Thank you for your story about Rep. Scott Tipton’s visit to the Southwest Open School (Journal, Feb. 2). I teach third grade at a similar school in Glenwood Springs. It is a public school that has adopted an expeditionary learning model. The deeper learning that you so well described is very effective in motivating students to do their best at school and more importantly, in their lives beyond. Tipton acknowledged the importance of character education during his visit. Students at my school learn this by being civically engaged in our community. I hope that some of them may one day take the risk to serve their state as leaders, and I honor the enormous commitment to Western Colorado that the congressman shows every day in his work.
I want my students to become adults in a world that is thriving economically and ecologically, where they can make free choices about who to be and how to contribute, where they and their children will breathe clean air. I want my students to enjoy our remarkable state and to be able to choose healthy jobs that are as rewarding as teaching is for me. I aim to live with the integrity that I work to instill in them. So in my personal time, I volunteer for Citizens Climate Lobby. CCL works with Republicans, independents and Democrats to build the political will for a stable climate. It’s hard to envision what the world will be like when my third-graders are old enough to be in Congress.
That’s why I ask Tipton to learn more about carbon fee and dividend. It addresses pollution by pricing carbon when it comes out of the ground, giving all the money back to the American people, and letting the market go to work to drive innovation. Moreover, it will provide a net benefit to the economy and prevent 224,000 early respiratory illness-related deaths. It’s the light-touch, capitalist solution we need, so that all of our students can inherit a healthy, livable world, ripe with economic opportunity for them to be the inventors and entrepreneurs we are training them to be.
Amelia Potvin
Carbondale
