Connecting The Dots: How The Changing Environment Shapes Student Success
September 29, 2025
Picture a classroom where children struggle to concentrate as temperatures soar past 80 degrees, their aging school building’s broken air conditioning no match for another record-breaking heat wave. Down the hall, windows that haven’t opened in decades trap stale air while outside, a nature preserve sits unused—a missed opportunity for learning that could transform both minds and hearts.
This isn’t a dystopian future. It’s happening in schools across America today. But within these challenges lies extraordinary potential for reimagining how and where our children learn.
What does it mean to create the optimal learning environment for students? That question is at the heart of Connecting the Dots: The Environment’s Impact on Student Success, a gathering recently hosted by the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE). At first glance, the event might sound like it’s about classrooms and curriculum. But the conversations extended much further to health, a changing climate, extreme weather patterns, pollution, and the broader natural ecosystems in which young people learn and grow up.
Education as a Determinant of Well-Being
Fifteen years ago, we founded SCORE on a simple but powerful insight: education is one of the most powerful determinants of long-term health and wellbeing. Research shows that people with a college degree live, on average, 11 years longer than those without a high school diploma. As I have seen in my own life as a heart transplant surgeon, a prescription or operation can save a life, but a high-quality education can extend it.
In the early 2000s, Tennessee’s K–12 education system was failing, literally earning an “F” from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Today, after years of reform and sustained focus on literacy, funding models, teacher support, and postsecondary pathways, the state has made historic gains. Students are achieving at levels never seen before, even after pandemic learning loss.
But amidst all this progress, a new challenge has become apparent: our changing environment.
The Environment’s Role in Student Success
Education and environment are deeply intertwined. The air students breathe, the water they drink, the heat waves and floods that close their schools, and the failing HVAC systems and the aging buildings they spend over 1,000 hours a year in—all shape how well they can learn.
The data are sobering:
- One in four U.S. public schools sits in a high-risk zone for extreme weather.
- From 2011–2019, 83% of week-long school closures were weather-related.
- Each one-degree increase in classroom temperature reduces learning by 1%.
- In Tennessee, schools have already this year faced closures and disruptions due to heat waves, broken HVAC systems, and flooding.
Beyond academics, these environmental stressors weigh on students’ mental health, fueling fears about the future and widening inequities for underserved communities in urban heat zones.
SCORE
Opportunity Within the Challenge
The story isn’t only about risk; it is also about opportunity. For example, research shows that just 10–50 minutes of nature-based learning a day can substantially improve academic performance, mental health, and social-emotional skills. And there is the opportunity for future jobs. The workforce is rapidly evolving toward sustainability: more than 9 million new jobs are projected in the clean energy sector over the next decade, and over 17 million existing jobs already require green skills.
Schools have the potential to lead, not just in preparing students academically, but in equipping them with the tools, resilience, and knowledge to thrive in a rapidly changing world. They can serve as community hubs for climate resilience and as launching pads for career pathways tied to sustainability and innovation.
Examples in Action
The Connecting the Dots event brought together educators, researchers, healthcare providers, and community leaders to explore how health and environmental challenges, including the changing climate, intersect with education—and how collaboration can lead to solutions.
Invest in Infrastructure
Jonathan Klein of UndauntedK12 noted that about 40% of U.S. schools were built before 1970, “built in and for another time.” At least 9 million kids, or “about 1 in 10 students this year … had their school experiences and activities disrupted by extreme weather.” Klein pointed to school infrastructure as part of the solution, citing the example of a federal tax credit available through 2034 that allows schools to modernize HVAC systems at a 30–50% discount, cutting both costs and emissions.
Tennessee Nature Academy
Jay Renfro, founder and executive director of Tennessee Nature Academy, described today’s youth as “the most disconnected generation that has ever walked the Earth.” He recalled childhood milestones like walking in the woods or sleeping under the stars, experiences many students now lack. His public charter school aims to change that, and the results are clear: Tennessee Nature Academy students outperform nearby peers while learning outdoors year-round. When asked what mattered most, his wife, an educator at the school, urged him to “talk about how happy the kids are.” Renfro added, “Kids belong outside. Adults belong outside.”
Dobyns-Bennett High School Burn Team
2024-25 Tennessee Teacher of the Year Bryan Kerns combined his background as a wildland firefighter and math teacher to reconnect students with nature. “I was a wildland firefighter … and then I was a math teacher for 17 years, and I thought those will never blend,” he said. “But then the more I saw, kids need a connection back to the environment. They needed a hopeful pathway for a sustainable living, a job.”
Kerns founded the Pulaski Club and Prescribed Burn Team at Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennessee, training students in fire science and ecological restoration, and guiding them on burns to restore farm pastures and natural grasslands. “We talk a lot about, what’s our impact on the environment, but I love thinking about what’s the environment’s impact on our kids that we’ve lost because they’re not outside anymore.”
His highly popular burn club evolved into three levels of fire science and emergency services courses, with graduates moving into careers once unimaginable, like the student who failed Algebra 1 but now serves as a professional firefighter with the elite Arizona Hot Shots. (Watch Kerns’s students conducting a prescribed burn here.)
Bill Frist, MD
A Call to Lead
The stories we heard of how nature-based learning is transforming students’ lives were inspiring, and data show there’s broad support for more of this type of learning.
More than 80% of Americans believe children should gain climate knowledge, and both Republicans and Democrats support schools as a venue for that learning. Tennessee has historically shown national leadership in education reform as well as environmental policy, from Senator Howard Baker’s leadership role in the Clean Air Act, to Vice President Al Gore’s groundbreaking documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” that ignited global interest and action, to the Great American Outdoors Act co-authored by Senator Lamar Alexander. And starting this school year, Tennessee now requires 40 minutes of daily unstructured physical activity for K-5 students – which has translated into more consistent outdoor time for kids. Students, parents, and teachers alike are excited by this change.
Now, it’s time to apply that same leadership to addressing the growing challenges arising at that important intersection of K-12 education and the environment.
Connecting the Dots
The Connecting the Dots conference wasn’t just another gathering of experts. It was a first-of-its-kind conversation that brought K-12 and postsecondary education leaders together with climate and environmental experts under one roof. In doing so, we created something powerful: a shared understanding of what our schools need to thrive in a fast-changing world.
The message that emerged is both urgent and hopeful: we can no longer treat the environmental conditions where children learn as a mere backdrop to their education. These conditions are active forces shaping every child’s chance for success. But when we acknowledge this reality and work together to address it systematically, we unlock extraordinary potential.
The question isn’t whether we can afford to reimagine education for a changing world. The question is whether we can afford not to. Our children deserve schools that don’t just shelter them from environmental challenges but equip them with the knowledge, skills, and resilience to lead in solving them.
The dots are there, waiting to be connected. The future is there, waiting to be built. And our students are there, waiting for us to give them the tools to create and engage in a world where both learning and living can flourish.
View a recording of the September 4, 2025 symposium: “Connecting the Dots: How the Changing Environment Shapes Student Success” here.
Senator Frist chairs SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education) as well as the global board of The Nature Conservancy.
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