[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 116 (Monday, September 10, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1609-E1610]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         VERMONT HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT CONGRESSIONAL TOWN MEETING

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. BERNARD SANDERS

                               of vermont

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, September 10, 2001

  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, today I recognize the outstanding work done 
by participants in my Student Congressional Town Meeting held this 
summer. These participants were part of a group of high school students 
from around Vermont who testified about the concerns they have as 
teenagers, and about what they would like to see government do 
regarding these concerns.
  I submit these statements to be printed in the Congressional Record, 
as I believe that the views of these young persons will benefit my 
colleagues.

On Behalf of Kevin Van Genechten--Regarding Global Warming, May 7, 2001

       Kevin Van Genechten. My name is Kevin Van Genechten, doing 
     global warming, for Colchester. Global warming is the steady 
     rise in temperature caused by buildup of gases like CO2 and 
     methane gas in the Earth's atmosphere. The gases act like the 
     glass in a greenhouse; they let the heat in, but not out. The 
     main cause of gas buildup is the burning of coal, oil and 
     wood CFCs. 1998 was the hottest year in thousands of years. 
     The nine hottest years on record have all been in the past 
     two decades. Humankind's actions on the global scale have 
     changed not just the landscape of the earth, but the world's 
     climate too. Increasingly sophisticated measures of the 
     Earth's climate and the weather systems have provided a 
     wealth of evidence that the earth has been getting steadily 
     warmer. An intergovernmental panel for climate change set up 
     in 1988 to put together the thinking on global warming is 
     leading the search. It has found that global temperatures are 
     increasing alarmingly, already having risen between .3 
     Celsius and .6 Celsius in the last century. Sea levels are 
     rising and previous environments are being altered, some 
     irreparably. The rising temperatures we have witnessed may 
     seem slight, but are we currently experiencing the greatest 
     rate of change in the temperature ever. The effects are 
     already being felt, and things may get much worse. Most of 
     the impact of global warming won't be felt for another 30 
     years. And yet hurricanes, storms and extreme weather 
     conditions are recorded almost weekly. Our reckless 
     destruction of the environment through industrial pollution 
     is creating a dangerous world. The burning of fossil fuels, 
     such as oil and coal, and the emission of harmful gas must be 
     addressed if we are secure ourselves a future on planet 
     Earth. And although interested parties are bringing pressure 
     from the big pressure groups like the Worldwide Fund for 
     Nature--which may soon disappear--it may be these gestures 
     are too little, too late. There is still hope in the air and 
     time in this millennium to make the necessary changes to 
     happen. However, we leave this century fudging on fossil-fuel 
     emission targets, which almost everyone now agrees is the 
     strongest way to combat global warming. Big changes in 
     lifestyle and energy production will be needed to slow the 
     global-warming time bomb.

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On Behalf of Katie Kevorkian, Carlin Hebert, and Bethany Wallace--High 
  Drop-Out Rates, Focusing on Inadequate Social Services, May 7, 2001

       Bethany Wallace. Our subject is the increasing dropout rate 
     in, not only our county and our school, but, you know, across 
     the nation. It said in the little packet that we were going 
     to focus on the lack of social services which I don't think 
     we did.
       Congressman Sanders. That's okay.
       Bethany Wallace. That is not really what we are focusing 
     on. My part--I will give you a little basis. We didn't really 
     know a lot about the dropout rate when we were given this 
     task to present. So what we did is, we divided it into 
     factors that would affect the dropout rate. And mine is the 
     alternative programs, Katie's is the pregnancy rate, and 
     Carlin's is the extracurricular activities. At Mt. Anthony, 
     we have an alternative program that I don't think a lot of 
     people are aware of, and we certainly didn't know what it was 
     all about. So we went to the alternative program a few days 
     ago and just sat down and interviewed both the students and 
     the teachers there. And what we found out was that the 
     alternative program is a combination of two former programs, 
     the girls program and the boys program. And right now it's in 
     one building, and it is funded by the high school, it is 
     considered part of the high school, but with its own budget. 
     There are about 25 students in the program right now, all 
     different levels in high school. They also have a branch of 
     that for the middle schoolers, that is called the Stars 
     Program, but we didn't really dig into that. The students 
     there--we have a little list--have been referred to the 
     program because of a variety of reasons, varying from high 
     absenteeism, which is what they said in there, and poor 
     performance academically, for whatever reason. In sitting 
     down with the students and talking to them about it, more 
     than three-quarters of them said that, if it wasn't for this 
     program, they probably would have dropped out of high school. 
     So in presenting this to you, I just hope to show you how 
     beneficial these programs can be. However, they do have 
     faults. The students that graduate from the program graduate 
     with a normal high school diploma, and to achieve that 
     diploma, you have to have the same requirements of credits 
     that we in the high school have, and that is 26 credits. The 
     difference is that their classes are all pass-fail. And I 
     have--just personally, I have mixed emotions about that, 
     because I just don't know--I won't get into that. But their 
     classes are all pass-fail. They get a normal high school 
     diploma. They are not always there for just four years. It 
     varies. They can be there for five years, they can be there 
     through the Stars program and the alternative program. There 
     are three main teachers in the program. And what they were 
     telling us was,

[[Page E1610]]

     and what you could see, is that it was designed as kind of a 
     family-type of thing, where the teachers knew a lot about the 
     personal lives of the students, and the students really liked 
     that. If they didn't want them to know about their personal 
     lives, they would usually leave. And one of the problems--
     because we also wanted to know what was wrong with the high 
     school, what the students in the program didn't like about 
     the high school. And a lot of what they said was how big it 
     is. And, as you saw with the group that went before us, we do 
     have a very big school, so you can get lost, in that you can 
     slip through the cracks. If you need help and you don't go 
     for it, it is not always given to you. And these people, they 
     do come--the majority of them come from broken homes or 
     dysfunctional families or things where they have a lot of 
     problems, and are not getting the help that they need. And 
     their teachers in the high school, they were saying, weren't 
     always aware of that, and weren't really interested in that. 
     So in the program, they work through things. The teachers are 
     not only educators, but they are also kind of counselors and 
     moms, and they give hugs and everything. We thought it was 
     the coolest thing when we went over there. We didn't know 
     what to expect, and we came back, and we were like: Oh, my 
     God! We just couldn't believe it. But it does seem like a 
     very close-knit thing. And the classes are constructed--
     they're offered as needed. Like if 15 of the students really 
     need a Western Civ class that semester, that is what the 
     teachers will do. Another problem that might be with the 
     alternative program is, we found out that one of the teachers 
     is only certified to teach--was it elementary English and 
     social studies? And we didn't really know how that worked in. 
     And I kind of had a problem with that; I don't know if Carlin 
     and Katie did. But it seemed to work for them.
       Congressman Sanders. Okay.
       Bethany Wallace. That's basically the gist on the 
     alternative programs. And we found that, especially with it 
     coming from the students, it was really helpful, and they did 
     a lot to keep the kids in school.
       Congressman Sanders. Bethany, thank you. Katie or Carlin, 
     are you going to go next?
       Carlin Hebert. I focused more or less on extracurricular 
     activities and how they affected dropout rate. And like the 
     other group said, the extracurricular
       Katie Kevorkian. I focused on the pregnancy factor. And I'm 
     going to start out with a little story that was told to me by 
     the teachers in the Stars program, one of the teachers in the 
     middle school program. She had a girl a few years ago who, at 
     13, became pregnant. And once that happened, she couldn't 
     attend school anymore, she couldn't attend the Stars program, 
     because, once you have a baby, you can't really do that. And 
     she couldn't find childcare. She actually had twins at age 
     13, and the woman there was her teacher, who was trying to 
     get her an education. She sent her to tutorial centers, she 
     helped her set up childcare, but the girl apparently was very 
     disagreeable with her childcare, and ended up taking her kids 
     out of that. She is now 15, and she has missed so many 
     credits that she cannot graduate high school at age 18, and, 
     at 15, she was working on her GED. I interviewed people from 
     two places, two area places, where pregnant teenagers often 
     go. One was the Tristate Pregnancy Center, and they basically 
     give out--they try to educate teenagers when they are 
     pregnant, and show them their options. And then they work 
     through another place I interviewed, Sunrise Family Resource 
     Center, to help them get their GED and finish their 
     education. Sunrise also does that. They try to provide 
     childcare. They have programs such as Reach Up, which helps 
     with--they try to get them some benefits. And the other one 
     is--Can you let me see that? Vermont Homeroom. They try to 
     get childcare and educate them. And pregnancy is a problem. 
     It has gone down in the last ten years, but, in our 
     community, it is still a huge problem. The rate is higher 
     there than in any other place in Vermont. No, the rate is 
     higher there than the rate in Vermont. Excuse me.

     

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