The dates mentioned are Sept. 20 and 27, which begin and end the week of action. All of this leads up to, of course, the UN Climate Action Summit.
Thunberg tweeted about this too:
Kids want to get involved and save the planet. How cool is that?