Today’s children and young adults care more about climate change than they do most issues as temperatures have reached record highs and the number of weather-related disasters continues to rise.

Yet research suggests the learning materials students are consuming in school have in some cases muted their coverage of climate change. Students told USA TODAY treatment of the issue has remained limited in schools even as their demands for such education have grown.

“Everything I learned about climate change was self-taught,” said Amara Ifeji, 21, now a senior at Northeastern University in Boston and an environmental justice advocate. Her low-income high school in Maine didn’t require climate change instruction for students in her particular science, technology, engineering and math program, let alone instruction that addressed the uneven impacts on people of color.

While a number of states have changed their standards and curricula to address climate change, she worries about all the students at schools that lack the resources or the political will to make it a formal and interdisciplinary part of the learning experience. Polls have found a majority of teachers still don’t talk about the topic in class, usually saying it’s outside their wheelhouse.

This, observers say, amounts