Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: School Districts Hard Hit by Energy Cost Increases, 11/21/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec05/gascosts_11-21.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Have you noticed the price of gas in your community? How has it changed?

2. How might rising gas prices impact your life?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. In financial terms, how have rising gas and fuel prices impacted school districts?

Plymouth school district in Massachusetts reported that it will likely go more than $600,000 over budget this year. The superintendent recommended that staff and students ask for warm sweaters for Christmas. He was only half-kidding, the Enterprise of South of Boston newspaper reported.

Last year, Abington School District in Massachusetts spent $7,000 on gasoline. This year it expects to pay $18,000.

2. Describe some conservation efforts that schools are attempting this winter?

One school district in Hanover, Mass. plans to lower classroom temperatures as far as comfort permits, and many other schools in surrounding districts have said they will begin covering their windows with plastic sheeting to lessen the draft.

In order to save on gas, Ohio's Princeton School District canceled most field trips, will pool athletic teams for competitions and send only the pep band, not the full band, to away games.

3. How are students and parents responding to the conservation efforts?

Some students said they are disappointed with the changes.

Brenda Dinsdale of Reinbeck, Iowa told the WCF Courier that her seventh-grade daughter, Tessa, was unhappy to learn that the annual seventh-and-eighth-grade chorus field trip to Adventureland for the spring was canceled.

"It is something they look forward to, and now they can't because of gas prices," she said.

But others understand the pressures schools are under.

"The things that are the most important are the basics," Chelse Garvey of Freedom, Wis. told the Post-Crescent. "A field trip is nice, but heat is necessary."

4. How is the price of fuel impacting when schools schedule classes?

The Greencastle-Antrim School District in Greencastle, Pa. considered canceling classes for the month of January when heat is most expensive and weather is its coldest, but then schools would not meet the state required 180 class days.

Schools in Jackson County, Kentucky will shorten the school week to four days, the Record Herald reported.

5. How is the rising cost of gas impacting the use of school buses?

Madeira, an Ohio district, is working to consolidate its school bus routes, making students wait longer, but reducing the number of high school buses from six to four and saving over 500 miles of travel daily.

"I think that was needed, because the high school busses are not even half-full most of the time," Madeira PTA President-elect Candy Hopewell Caesar told the Cincinnati Enquirer. "I think priorities should be saving taxpayers money because I don't think they've done that up until now."

6. How do schools plan to pay for the higher cost of heating schools?

The costs of heating the schools could fall to the taxpayers, forcing residents to pay more to heat both their homes and their local schools.

Avon, Mass. District Superintendent Margaret Fierswyck said she may have to call a special town meeting to ask for more funds.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. What is the heating and fuel situation at your own school? What is your school or district doing in anticipation of higher fuel costs? How do you feel about the changes? What would you do differently?

2. According to the story, many of the increased fees will fall to local taxpayers. How else do rising heat costs impact the local economy? What should local leaders do to help solve this issue?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.