Overview – The Climate Change is Elementary™ program will be piloted in a few selected schools. Once it is designed and thoroughly tested it will be presented by properly trained facilitators in elementary schools nationwide at minimal cost aimed at total nationwide coverage within a ten-year time frame. Over 50,000,000 students can be involved, along with all their teachers and most of their parents. The program uses the system that has been established and tested by Dave Finnigan who has visited over 2,000 schools with a highly valued self-esteem program that then becomes part of the school culture. Every student, every teacher, and most parents will be deeply involved in the Climate Change is Elementary™ Program and will be assisted to make a commitment to help solve the crisis. The expected outcome is a sea change in public opinion regarding Global Warming and should lead to action by families throughout the US. Secondary publicity will be enormous.

Brief Operational Concept – Climate Change is Elementary™ will be implemented through the network of 95,000 Wellness and Health and Physical Education (W/HPE) Teachers at the elementary level. It takes one long day per school for a trained consultant to implement but becomes part of the W/HPE curriculum thereafter. The day begins with a 30-minute teachers meeting before school where every classroom teacher is briefed on the program, sees a few of the slides from the Climate Project slide show and gets a few questions answered by a properly trained consultant. The consultant then meets every student in the entire school one grade level at a time in specially designed hands-on activity based workshops in the gym or cafeteria with classroom teachers and Wellness/HPE teachers in attendance. These workshops use principles of Accelerated Learning to get students and teachers physically involved in skits, games, music, poems, and group activities that teach parts of the problem. At the end of the school day we hold an all-school assembly and the students present the problem in bite-sized pieces, one grade level at a time. That same evening parents are invited to come to school with their children. Every child is in the show. The students present the material just as they did in the assembly. The consultant shows some of the more important slides. Then the families work together to come up with solutions. The consultant is the facilitator. Family feedback is built in by collecting e-mail addresses of all participating families, and by sending the group’s conclusions out to every family.