The federal government is set to spend nearly $200 billion to safely reopen schools, boost state spending on low-income school programs and increase financial aid at universities as part of President Joe Biden s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.

To Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), that spending looks more like triage than investment. On Saturday, the first-term congressman is set to unveil a $1.16 trillion proposal to fund climate-friendly retrofits at every K-12 public school in the nation, hire and train more teachers, and beef up funding for low-income and disability-focused programs.

Before COVID-19 killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and made in-person classes unsafe, nearly 8,000 public schools sat within 500 feet of highways, truck routes and other traffic-clogged roads where roughly 4.4 million students breathed air filled with toxic levels of exhaust pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 1 in 5 schools has at least one classroom with unsafe levels of radon, a radioactive gas that causes lung cancer. Countless more schools struggle with mold, toxic building materials and excessive heat, particularly as climate change worsens heat waves.

The proposal aims to spend $250 billion over 10 years to retrofit schools, remediating lead and asbestos, equipping facilities with solar panels and batteries, and increasing energy efficiency and air circulation. Once those upgrades are complete, it would slash emissions of planet-heating carbon dioxide by at least 29 million tons per year, the equivalent of taking 6 million cars off the road. The work would also create demand for more than 100,000 construction and maintenance jobs, split roughly in half between red and blue states.

Another $250 billion spent over that same decade would fund the creation of 336,000 new jobs in schools, adding nearly 10 new teachers, nurses, social workers and other staffers on average to about 33,000 schools.

And the plan calls for quadrupling funding for Title I programs, which aid students and districts in higher-poverty areas, from $14 billion to $60 billion, while increasing the budget for the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act for students with disabilities from $13 billion to $33 billion. Those increases would amount to roughly $66 billion per year in new spending.

The proposal is a debut effort by the newly formed climate + community project . The policy outfit and network of academics, which lowercases its name, is predicated on the idea that theres a ton of public money on the table this decade we have to spend it right, said Daniel Aldana Cohen, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the project.

We need to heal these fractures across communities, school districts, and states that have struggled to support one of our most critical pieces of infrastructure, said Akira Drake Rodriguez, the University of Pennsylvania researcher who authored the plan. By investing in green retrofits for aging facilities and funding to expand educational opportunity and access, we hope to give school districts and local communities the capacity to reimagine and transform public education.

Billy Fleming, director of the University of Pennsylvanias McHarg Center and another co-founder of the climate + community project, placed the proposal in the context of the Green New Deal, the sweeping climate and jobs plan introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and supported by Bowman.

Ultimately, no one will understand the Green New Deal through the volume of carbon molecules in the atmosphere or the source of the electrons in their circuit, Fleming said. But there is a real opportunity to translate the demands of the climate justice movement into transformative investments in the built environment the public schools, housing, transportation systems and infrastructures that stitch together everyday life.