The Independent

Students look to green future By G. Demarest

In a first, East Mountain High School students put on their own town hall meeting Dec. 8 to discuss how to enhance education to prepare students for a greener future. The meeting—dubbed a “Town Howl” in the spirit of the school’s Timberwolves mascot—was the brainchild of East Mountain teacher Vincent Langan’s international relations class and sponsored by New Mexico First, a non-profit organization that supports town hall meetings statewide. About 60 or 70 students, primarily seniors from East Mountain, and a handful of parents attended the meeting while the students from the international relations class conducted it. The audience sat at tables and each table had a designated discussion leader with an agenda to follow, along with a reporter to record everything discussed. Other students from Langan’s class who weren’t assigned a table monitored or documented the event. “Everybody has a job,” Langan said. Anne Lightsey with New Mexico First said her organization sponsors several student-driven town hall meetings at schools every year but noted that the topic of the East Mountain event was significantly different than most. “Usually it’s school-specific,” Lightsey said. “This one is broader and could be implemented at the state level so their challenge is much greater.” The ideas generated at the Town Howl ranged from effective recycling to increasing awareness of green-based careers to creative ways for funding environmental education and making it a mandatory curriculum. Langan said it was important for the students to experience the process first-hand: speaking out, listening to others and putting all their ideas together to form a consensus of opinion. He said they were learning how they have the power to make their ideas public and create meaningful action. Senior Jace Reynolds was the discussion leader at one of the tables and said at first he had to prod the kids to open up but eventually a positive discussion ensued. “It takes a little effort getting teenagers to talk with each other but once it got going every single person put an idea on the board,” said Reynollds. Langan said his international relations class will put all the data from the meeting together with the hopes of taking it to Santa Fe to present to the Legislature.