Utah's state education board narrowly voted to keep climate change as a part of its science curriculum

• Utah's state school board voted 8-7 to kill any amendments to the state's science curriculum standards.
• One of those amendments would have removed climate change from the state curriculum.

The Utah State Board of Education voted to keep climate change in the science curriculum for grade school children by a margin of just one vote last week.

The board voted 8-7 to accept new proposed standards for the state's science and engineering curriculum, which were written by a committee of educators, scientists, and parents, according to KSL, a local news outlet based in Salt Lake City.

The meeting lasted nearly 14 hours and ended with a vote to quash all amendments to the curriculum, one of which included a provision to remove climate change from the state curriculum. The board also rejected another amendment that would have added to academic standards an alternative theory about rock formation that cites the Great Flood story from The Bible, the outlet reported.

Conservatives in the United States in recent years have pushed for books and other materials to be removed from schools that they consider "harmful" or "politically charged." Classroom discussion of climate change has also sometimes been the focus of these political debates.

A state Senate bill now in committee in Ohio would require university professors to teach "both sides" of the climate change issue. Similar legislation has been debated in Alabama and Indiana. And in 2019, a legislative battle erupted in Idaho over whether or not to include climate change in the state's academic standards.

New Jersey became the first state to require that climate change be included in public school curriculums in 2020.

The proposed amendment to Utah's curriculum would have removed the term "climate change" and included a section that said students should "plan and carry out an investigation to determine the natural and human-caused factors that could produce changes in Earth's climate systems," the board's vice chair, Jennie Earl, said, according to KTVX, an ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City.

Brent Strate, the board member who introduced the motion in Utah to accept the curriculum as is without the added amendments, said during the meeting that he felt comfortable with the current standards because they had been approved by the board since 2019.

"If it's an amendment, if it isn't better, I'm not considering it," Strate said. "It could be equal and we'd have a long debate about it, but it has to be absolutely better or I'm not going to vote in favor."

Earl, meanwhile, urged the board to vote no and allow amendments to the standards during the meeting on Thursday.

"I think we've done a lot of work and I think we can continue to do that," Earl said.