URGENT: Act Now to Save Local Control of Schools

Act now to preserve local control of schools,
or yours could be next!

The House of Representatives will soon vote on a bill that radically restructures one school system without approval of the voters.

If you believe in local control of our schools, please ask your Representative to OPPOSE SB 636 by Sen. Bodi White (R-Central).

The bill is widely seen as a back-door effort to convert all schools in East Baton Rouge Parish to charters. If the Legislature can force this change on Baton Rouge schools, then any district in the state could be next.

Please click here to learn more and send your Representative a message!

EMERGENCY ACTION NEEDED: Tell Lawmakers: Don’t Silence the Voice of Public Employees

Tell lawmakers: Don’t silence the voice of public employees!

silence
 In an effort to silence the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and other public sector unions, bills have been introduced to strike at the unions’ source of funding. Read more here.

A Threat to the Existence of Advocacy Organizations

Freedom of speech and freedom of association are crucial to a representative form of government. Prohibiting the payroll deduction of union dues would stifle those freedoms and ultimately weaken our democracy.

Take Action Now!

HB 172, HB 451 and HB 1059 have been assigned to the House Committee on Labor and Industrial Relations. They could be heard as early as Wednesday, April 30.

Please take action now, and ask members to vote NO when these bills come before them.

ACTION ALERT: Tell Pearson’s Board of Directors to Lift the “Gag Orders” and work with teachers to fix their tests!

Right now—7AM EST on April 25th—the AFT’s chief of staff and one of our researchers are in London working to change the culture of high-stakes standardized testing here in America.

They’re attending the annual shareholders meeting of Pearson Education, the largest for-profit education, testing and book publishing company in the world, demanding that the company remove contractual “gag orders” that prevent educators from talking about Pearson’s tests, and asking Pearson to sit down with parents, teachers, principals and students to address legitimate concerns about these tests.

Tell Pearson’s board of directors to lift the gag orders and work with stakeholders to fix their broken tests.

In New York, teachers and principals who administered Pearson’s Common Core-related assessments have raised red flags about test content that isn’t age-appropriate and doesn’t align with student learning. But, because of a gag order written into the contract, educators are forbidden from discussing the content or quality of the tests—they can’t even tell parents what’s on the test their children are taking.

There are many other examples like this across the country.

The gag orders don’t help students learn or help schools improve—their only obvious purpose is to protect the corporation’s interests. That’s not right. Pearson’s secretive tests have huge consequences for students and their families, teachers, schools and communities. The tests need to assess what students have learned—they need to be accurate, properly aligned and fair. That’s why transparency is so important and this gag order is so wrong.

Our children are not test scores, and our teachers are not algorithms. We need to stop this testing fixation, change the culture of high-stakes testing and hold the corporations that are profiting from these tests accountable. The Pearson shareholders meeting is a perfect time to demand that Pearson be accountable to our schools and communities. Pearson’s gag order is not in the best interests of children, teachers or schools.

Accountability goes both ways. Stand with us to tell Pearson and the company’s board of directors to drop the gag order and work with stakeholders to make the tests transparent and fair.

Educators know what our children need in the classroom. Their voices should be respected by the companies paid by public dollars to create and score tests, not silenced by gag orders.

I hope you’ll stand with us,

In unity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President

P.S. You can read the full letter we delivered to Pearson’s board here.<http://afl.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=avup2LOOymcTKWqtu1wZ0P06HU67jI8d>

ACTION ALERT: Tell Lawmakers: Don’t Handcuff Teachers!

Tell lawmakers: Don’t handcuff teachers!

Last March, a veteran teacher in Baker, Louisiana was arrested, handcuffed, taken from school in a police car and jailed.

Why?

An eighth grader ignored the teacher’s request that he tuck in his shirt tail (a violation of school rules) and tried to slip past the teacher into her classroom. She took hold of his shirt tail to stop him.

The child’s parent notified the police, and by the time a law officer arrived at the school, newspaper reporters were already on the scene.

The police officer could have issued a misdemeanor summons asking the teacher to appear and answer to the parent’s charges. Instead, the teacher was hauled off to jail.

The district attorney refused to prosecute the case, but the damage to the teacher’s reputation was done. She had been humiliated in front of her students and peers.

There is now a bill in the legislature that would ensure this does not happen again.

Please click here to learn more about HB 1108 and ask your Representative to vote FOR the bill!

TAKE ACTION NOW: Call the Members of the Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee before 1:30 PM 4/14/14!

LEADERSHIP ALERT!!!

Call the members of the Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee before 1:30 P.M. today (April 14, 2014)!!

Three bills slated to be heard by the Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee would cripple local governments’ ability to pass taxes and issue bonds.

Each of these bills would require more than 20 percent of voters to turn out in order for a tax election to be valid.

In effect, that would mean everyone who does not go to the polls votes “NO.” It means that important elections would be decided by the lazy, the disinterested and the uninformed. Think about how low the turnout is in many of your elections for new bond issues, millages and even for renewals of existing issues.

These are the bills up for a vote today. All of them are by Sen. Bret Allain (R-Franklin). The committee will convene at 1:30 P.M.

SB 200: Constitutional Amendment to require a minimum turnout of 20% of voters to approve a political subdivision or special district proposition to incur or assume debt, issue bonds, or levy a tax.

SB 201: Requires a minimum turnout of 20% of voters to approve a political subdivision proposition to incur or assume debt, issue bonds, or levy a tax.

SB 517: Prohibits the state bond commission from approving any tax exempt indebtedness if the proposition to incur such indebtedness was approved in an election in which turnout was less than 20% of registered voters.

Please call as many members of the committee as you can, and tell them to vote NO on SB 20, SB 201 and SB 517

Revenue & Fiscal Affairs Committee

 

Committee Members
Senator Neil Riser (Chairman)
P.O. Box 117
Columbia, LA 71418
(318) 649-0977
risern@legis.la.gov
Senator Dale M. Erdey (Vice-Chairman)
P.O. Box 908
Livingston, LA 70754
(225) 686-2881
erdeyd@legis.la.gov
Senator Robert Adley
611 Jessie Jones Drive
Benton, LA 71006
(318) 965-1755
adleyr@legis.la.gov
Senator Sharon Weston Broome
P. O. Box 52783
Baton Rouge, LA 70892
(225) 359-9352
lasen15@legis.la.gov
Senator Yvonne Dorsey-Colomb
1520 Thomas H. Delpit Drive Suite 226
Baton Rouge, LA 70802
(225) 342-9700
dorseyy@legis.la.gov
Senator Rick Gallot
P.O. Box 1117
Ruston, LA 71270
(318) 251-5019
gallotr@legis.la.gov
Senator David Heitmeier
3501 Holiday Drive
Suite 225
New Orleans, LA 70114
(504) 361-6356
HeitmeierD@legis.la.gov
Senator Robert W. “Bob” Kostelka
P.O. Box 2122
Monroe, LA 71207
(318) 362-3474
kostelka@legis.la.gov
Senator Jean-Paul J. Morrell
6305 Elysian Fields Ave.
Suite 404
New Orleans, LA 70122
(504) 284-4794
morrelljp@legis.la.gov
Senator Gary Smith
P.O Box 189
Norco, LA 70079
(985) 764-9122
smithgl@legis.la.gov
Senator John R. Smith
611-B South 5th Street
Leesville, LA 71446
(337) 238-2709
smithj@legis.la.gov

 

AFT to host educators’ summit on school discipline: March 21-22 2014

On March 21-22, the AFT will host an educators’ summit on school discipline.

The summit will bring together teachers, support personnel, school-based mental health professionals, superintendents and administrators to help change school climates by identifying alternatives to suspensions and developing strategies involving restorative practices. The summit comes at a time when the buzz around school discipline policies continues to grow. On Jan. 8, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced new guidelines aimed at ensuring that school discipline policies are equitable and effective. That same day, the AFT and the Albert Shanker Institute hosted a symposium to explore how rigid school discipline policies like “zero tolerance” are effectively discriminatory and steal opportunity from great numbers of students, particularly children of color.

Read Loretta Johnson’s Column on School Suspensions here

A New Path Forward On School Discipline Practices- AFT Statement

Later this month, on March 21-22, the AFT will host an educators’ summit on school discipline. The summit will bring together teachers, support personnel, school-based mental health professionals, superintendents and administrators to help change school climates by identifying alternatives to suspensions and developing strategies involving restorative practices.

Data show that boys of color are disproportionately affected by disparate treatment that typifies zero tolerance and other ineffective discipline policies. According to the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, 3.3 million students were issued out-of-school suspensions in the 2009-2010 school year. Of those students, African-Americans were found to be three times more likely than their peers to be issued an out-of-school suspension, a punishment also handed out to nearly 1 in 13 Latinos.
“What started as a push for safe, secure schools now has become the only response to any infraction,” says AFT President Randi Weingarten of zero tolerance.

Divisive approaches like zero tolerance create “a really alienating environment” for many students, Weingarten says, which is made worse by school reforms that cause tests to proliferate rather than provide real supports like counseling for kids and professional help in classroom behavior management.

During its February meeting, the AFT executive council adopted “Reclaiming the Promise: A New Path Forward on School Discipline Practices,” a policy statement that recommends a number of changes in current policies and practices that the AFT believes would have a positive impact on school discipline disparities. They include ongoing professional development for all school staff; funding for mental health services and other supports; investments in social and emotional learning; collaborative analysis of school discipline data; the restoration of critical school personnel such as counselors, psychologists, nurses and social workers; the inclusion of students, families, educators, support personnel, juvenile justice professionals and other community members in the development of school improvement plans; and the implementation of alternatives to suspension and expulsion to manage student behavior.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who took part in the AFT symposium, believes teachers are in a unique position to work with parents and others to develop alternatives to zero-tolerance policies, which often feed the school-to-prison pipeline. Zero-tolerance policies, test-based sanctions and federal sentencing guidelines wrongly take frontline experience and discretion out of key decisions, Ellison says, and they foster a “zero-sum, winners and losers” approach to opportunity and advancement in America.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman noted that “too many schools still use severe and ineffective practices to address student behavior.”

“Large numbers of students are kicked out, typically for nonviolent offenses,” the article continues, “and suspensions have become the go-to response for even minor misbehavior, like carrying a plastic water gun to elementary school or sometimes simply for talking back.”

Rather than teaching kids a lesson, Ross and Zimmerman wrote, “these practices increase dropout rates and arrest rates—with severe social and economic consequences.”

So how do we develop alternatives to policies like zero tolerance that have proven to be discriminatory and largely ineffective—policies, practices and resources that give teachers, administrators and other educators the tools they need to maintain safe and healthy learning environments?

Holder and Duncan announced the new national guidelines at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore where a new discipline policy has dramatically reduced suspensions. In a recent Education Week column, AFT Secretary-Treasurer Lorretta Johnson, who is a Douglass alumna, called the school “a shining example of a public school that has seen marked student improvement since it changed its discipline practices and implemented other reforms to improve student achievement.”

“I am particularly pleased with what Douglass High School has accomplished and am confident others can achieve success by implementing smart, well-funded revised discipline policies and other reforms that will help reclaim the promise of public education for all students,” Johnson wrote.

Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English sees and feels a different atmosphere when she visits Douglass. “The school has definitely turned around,” says English, who credits the relationship building that has taken place between teachers and other school staff and students at the school. “They’ve built great relationships, and you see it in the students’ attitude toward school.”

English says that there are some aspects of the Baltimore school district’s new code of conduct, which was crafted by educators, parents, students and other stakeholders, that need to be revisited. “We’re not proponents of kicking kids out of school, but we do believe that there’s a need for alternative placements for those students who need more intensive supports before they are returned to the classroom.”

She is quick to add, however, that the code of conduct has been a real success, reducing the number of suspensions and expulsions, and bringing down the dropout rate. “Good things happen when teachers and students feel that they have been part of the process.”

Some AFT affiliates, including the United Federation of Teachers in New York City and the Peoria Federation of Teachers in Illinois, are taking on the issue of discipline codes and student behavior as part of a pilot program funded by a grant obtained by the AFT from Atlantic Philanthropies.

The UFT is part of a consortium called the Institute for Understanding Behavior, whose goal is to “improve student achievement and social/emotional competence by providing schools with a systemic approach to understanding, assessing and supporting positive student behavior.”

In Peoria, a broad coalition of stakeholders, including the school district, parent groups, the union and a cross section of community organizations, formed a “school discipline collaborative.” The initiative targets Peoria North, a program housed at Peoria High School, and the Woodruff Career and Technical Center.

Professional development for teachers and other school staff and strong partnerships with community service providers are essential elements of the Peoria program. One of those partnerships is with FamilyCore, which has two full-time staffers based at Peoria North who work directly with students and staff. “The FamilyCore staffers are on hand to provide immediate intervention when there’s a discipline problem,” says Makeba Barnes, a grant consultant for the Peoria program.

The aim, she says, is to immediately address the situation—with the goal of keeping kids in the school community and returning them to their classrooms as soon as possible.

At Woodruff, training provided by the community organization Positive Action is designed to both empower students and create an atmosphere of mutual respect between students and teachers. In addition, teachers and other staff at Woodruff receive ongoing professional development around such topics as cooperative learning and student engagement strategies.

Improved attendance, less tardiness, increased parent involvement, better student achievement, and reduced suspension and expulsion rates are the major goals of the Peoria program.

 

ACTION ALERT: Bossier Parish to Gut Dismissal Policy – BPSB Meeting this Thursday!

Bossier Parish to Gut Dismissal Policy – BPSB Meeting this Thursday!

Actions speak louder than words. On two separate occasions, you have expressed a willingness to take action and change policy/procedure to the benefit of your employees, but no action has been taken. We want to take you at your word. We want you to take action.
Red River United is asking all Bossier Parish employees to continue push the Bossier Parish School Board to take their suggestions seriously (Caddo can lend support to its sister Parish, too). Please come to the BPSB meeting this Thursday, March 6 at 6:00 PM at the BPSB office in Benton and put the pressure on the BPSB to follow through with their rhetoric of listening to their school employees with actual action on the issues.

Last year, members in Bossier Parish called Red River United and asked if there was anything we could do about asking the Bossier Parish School Board to give employees the OPTION of receiving a paycheck twice monthly. The OPTION of receiving your pay two times per month is something that new and transferred employees are looking for. Additionally, unexpected expenses (blown tires, emergency surgery, etc.) can quickly deplete a person’s savings. Knowing that a paycheck is coming soon can help navigate through a financial quagmire. Red River United is not pushing for anyone to change their pay schedule who does not want to. By request from our members, Red River United brought this request to the Bossier Parish School Board at the September 5, 2013 school board meeting. After hearing testimony from RRU members about twice monthly pay, the BPSB responded saying that they will send surveys to employees and look into the possibility of implementing the twice monthly pay option for the next school year. Well, it’s almost next school year and BPSB employees have seen no such survey nor have heard any more news on the topic from the BPSB since.

Are you really listening to us, Bossier Parish School Board?

In a BPSB Admin meeting on Tuesday, February 25, the BPSB indicated to Red River United that they would consider adding one more step to the dismissal policy. The suggestion was made by Jackie Lansdale, President of Red River United, based on lengthy experience navigating school board policies that already limit your ability to appeal wrongful terminations. Although they indicated that they would consider these suggestion but they made no moves to formally draft the new policy for a vote at the next board meeting.

We are asking for consistency. We are asking for transparency. We are asking for action. Join us at the next Bossier Parish School Board meeting, Thursday, March 6 at 6:00PM (BPSB Office in Benton).

SURVEY: Children with Chronic Conditions in the School Setting

TAKE SURVEY HERE. 

Dear EducatorIf you are a regular education teacher in grades 1-12 in a public school and have taught for at least one year, you are invited to participate in a survey that explores your experiences in working with children who have a chronic condition. Children with chronic conditions make up more than 26% of the student body. A chronic condition is defined as one that lasts one year or more and requires ongoing medical attention and/or limits activities of daily living (including learning). Examples include asthma, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, ADHD, learning disabilities, sickle cell disease, kidney disease, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and food allergies.Dr. Janice Selekman, a professor from the University of Delaware, is conducting a survey to identify the experiences, barriers, and challenges (need for knowledge, skills, and ideas for accommodations) of, as well as resources that are most helpful to, regular education teachers when they have students with a chronic condition. This survey has the support of the American Federation of Teachers and is partially funded by the National Association of School Nurses.

Analysis of the surveys will be used to assist pre-service educators to understand the needs of practicing teachers and to expand programs to enhance the health-related knowledge of new teachers. It will assist current school administrators to address faculty needs for working with students with chronic conditions and it will assist school nurses to understand their role in enhancing the health of these children and adolescents by preventing health-related problems and enhancing academic outcomes. The findings will be presented to teachers and school administrators, as well as school nurses to assist them in understanding the needs of teachers in regular education classrooms.

Please fill out the attached survey and submit it via Survey Monkey. If you would rather fill out the survey by hand, contact Dr. Selekman at the e-mail below and one will be sent to you. You can send it to Dr. Janice Selekman, 317 McDowell Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716.

This questionnaire is voluntary and your return of the survey indicates your willingness to participate. We will not collect your name or school’s name; the goal is to have representation from throughout the country, including urban, suburban, and rural areas as well as representation from those in elementary, middle, and high school.

It is estimated that the survey will take about 15 minutes of your time. If you have questions about the survey, please contact Dr. Janice Selekman at selekman@udel.edu (302-897-8884)

Janice Selekman DNSc, RN, NCSN, FNASN
Professor, University of Delaware

ACTION ALERT: Tell Jindal and White they are wrong about teachers!

lftactionalert

Tell Jindal and White they are wrong about teachers!

For the second time, a state court has struck down Act 1 of 2012, the so-called “talent act,” because it violates a prohibition on bundling too many objectives in a single law.

Act 1 is a reflection of the governor’s very wrong opinions about teachers.

We strongly believe that the law has harmed teachers. If each of its elements had been introduced as separate laws, we would have opposed all of them.

We wish the lawsuits were not necessary. But until the Jindal administration respects both the rule of law and the teachers who dedicate their lives to the children of Louisiana, we have no choice.

To learn more and send Gov. Jindal and Supt. White a letter, please click here. Tell Gov. Jindal and Supt. White that it’s time to stop the lawsuits and work together in the best interest of all our children and the professionals who work in our schools.