By hanging Uncle Sam posters across school that ask for help against climate change, the Sunrise Movement wants everyone’s support as they prepare to meet with the CPS school board. Sunrise hopes to convince the board into using more renewable energy sources to power our district.

Members of Sunrise have been having discussions with board members Mary Wineberg and Mike Morasky through email with hopes of convincing the board to use more renewable sources across the schools in the district.

“They have generally been pretty supportive of our measures,” Sophie Krumm, ’25, one of Sunrise’s co-presidents, said. “The board has not given us much talk lately because we haven’t presented them with an actual written resolution, but that resolution is written and we will be presenting it hopefully in December.”

Sunrise has promoted the use of numerous policies such as the Green New Deal and a carbon-tax that would reduce the usage of emissions.

“[Climate change] disproportionately affects people who have been historically marginalized,” Audrey Symon, ‘25, Sunrise’s other co-president, said. “CPS serves a lot of those communities, so they need to recognize that this is an issue that directly affects children.”

As Sunrise plans its meetings with the board, it encourages the people of Cincinnati to also get politically involved by making educated voting choices.

“An important part of Sunrise and any [other] environmental movement is getting people educated on who to vote for,” Symon said. “We are planning on doing some sort of voter registration event for SENIORS and any staff that may need to be registered for the upcoming November election, which will elect and re-elect city council members as well as CPS board members.”

Aside from meeting with the board, Sunrise has plans to help convince the public of other ways to be more eco friendly, with talks of publishing a newsletter and even considering a clean up event.

“The city really is in a rather good place when it comes to climate policy because we have a really strong policy called the Green Cincinnati Plan,” Symon said. “We’re poised to become a leader in sustainability in the coming years, [but] there’s always more that can be done, always discussions to be had about how we can improve these plans to become more and more sustainable.”

Though the group may be small, they’re not giving up on the chance to help fight climate change.

“I think that one thing I see a lot with teenagers, [is that] we all know that it [climate change] exists, but it’s not brought up a lot, it’s just something that kind of exists,” Krumm said, “but it’s more that it just exists, it’s attacking us. We don’t notice it, but other people do, and we want to help.”