CAP Post Course Survey, 2nd Quarter 2008

As the quarter comes to a close, I wanted to get some open and honest feedback from this class about how to improve the CAP for future students. This information will not affect your grade, but please take it seriously. It will be reviewed by the school, the Cottonwood Institute, and this information will help us secure funding to make this class accessible to other high school students. Please Click Here to Take the Survey.

We’ve Been Busy!

Our second overnight is complete, our action project is in full swing, and next week we’ll be going rock climbing to celebrate. 

The past few weeks have been busy ones. We met with North Boulder Recreation Center to get a look at a LEED certified building, we chose our environmental issue, and survived a night in the snow.   

Second quarter CAP class has chosen “water issues” as their environmental focus.  We narrowed down “water issues” to two different focus areas: bottled water, and water conservation.

Here are our problem statements:

Bottled water:

In the United States alone, we dispose of almost 22 billion petroleum based water bottles every year.  It is estimated that each bottle will take over one million years to decompose.  Making plastic bottles and transporting them contributes to climate change.  In addition these plastic bottles contain chemicals, such as bisphenol A, that are potentially hazardous to human health.

Water Conservation:

Water is essential for all living beings.  Unfortunately humans greatly abuse water, treating it as a right rather than a privilege.  In Boulder County we live in a semi-arid region, because of this it is essential that we conserve water.

As we’ve moved through our action project process the students have decided to create a movie to raise awareness about water in Boulder.  In addition we will be completing a clean up at a Boulder Creek this coming Friday December 12^th, 2008.

 Our second overnight was, simply put, awesome.  We completed service work, practiced our fire skills, learned map and compass skills, and sang around the campfire with special guest Jeff Kagan, local environmental children’s musician.  

We spent the evening around a glowing fire, played our favorite games and threw plenty of snowballs!

Enjoy the photos and look out for a final update coming soon.

For Now… Ready

Aim

FIre!