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: New Head of the Environmental Protection Agency, 10/29/03
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jul-dec03/epa_10-29.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is the Environmental Protection Agency?

2. What are the most important environmental issues facing the U.S.?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Who is Mike Leavitt?

Mike Leavitt is the new head of the EPA. He served 11 years as the governor of Utah. Leavitt, a former insurance executive has been popular in the Republican state, maintaining 75 percent approval ratings.

2. What do some environmental groups say about Leavitt's record?

Environmental groups claim that Leavitt weakened environmental regulatory agencies, allowed businesses to create their own voluntary agreements instead of mandatory requirements, fought for roads to be built in protected wetlands and overlooked scientific evidence.

3. Describe Leavitt's environmental philosophy

Leavitt says his environmental philosophy is based on the Latin word enlibra. "It means 'to move toward balance,'" he explained. "To me, there is an inherent human responsibility to care for the earth. But there's also an economic imperative that we're dealing with in a global economy to do it less expensively."

4. Who is James Jeffords? How does he feel about President Bush's environmental policies?

Independent Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont is on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
He said: "The Bush administration is weakening the Clean Air Act, it is weakening the Clean Water Act and it is not cleaning up Superfund sites. We have a right to know why. There are life and death issues."

5. Why did Senator Hillary Clinton change her mind about voting for Leavitt?

Sen. Hilary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) used the hearings to criticize the EPA for not warning about potentially hazardous conditions at the World Trade Center site following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Minutes before the vote on Tuesday, Clinton said she would vote for Leavitt's confirmation after receiving a letter from the president's council saying it would offer additional measures to protect New York City residents.

6. What is the EPA? Who started it? When?

The EPA has been the center of controversy since its inception in 1970. Growing public concern for the environment led President Nixon and Congress to create an agency to repair some of the environmental damage that had been plaguing the nation for years.

7. What are the top priorities for the new EPA administrator?

A top priority for the new administrator will be the "Clear Skies" proposal, which allows companies who emit pollution to buy clean air credits from other companies. Another is "New Source Review" which allows many of the nations' coal-burning power plants to modernize without adding expensive new pollution controls. The policy modifies the federal Clean Air Act of 1977 that made anti-pollution devices mandatory any time a plant upgraded.

 

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Does Mike Leavitt sound like a good leader for the EPA? Why or why not?

2. If you were in charge of the EPA, what issues would you focus on? How would you decide which issues are most important and what positions the EPA should take?

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.