What did you think about being in the water today?

It was cold and warm.

The sun was shining on the top of the water most of the day.

There's no right or wrong answer here, but what do you think happens when there is no water left in Lake Powell?

I think that when there's no water in Lake Powell, like all the homes don't get power and that are powered by, Lake Powell, and the animals and the ecosystem, it just is just going to collapse.

And a lot of the animals could die.

It could also harm like ground feeders could harm fish, which fish are a major part of the ecosystem providing food for like predator birds, like hawks, bald eagles.

Are there bald eagles here?

Yes.

They do provide food for them.

And also herons, which their main food source is like is the fish here.

And the Colorado River is running dry pretty quick because like every time we passed it on the way here, it was always dry.

Nothing there.

So I feel like a lot of people just like adapt to like one thing and they like really don't think about what happens if this goes out.

What will I do?

They're not caring about the animals.

They're not preserving it like most people should.

They were thinking of their generation, but they weren't thinking of the future and of, and that if they made such a mess that we will have to clean up after them.

I've seen temperature increases.

I've seen snow levels decrease, water levels decrease, and it's all very visible and in your face.

And then the Roaring Fork flows down to Glenwood Springs and goes into what river in Glenwood Springs?

The Colorado River.

My house has been put on pre-evacuation I think twice because of wildfires.

I've seen smoke envelop my community.

It's so commonplace for people in the world today to experience natural disasters.

That doesn't even feel like a big thing.

That feels normal, which is kind of terrifying to me.

And this paper will biodegrade.

Can you say biodegrade?

Biodegrade.

Obviously the classroom is and has been for decades now a political battlefield.

If we don't take care of them and conserve, then they might go extinct.

Students are on TikTok and Instagram and they see news.

They're picking up on things that my generation certainly didn't, because we just didn't have access to the entire globe, for better and for worse.

Climate change wasn't a mandatory part of education, which to me means that students weren't receiving a full education in science.

Public education was created at the beginning of our country's development to have an educated citizenry who could participate in democracy.

This is Colorado's driest winter recorded.

It is.

It's actually getting worse and worse.

It bothers me that Colorado is the seventh worst air in the nation.

Our public schools are overseen by the Colorado Department of Education.

The local school boards don't always have the same perspective as perhaps the state Board of Education about what should be taught.

Local control and school districts is critical to meet the needs of our specific kids, and make sure that communities needs are always on the forefront.

And at the same time, some students may not be prepared to face the climate crisis and the water crisis that is on our front porch.

If we are ignoring what students are hearing every single day, what does that say about our education?

We need to figure out how to equip our students to face a future that's not nearly as certain as ours was.

If we're going to teach about climate change in Colorado, we're teaching about wildfire, water and drought.

Were teaching about the things that happen on the landscape where we live.

This year, we didn't have as much snow in the mountains, which means we won't have as much water on the farm.

I want to make sure we're looking at science and not political interpretations of the science.

The question of indoctrination, I think, is important.

I do not like to spoon feed students.

A very large barrier in addition to politics and community support is this access to funding Environmental education and climate education has always been considered an extra.

It's something you do outside of school or it's something that is if you have time, because reading and math always comes first.

We know that environmental and outdoor learning is really place-based.

Not everybody is getting the same level of experience, and there are areas of the state that have access to fewer resources than others.

You know, what we build around rivers really affects what happens to the rivers.

They put a big dam right at the town of Page.

How do we make sure that every student in Colorado has access to learning about water, climate, outdoor and environmental learning?

We're actually going to talk about the direction of the flow and add some vocabulary for the students.

I like to talk about teaching them the language of water so that when you're done with my lesson, we'll speak water.

okay.

There's resistance from local school board to integrate climate education into the curriculum.

Waters brilliant, right?

You know, speaking with many of my educator friends who are still teaching in the public school system, that it's a hot button issue for sure.

And they don't feel always free to be open and honest about the science.

In your kits... They feel really hamstrung by some of the local political and administrative institutions in the school systems that really frown upon broaching what's considered a controversial subject.

But I also feel like that creates a really unique opportunity for non-governmental organizations to kind of step up and fill that gap.

So part of the project we're going to work on today is going to be you guys helping us solve this problem that we have, which is not having as much water.

So all of these plants, as I mentioned, are what we call drought tolerant.

All of these, these were gathered and collected by the Ute people for lots of different reasons.

I think having those partner organizations working together, sharing the same vision and telling the same stories from different points of view, I think is really powerful and we rely on one another quite a bit.

The water is going down, the water is going down, the water is going down.

The ability to take students on a short river trip on the San Juan River opens up so many ways for them to immerse themselves in that environment and feel like they're part of something bigger.

Can you guys name the tribes that call this place their ancestral home?

Ute.

Diné.

Nice.

She said Ute, Diné.

There's two.

That's good.

Great.

Tódích'íi'nii.

That's that's great.

She said Tódích'íi'nii.

That's a clan.

She even got more specific.

Wow.

That's awesome.

Drop it in the water.

Understanding perspectives from Indigenous folks and our neighbors at the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Navajo Nation, which is adjacent to our county, is super powerful.

They create a new lens through which to understand water in our community and the role that it's playing now for Indigenous people and the role that it played for the last 1000 years.

This water teaches us a lot, you guys.

It teaches us about connection, you know, how to survive.

There's endangered fish in there too, you guys.

So that's pretty cool.

There's Colorado pikeminnow, very rarely seen.

Ive seen one?

Wow.

My experiences with the environment and nature were fostered through my family and culture, and not really through the public education system.

I have lived here most of my life and never knew how heavily mined these mountain ranges were and how they have been so carelessly left and not taken care of.

Seeing the Gold King Mine spill, I wanted to investigate more on that topic of mining on reservations.

It definitely made me think deeper and look harder into solutions on how we can remediate the mine drainage and leaching into the environment.

I research ways into how we can do this in a cost effective and easily attainable way, like phytoremediation and microremediation, which is using plants and mushrooms to remediate contaminants from soil, which will stop it from reaching water.

In almost every ceremony that I've been to, whether it's Sweat or Sundance, there's always a prayer for rain and water, and we always thank it for taking care of us, and our land, and the animals that rely on it.

So it's a very big part of all our lives here in the Four Corners.

There's a lot that has happened right here in the last few years.

I mean, we get smoke in this valley all the time from fires that are far away.

Kids are really paying attention to that and are very nervous about it.

There's conversations now that I didn't think we'd be having, and it's all due to the climate.

And then I want you to point to the ridgeline over there.

You see it?

Yeah, yeah, half of the mountains.

What are our arms making a V?

What direction is the water going to run when the snow melts and it rains?

Down.

In elementary school, our top priority is teaching them how to read.

Because if they can't read, then it's really hard to access something like environmental science.

So we do get a lot more science content in by having a literacy curriculum that does that.

One, two, ready, go.

The Water Cycle Boogie goes up and down.

The Water Cycle Boogie goes round and round.

Evaporation!

Condensation!

Precipitation!

Percolation!

You know, the biggest barrier is is time.

After being in elementary school for 20 plus years, we still haven't cracked that.

What do you guys think about your classroom?

Is this okay?

Yeah, it's an alright classroom?

The organizations in this valley are fabulous.

That is what saves us.

There's this network of organizations and providers all over the state who are supporting schools through field trips, through in classroom presentations, all different ways to get students engaged and involved.

Today, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking at kind of what the snowpack looks like up close.

You can see our... I feel like we're in a really unique area in this valley.

We have strong support from school districts, from people that just donate, to make sure that our programs are available for schools.

Okay.

And that would line up with our weather patterns, right?

Because, you know, they'll start out like this.

But then as we're exposed to the sun, they're melting.

And then combining and creating more globular structures.

Students should not be experiencing everything from a chair.

As a classroom teacher, I found that, you know, some of the other things that I did with students would come and go and they would build the skills, but they wouldn't have as concrete and strong memories as they did when I actually had them getting their hands dirty, getting their feet wet.

Or if you have your own ideas, you can write your own ideas down.

And we're going to try to get at least two ideas written down.

Make sure you put your name on your papers, that you can share with your pen pal.

Things that you can do with your family to save and conserve water.

The Watershed Pen Pal program came out of a desire to connect water users across the state.

80% of the people live on the Front Range, while 80% of the water is on the Western Slope.

When our state boundaries are square and we're not divided by watershed, that creates an issue.

I had the opportunity to bring a small group of Aurora students to the Roaring Fork Valley.

On the Front Range a lot of the students there rarely get to rivers, rarely have access to open spaces without long car drives, and when they start writing letters to their pen pals here, the students here walk by a river every day on the way to school.

So the experiences that they're able to share are pretty unique.

This was my first time on the river ever.

We got to understand where our water comes from, from the people that live up in the mountains near the headwaters.

And they got to understand where most of their water goes, because that's where most of the people are.

Does it ever get too cold for them?

It doesn't get too cold, it does get too hot.

If our river gets smaller.

So if we're using a bunch of water, does that make the water hotter or colder?

Hotter.

Hotter.

Yeah.

So if we start using... Before this trip, I thought water was just an object.

I didn't think that water was a privilege.

It really surprised me like just how far the water needs to travel to reach our home.

It has to go from the rivers to a cleaning process, to pumping it over here, and then to finally getting to us.

And I always thought that it just was there and that, you know, I would always have it no matter what.

And it really opened up my eyes, I would say.

His school offering that experience also educated me.

If it weren't for him, I would have never learned what I learned about the river.

I think as adults, we still don't all have it figured out and there is always an opportunity to learn something new.

Weld County is an ag county.

It's producing about a quarter of the agriculture output of the state.

Recently, the population has been increasing, especially for Greeley, and we're expected to double our population by 2050.

That just raises concerns about how that might transition the agriculture sector to maybe something else, but also the demand for water.

With climate issues decreasing our water supply, that's a little scary.

And the city of Greeley is doing an amazing job trying to be proactive.

As we walk, I want you guys to take a close look at the... So a lot of the students we work with at the Poudre Learning Center, they might have a general idea about water concepts, but if you ask them about their water, that's a whole different world.

And I think that's why the PLC is is such a value to the community, because we help establish that connection from the classroom learning, but also localizing that learning.

Observations?

Let's go.

What do you see?

Oh!

All the water is going down there.

It's making like a waterfall.

Do we see it running like across the top or is it seeping down?

[Unintelligable.]

And then we have the Caring for Our Watersheds program, which is our stewardship program.

It invites high school students to submit a proposal on an idea that they can implement to improve their watershed, and then we award them with implementation funds so that they can bring it to life.

I came up with the proposal of making signs that say no idling with a QR code that would send them to a website with more information about why they shouldn't be idling.

I have my signs right there and around here.

That's where we have the most idling.

Parents who are picking up their students after school they'll sit here in this line.

So that's when cars are idling the most.

I know for like younger people, our lungs are more fragile.

If you're exposed to it for a long time, it can cause issues, at least from what I saw in my research.

Improving the air quality would be a very great thing for the students health, for our environmental health.

I have noticed a decrease in vehicles idling.

I think that people just really need to realize that their small changes can make a difference in the long run.

That's what we need is innovative ideas and motivation to just keep going, because it can be kind of a downer to just always hearing negative news, and we'll always put it on the next generation.

But in order to get them excited about coming up with innovative ideas and see them as opportunities, moreso, we have to engage them in a positive light with those things.

Over the previous decade, I had the opportunity to move from, hey, I need to convince you that anthropogenic climate change is real to you now know that greenhouse gases are causing the climate to change.

How are we going to address that?

I think we need to invest much more in that learning itself.

Given that we have both a federal and a state administration right now that continue to borrow from the future wealth of youth to pay for the people who are older right now.

I don't know how we change those priorities so that education and the health and safety of our younger generations becomes the primary focus.

There have been a lot of impacts and changes within this new administration.

We've seen a handful of organizations that have lost significant federal funding, and that's been a challenge in order to continue the the programming that they do.

We've seen educators lose access to data and educational materials that they have been using to engage their students with.

As different websites have gone through changes, edits, or being taken down completely During this time of uncertainty and erosion of our democratic processes and erasure of science, you might wonder how in the world that a 16 year old is going to get a quality education and be able to join that workforce, that might be that land manager or that environmental scientist that we need in the future.

As you'll recall, at the April 2025 board meeting, we shared with you draft recommendations for the revisions to the science standards.

The point of those revisions was to strengthen the standards around climate science.

The majority of educators even said that our standards needed to be a little more balanced between fossil fuels and renewable energy.

There were a lot of people who said that they didn't think are changes, gave children in schools the opportunity to have critical thinking, but that instead it pushed one ideological viewpoint on them.

We've somehow convinced these kids that feel good kinds of things are going to make a difference, when in fact they're not.

They may be used to scare you into some level of mental illness, which apparently our science teachers are doing a remarkable job at.

We are not trying to indoctrinate students with these standards.

We are saying we've got to respond to what kids are seeing and what kids brought to us.

When I began advocating to you, I was representing student organizations at less than ten schools.

Today I am representing 20.

This is my proof.

Students across our state, from Leadville to Denver to Colorado Springs, desire climate education enough to advocate for it.

The climate crisis is something I believe that our state needs to address, and that's what this bill starts to do.

Does that make sense?

The climate crisis is such a huge issue that it can't be solved by half of the US population.

We need everyone's support working together on this issue in order to solve it.

And that means both people and also our leaders.

And I think the main thing the school board was missing on that debate is the idea that climate change isn't a partisan issue.

It's a basic part of students education to learn about our future.

I am hopeful that with this minor revision to the science standards, we're going to see more places pick up environmental justice and climate education.

They won't use those phrases, but those are going to be things that more and more kids are going to be getting across the state.

If we have a climate education for our students in Colorado, we're allowing them to be part of that state identity.

We're allowing them to build up our natural spaces and their communities and so forth, in a way that will create a better future for our state.

There's a huge demand for educating community members, and what a better way than to start with our youth, who are then going to grow up and be community leaders and make decisions for the community.

Anyone can lobby, so that's literally anyone.

You don't have to be an expert.

You don't have to have an official title.

You don't even have to have a college or high school degree.

A part of my vision is, long after Im gone, I hope to have planted seeds here in this community, and especially maybe inspire some Native youth that I've worked with to play a more active role, carving out a place for themselves at those tables, where those decisions are being made.

I've been teaching long enough that my first third-grade class are now in their 30s.

I've watched students go into fields that are helping their communities, so I know the impact is great.

Our local governments know that the impact is great.

There's something that feels really extraordinary about your generation and all the younger generations.

Never forget the value in your life.

You matter, your voices matter, and you all have a beautiful spirit.

When we teach young people about these wicked issues and arm them with information, we're giving them a lot of power.

I'm here because I am furious that we're doing nothing about climate change.

I care about the environment because I think it's really important to do something now before climate change gets even worse.

What are your thoughts as we approach, like more data centers emerging?

Were here to talk about the SB 26022 bill, the one about the Nixon Power Plant.

It's kind of a responsibility of mine to help people understand and help people want to care and help give people that deeper understanding that I have gained.