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A message to Trump Ashland Middle School students sit among a sea of posters arguing the existance of climate change that will be mailed to President-elect Donald Trump. Daily Tidings / Denise Baratta Friday Dec 16, 2016 at 2:00 AM Joe Zavala Ashland Daily Tidings @Joe_Zavala99 Ellis Pryor has heard the evidence, seen the data and he’s even created a poster that illustrates his findings. Now, the Ashland Middle School eighth-grader has a message for President-elect Donald Trump: “Dear Mr. Trump,” Pryor read, holding up a strip of paper on which he scrawled the short letter. “I’m glad to hear that you’re keeping an open mind to climate change. I hope you’re willing to represent most of the American people and the almost unanimous scientific data on climate change.” Pryor’s poster, which focused on how climate change will impact weather patterns, and the message he wrote will soon — possibly today —be packed away along with all the other posters and messages created by Jennifer Craugh’s seventh/eighth-grade science class and shipped off to Washington D.C., where Craugh’s students hope the future president will see the large stack of facts and take a moment from his busy schedule to consider the ramifications. The idea of shipping the projects to the next Commander in Chief came to Craugh as she watched election results roll in Nov. 7. Her class had been working its way through a month-long unit study on climate change, part of the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by Oregon two years ago. Craugh said the unit proved to be excellent and timely, but also a colossal downer for some of her students as they came to understand the many ways in which their lives are likely to be impacted by climate change. “I had one student in particular … come to me and say, ‘I don’t want to come to science today — climate change is too depressing,’” Craugh said. “And I said, ‘I agree, it is. So when something’s scary or depressing, then the best thing to do is take some action against it.’” At first, that “something” was local — Craugh encouraged her students to turn off their lights at home, conserve energy and, in her classroom, they used as few lights as possible and turned off the projector when it wasn’t in use. Then Donald Trump, who tweeted in 2012 that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” was elected president. “And so,” Craugh said, “the night of the election I thought, 'oh my gosh, what am I going to say to my students?' They were depressed before, and now … So I kind of went back to my original idea, which was, when something’s scary, then we take action.” Science is about evidence, Craugh reasoned. So why not send the evidence to Trump? She wasn’t sure what her students would think of the plan, but when she told them the next day the response was unanimous. “They started clapping,” she said. “They all started clapping like crazy, getting so excited.” The students, who partnered up and chose their focus from 15 different climate-change impacts, completed their posters over the next week or so and on Wednesday were busy writing the statements that will be shipped to D.C. along with the posters. Pryor’s poster, one of 24 laid out for other AMS students to see outside Craugh’s class Wednesday, was titled “Stronger Storms” and included a picture in each corner, including a graph that showed the accelerated rate at which the earth’s oceans are warming (his source: the NOAA/NESDIS/NODC Ocean Climate Laboratory). In the top right corner of Pryor’s poster was an easily-recognizable image shot from space — a massive hurricane, exactly the sort of event he believes, based on his findings, we’ll likely be experiencing more in the near future. “We researched what’s going to happen with storms and we found that storms are actually going to go down, but they’re going to be way stronger,” he said. “And so the number of main storms is going to go up, and for the East Coast that’s going to be terrible.” Seventh-grader Kai Briola, who won the school’s National Geography Bee in January and placed eighth in the state, studied habitat loss and extinction. His poster included some colorful pictures of a few of his favorite endangered animals and a long list: Forest elephant, giant panda, hippopotamus, marine iguana, polar bear … He couldn’t include the entire list. “It was this long,” Briola said, stretching his arms as far apart as they could go. Abigail Fellman, a seventh-grader, and her partner focused on the rising sea levels and how that will impact coastal regions in the U.S. Her poster included a dire factoid inside an orange-bordered box in the lower right corner: By the end of this century, the sea will have risen one to four feet, which will result in the flooding of 150 million to 250 million homes. What was it like to discover that data in the AMS computer lab? “Well,” Fellman said, “it makes me scared. But when we see what’s going to happen, what we know is going to happen around the world, it makes everybody think — hopefully it makes everybody think — about what we can do to help that and what we can do to change that. Because it’s pretty awful.” Other climate change poster titles included “Wild Fires and Droughts,” “Air Quality” “Snow and Ice Melting” and “Plants, Animals and Climate Change.” Fellman said she’s learned a lot about how the earth is changing and, in following Craugh’s advice, has made subtle adjustments in her own life. Now, when Fellman leaves a room, she’s careful to turn off the light, too. Fellman may be only 13, but she’s not naïve enough to believe Trump will see the light based on some student-made poster projects. But, she’s also not cynical enough to have lost hope in the power of the people. “I think it’s a great thing that (Craugh’s) giving us the opportunity to talk to him and tell him that just a small little town in Oregon, a place he probably doesn’t care about that much, is affected and is learning about this and believes that he needs to do something to change it," she said. “I mean, I don’t think he’s going to change his mind solely because of a group of middle schoolers. But maybe if enough people talk to him about it and tell him that he needs to work on that he might start to warm up to the idea of changing and helping and getting people to help with climate change.” Joe Zavala is a reporter for the Ashland Daily Tidings. Reach him at 541-821-0829 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @Joe_Zavala99.