Fires, Floods, and Droughts: Impacts of Climate Change in the U.S.

School Description and Rationale

The Franklin-McKinley School District in partnership with East Side Union High School District, Evergreen Valley College, and San Jose State University opened College Connection Academy (CCA), a Partnership School, grades 7 through 12/13 in the fall of 2008. CCA has the same autonomy and freedom to deal with curriculum, teaching and learning to meet individual students' needs. The four partners have combined and integrated their resources to make the Academy successful. CCA is located on Yerba Buena High School Campus, which allows students to take high school elective classes while in eighth grade. CCA students can earn up to one year’s worth of college credits by the time they graduate from Yerba Buena High School. 

The population is made up of 200 students for the academic year 2021-2022, of which 96 are seventh-grade students, and 104 are eighth-grade students. During the past school year, the state of California provided free lunches for all students, regardless of their socioeconomic status. The student demographics are approximately, Black or African American 1%, Asian 62.9%, Filipino 3.8%, Hispanic or Latino 30.5%, White 1%, other races 1%, English Learner’s 9.5%, and Students with Disabilities 0.5%. This unit is developed for approximately 100 seventh grade general education students. All the students attending CCA are required to participate in the School District Science Fair. Learning this unit could inspire some students to generate ideas for their future Science Fair Project. Students do not have physical textbooks for science. We have science techbooks. As our curriculum is available online, students are familiar with using their computers to learn from, and research on the internet to gather information.

My school district is in San Jose, California which is a part of Santa Clara County. The Santa Clara Valley Water District (also called Valley Water) company supplies water to our area. To get the attention of drivers along Freeway 101, several billboards have been set up by Valley Water asking people to conserve water. In addition, the Valley Water District News update is asking people to conserve water as we are in a third year of acute drought.² Valley Water has also mandated water restrictions which allow watering lawns only two days a week, between 6 pm and 9 am in order to avoid peak hot weather times of the day, and watering that might cause a runoff.³ Bringing awareness to my students about The Santa Clara Valley Water District (Valley Water) company’s efforts will allow them to better understand why water is a precious natural resource, and why we must water our lawns less frequently so we can conserve water. We have a lawn just outside my classroom. Students will get to observe the frequency of the lawn being water, so they know that the school is doing its part of conserving water.

This unit will focus on the impact of lower annual rainfall on agriculture in California, the impact of higher temperatures on agriculture in California, approaches for addressing water scarcity in California, approaches for irrigating crops during water scarcity, and growing less water intensive crops. Studying this unit should help my students to better understand the causes of climate change, and what measures must be taken to reduce the impacts of climate change.