Data centers outreach to kids uses school trips to shape views

Data centers outreach to kids mostly comes through industry groups and individual operators, and it spans every grade. 7×24 Exchange runs what it calls International Data Center Day, a holiday meant to raise awareness of the industry and inspire future workers, and it encourages supporters to pitch the day to school administrators.

The kits differ by age. High schools get a themed crossword and information on data center training programs. Elementary schools get coloring pages, a science project about evaporation, and printouts asking kids to draw the cloud or invent a data superhero. The group also points readers to several data center picture books, including one where two sisters meet a robot during a visit and another where two brothers save the internet.

This year alone, the group has run or joined at least a half-dozen school events around the country. In one, it took students from Fridley High School in Minnesota to a Cummins diesel generator plant to learn about the backup power that keeps data centers running.

Trade groups are doing the same. In May, the Potomac chapter of AFCOM, a data center industry association, sponsored Memorial Day flag-making kits for 3,100 first graders at 37 schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, the area often called Data Center Alley. Each child also got a card listing the industry’s economic benefits to the county.

A tally of public blog and social media posts found at least eleven companies and industry groups have hosted student trips to local data centers since 2025.

• Sabey, which runs seven US data centers, has hosted several trips for high schoolers in Washington state, from Quincy, Manson and Eastmont.
• Quincy School District says it has organized data center visits for years at sites run by Sabey, Yahoo, Vantage and Microsoft, including all-girls visits and tours for students interested in construction or engineering. It calls Sabey a long-standing partner that provides guest speakers, mock interviews and internships.
• Amazon opened its Skills Center in Arlington, Virginia, a free community space about cloud computing careers, to any high school in the DC area. Only one school, Jackson-Reed High School, came.

Not every trip was presented carefully. Manson School District’s blog post about its visit used an image labeled as AI-generated, and several people in it appear to be missing limbs.

Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who directs the National Education Policy Center, says industries with image problems have brought their message into schools for more than a century, naming fast food, tobacco, and oil and gas. In his view, the main goal is corporate storytelling rather than selling a product.

He also questions what children gain. A data center, he says, is mostly rows of hot, noisy servers with few people working inside once it is built. And he argues kids are especially exposed because, unlike adults, they can’t easily seek out other information or judge what they’re being told.

The timing isn’t random. Communities across the US have been fighting new data centers over electricity bills, water use, noise and land. Some of those projects sit close to schools: research cited by education reporters found around 1,878 schools within a mile of an existing or planned data center. In Frederick County, Maryland, part of a planned campus was drawn about 500 feet from Carroll Manor Elementary School, and the school installed an air-monitoring system.

There’s real value in learning how the internet works and what jobs exist behind it. Data centers employ technicians, electricians and engineers, and some districts treat visits as career education with internships attached.

But a tour run by the company that owns the building is not a neutral science lesson. If your child brings home a permission slip or an industry worksheet, a few questions are fair:

• Who designed the materials, and does the lesson mention electricity and water use or local concerns as well as jobs?
• Is the visit tied to a real career or training program, or is it a one-off promotional event?
• Will students hear from anyone outside the industry, such as a teacher-led discussion afterward?

Those questions matter more now. In the November 3 midterms, voters backed roughly 40 local measures restricting new data centers, and only one result, in Harwood, North Dakota, favored expansion. Ohio alone had 21 such measures, all of which went in favor of restrictions.

With public opinion moving against new builds, expect the industry’s community outreach to grow rather than shrink. Experts expect local officials to push data center companies for better deals, from paying their own power costs to contributing to local resources such as education funds. That could mean more school partnerships, sponsorships and classroom kits, so parents may see more of this, not less.