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Politics & Government

Ben Franklin School Principal Reports on Trip to Taiwan

Principal Chris Turnbull of Lawrence Township's Ben Franklin Elementary School traveled to Taiwan in June as part of a delegation from Sustainable Jersey whose goal was to exchange with Taiwanese officials ideas on how to protect the environment.

Thanks in large part to a trip Principal Chris Turnbull recently took to Taiwan as part of a U.S. team working on environmental issues with the Taiwanese, Lawrence Township’s Ben Franklin Elementary School is locked into a fast-growing, internationally-based effort to find and use ways to protect the eco-system.  The trip was organized by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and its counterpart agency in Taiwan's government.

Locally, by the way, a new EPA is on the near horizon.

"Ben Franklin is going to start its own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) next year," Turnbull told the Lawrence Township school board during its meeting Monday night (July 11).  "Each grade level will have its own 'department,' or area of focus, and will research an environmental issue and propose an environmental project.  We'll also have an eco-garden at the school."

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Helping them do that will be students at Ben Franklin’s new "sister school" – the Jian An Elementary School in New Tapei, Taiwan.

Turnbull, who was in Taiwan from June 10-18, visited that school while part of the U.S. delegation of scientists, diplomats and other government officials that went to Taiwan for an exchange of ideas and technique on how to help the environment.  Sustainable Jersey was a key player in the effort.  Former mayor and current .

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"Jian An is wonderful school," Turnbull said during his presentation about his excursion to Taiwan, and what can grow out of that trip, at the school board meeting.  "They have a student government based on environmental issues," he said.  "They call it their 'low-carbon student government.'  While we were at the school, we saw soap being made from used cooking oil.  Insect repellent was made from fruit rinds."

The U.S. team also found that, contrary to what many people seem to think, discarded empty plastic bottles are not an environmental dead-end.  In the town of Hualien, they visited a recycling plant that turns those bottles into thread for blankets and shirts.  Turnbull reported on that in his blog about his visit to Taiwan, which is on the school district's website.  He also told of a community garden in Zong-Shen, where residents went to every length they could devise to conserve water for their garden.  Not only did they catch rain water in big barrels, they put small funnels under air-conditioners to catch any water that dripped out of them.  That water was used in the garden where they grew their own food.

While Turnbull was away, students at Ben Franklin had more than his journal, which he updated daily with text and photographs, as ways to follow his trip and learn from it.  "I had daily live contact with the students Ben Franklin while I was away," he said.  "I spoke to them each day in their classrooms on Skype."

Ben Franklin student will use blogs, Skype and other digital tools to stay in touch with their new sister school about environmental issues.  "We'll be in regular, real-time contact with these students, who are literally as far around the world as you can go," said Turnbull, who added that one reason this link to Taiwan is particularly important is that 27 percent of the students in Ben Franklin are of Asian descent.  The contact between the two elementary schools is ready-made to be expanded to include other schools in the Lawrence district, he said.  

Turnbull noted that the foreign minister of Taiwan is scheduled to visit the United States soon and is expected to make a stop in Lawrence.  The principal said "imagination" is an essential ingredient for finding answers to difficult environmental problems.  "The solutions are out there," he said.  "We have to imagine them first – we have to work, and work together, to imagine them."

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