Seattle council urges schools to support student climate change walkout
Sep 17, 2019, 1:57 PM
Students take part in a climate strike in London. (Getty Images)
(Getty Images)
Students and Amazon employees will be walking out of school and work on Friday respectively as part of a larger global climate strike, and a push to promote action against climate change in the region.
Nearly a thousand Amazon employees will join walkout over climate change
The event will kick off at 9 a.m. at Cal Anderson Park. A march from the park to Seattle City Hall will take place at 12 p.m., followed by a youth-led rally at the end of the march. Amazon employees will gather at the Spheres on 7th Avenue and Lenora Street at 11:30 a.m., and will march to City Hall from there.
Seattle City Council also unanimously passed a resolution in support of students participating in the rally, urging public schools to “supports students’ right to assemble and participate in the Global Climate Strike.”
“After decades of inaction by corporate politicians and a recent report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change giving humanity just 12 years before surpassing a critical threshold of 1.5 Degrees Celsius of warming, young people are correct to be outraged, and they have no choice but to take action,” Councilmember Kshama Sawant said in a letter she issued proposing the resolution.
The measure also allows city employees to ask for unpaid leave for “a day of conscience” on Friday.
Students across Puget Sound skip school to protest climate change
When students participated in a similar strike in March, schools counted attendance at the rallies as an unexcused absence.
Roughly 1,100 have responded as “going” to the Facebook event page for the Seattle Climate Strike, with another 3,300 “interested.” That’s up from the 303 who responded as “going” back in March, and the 1,000 people who were “interested.”
Almost 1,000 Amazon employees vowed to participate back in early September.
