Rows of school desks appeared in downtown Durham’s CCB Plaza on Thursday as Durham School of the Arts (DSA) students staged a May Day “study-in” demanding climate action.
“We were debating between sitting on the steps of the school board building or doing the middle of the plaza,” says Sarah Rodrigues, a junior who helped organize the demonstration. “We were like, the plaza sounds good, but how do we make it school-specific? And then we were like, desks!”
Rodrigues found the desks on Facebook marketplace for cheap, she says.
The demonstration, organized by DSA’s Sunrise Movement chapter, brought students to the plaza after school from 3:45 to early evening as part of their ongoing campaign for a Green New Deal for Schools, which calls on the Durham Public Schools (DPS) Board of Education to invest in clean and renewable energy for schools, free lunches, climate curriculum, climate disaster plans, and pathways to green jobs. Students have advocated for the actions at multiple DPS board meetings.
It really does look like someone plucked a classroom out of Durham School of the Arts and dropped it, intact, next to Major the Bull. Some students wear headphones and work diligently on their computers, others chat among themselves or check their phones, and a few enjoy ice cream from The Parlour nearby. A portable speaker plays Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” in the background.
“If you see any trash, whether it’s yours or not, make sure you’re picking it up and putting it in the trash bucket,” Avery O’Brien, another junior organizer, reminds the group.
Between study sessions, several students gather to film content for social media showing staged frustration over climate inaction. The Instagram reel they edit together on-site features clips of students shoving each other and stomping their feet, overlaid with text like “Sunrise when our schools don’t have safe or clean enough buildings.” The video transitions to students looking excited when they see an “informative quiz” on a big poster board that asks questions like “Is global climate change likely to raise global temperatures by more than 1.5°C by the year 2029?”
The sit-in comes six months after DSA Sunrise staged a walkout in response to Trump’s reelection. Since then, the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement for a second time, declared a “national energy emergency” to accelerate Arctic drilling, dismissed all scientists working on the National Climate Assessment, and canceled $20 billion in climate grants, among many other environmental rollbacks.
“After the election, everybody was a little bit rattled, then I feel like things began to fizzle out,” O’Brien says about student activism inside DSA. “We want people to be aware that change still needs to happen, which is why we’re keeping the pressure up with demonstrations like these.”
Indeed, passersby aren’t particularly fazed by the unusual sight. There’s a petition to sign supporting the Green New Deal for Schools, but engagement is limited. A student tries to stop a couple walking past and asks if they want to sign, and when they decline with a “not today,” the student looks momentarily disappointed before mocking their own solicitation tactics by joking to a friend, “Do you know our lord and savior Jesus Christ?”
“It’s difficult, because a lot of people think about a climate issue and they’re like, ‘Well, that’s later,’” Rodrigues says. “That’s the very problem with the climate crisis—people push it back. So we’re trying to bring it back to the forefront.”
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Reach Staff Writer Lena Geller at lgeller@indyweek.com.Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com