Member Benefit Spotlight: Pet Insurance
FREE personalized one-on-one Tutoring for ALL RRU Members!
Personalized (FREE) one-on-one tutoring —
The Red River United ER&D (Educational Research & Dissemination) team is proud to announce a new type of professional development for all teachers in Caddo & Bossier Parishes. We are giving you, the teacher, an opportunity to seek help for problems in the classroom by working with you one on one. That’s right, you no longer have to sit in a classroom full of people and hear general lectures. We want to work specifically to meet your needs. These sessions offer new and veteran teachers a hands-on, highly interactive service that will give strategies and tools you can implement immediately in your classroom and to incorporate into your lesson plans.
All you need to do is schedule an appointment to work with one of our certified staff members. It’s that simple! You may schedule as many appointments as needed. This is a free service to members and potential members. Call, 318-424-4579 today.
Not a Red River United member? Join today!
How reconstitution, reorganization, and school closures may affect you
If you are currently employed at Atkins, Woodlawn, Midway, Fair Park, Mooretown, Caddo Heights, Sunset Aces, Caddo Middle Career & Tech, Cherokee Park, JS Clark, Westwood, Pinegrove, or Queensborough, you NEED to read this.
Dearest Educational Professional,
As you may be aware, at the close of this school year your school will undergo one of three processes, reconstitution, reorganization, or closure. While the Caddo Parish School Board has experimented with these processes before, experience tells us that the process is seldom smooth and without casualties. I am writing to ensure you understand your rights and that you take the necessary steps to safeguard your professional future. The most important step is to join Red River United. I have enclosed a membership application and return envelope for your convenience.
Safeguarding your future, step 1. Recent changes by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) have resulted in a postponement of the Value Added Model (VAM) until 2015. This means that all educators will have a score based upon their Student Learning Targets (SLTs) and administrative observations. It is critically important that your SLTs are realistic and achievable. At the mid-year mark you have the right to modify or revise your SLT to account for changes to your student population (such as students leaving your class and excessive absences) and changes to your teaching assignment. Be proactive about revising your SLTs and utilize Red River United’s expertise in this area. Revising your SLT is a right and is a safeguard to your professional future. Please refer to the enclosed literature for additional information on revising SLTs.
Safeguarding your future, step 2. Make sure that at the mid-year mark you go into CIS and verify your student rosters. It is important that the only students you are held accountable for are the ones you personally instruct.
Safeguarding your future, step 3. Your evaluation this year carries extra weight because you will either be reapplying for your job at your existing school or looking to transfer to a different school. Red River United offers free, personalized, one-on-one tutoring for our members. Right now, we are encouraging all of our members to come in the office and review their lesson plans with one of our experts prior to their evaluation/observation (all evaluations must be announced). After your evaluation, we are encouraging everyone at a school that is reconstituting, reorganizing, or closing to submit a rebuttal. A rebuttal, in its simplest form, is your side of the story and it is permanently attached to your personnel file. All eyes will be on what’s in your personnel file and your job placement may depend on it. Red River United has a positive track record of assisting with rebuttals and grievances. In fact, we have had scores increased and in some cases nullified. Protect your profession and let us help by writing a rebuttal.
Safeguarding your future, step 4. Your personnel file is very important. Red River United can assist you in pulling the file and ensuring that only official Caddo Parish School Board documents are enclosed. We have a history of purging personnel files of rogue Principal memos, unofficial write-ups, and superfluous materials. Request your file from the school board and bring to our office at 1726 Line Avenue, Shreveport, LA 71101.
Safeguarding your future, step 5. You have until March 1, 2014 to put in for a transfer. Submitting transfer paperwork does not necessitate that you change schools but it does offer you additional job placement opportunities. Furthermore, when a school is reorganized you need to protect yourself against a possible involuntary transfer. Red River United can assist you in this process, but do your due diligence and submit transfer paperwork before things come to a head. A transfer form has been enclosed in this letter for your convenience.
Red River United is concerned that the upheaval of so many schools due to reconstitution, reorganization, and closure will have unintended consequences on the stability of professionals’ careers. In order to avoid potential problems, it is critical that you follow Steps 1-5. We have the expertise to assist you in this process, but you need to meet us halfway and join Red River United. Where else can you get a full time staff, local office, in-house attorney, and dynamic president? There is no 1-800 number to dial, no gimmick, and no waiting for assistance. If you have questions, call us on our local line, 318-424-4579. Red River United is the largest organization in Northern Louisiana because it takes a stand on important issues and passionately advocates for its members. Join us!
In Solidarity,
Jackie Lansdale
Red River United, President
P.S. Because of the district wide upheaval there is always the chance of a Reduction in Force (RIF). Red River United will make sure the school board strictly adheres to policy. Policy states that RIFs (layoffs) shall be based solely upon demand, performance, and effectiveness. Evaluations/observations matter! Teachers operating on a temporary certificate or special funding source (Title I) are statutorily more vulnerable.
BREAKING: Payroll Deduct Ban Filed for Upcoming Legislative Session
Own YOUR profession! Take Action Now!
Silence Your Voice Bill Filed for Upcoming Legislative Session– Representative Talbot is first out of the gate with a bill to eliminate payroll deduct. HB172 will be heard in the House Labor and Industrial Relations Committee. Payroll deduction helps us support our professional union and advocate for the needs of Louisiana students. Let’s look at the facts:
- Because payroll deduction is part of the systems already in effect in municipal, parish, and state government offices, it does not add a dime to administrative costs.
- Lots of organizations, from credit unions to charities to insurance companies already use payroll deduction.
- The organizations an employee chooses to support is a personal choice – not the government’s.
Aiming this law only at our professional organization violates your freedom of speech. It is an attempt to gag the voice of teachers and school employees in our schools and in Baton Rouge.
There’s a pattern here: It seems that state after state they are trying to silence the voice of educators. We can’t let outsiders decide what happens in Louisiana schools.
TAKE ACTION NOW.
A Hand Up is Not a Handout
A hand up is not a handout
She lays out an array of programs that many elected officials love to hate—including unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, pre-K education, the minimum wage, paid sick leave and retirement benefits—and makes the case for why they are a benefit to individuals, their families and our communities.
“The shifts in our economy have shown how easy it is to fall into poverty and how hard it is to climb out,” Weingarten writes. “But this decline is not inevitable and it is not irreversible.” The policies mentioned above, along with a strong labor movement, “should be strengthened, not destroyed.”
University of Illinois-Chicago faculty wage two-day strike
University of Illinois-Chicago faculty wage two-day strike
The University of Illinois-Chicago United Faculty is a joint affiliate of the AFT and the American Association of University Professors. “From the outset,” says AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum, “the UIC United Faculty has bargained and the administration has stalled. While the administration rakes in millions in profits, and has hundreds of millions of dollars in reserves, it refuses to pay faculty what they deserve. We support our brothers and sisters at UIC in their struggle for a fair and just contract.”
Illinois Federation of Teachers President Dan Montgomery, who is an AFT vice president, calls it “outrageous” that the university has increased tuition and burdened students with debt, all while socking away almost a billion dollars of students’ money. “Just as outrageous,” he adds, “is that the administration has spent the students’ tuition dollars on increasing the number of administrative positions and reducing the number of faculty.”
AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress Chair Howard Bunsis asks how the UIC administration can claim it has offered a ‘fair contract’ when newly hired faculty make more than faculty who have been at the institution for many years. “How can the administration claim that it has offered a ‘fair contract’ when many nontenure-track faculty earn just $30,000 a year (less than a living wage in Chicago)? How can the administration claim that it has offered a ‘fair contract’ when faculty, who have been teaching at UIC for more than 10 years, do not know until August each year whether they will have a job in the upcoming year? If the administration cared about the quality of education received by UIC students, it would have settled with the faculty after 18 months of bargaining.”
Send a message of support to the UIC United Faculty. Follow the conversation about the strike on Twitter: #UICstrike.
LFT Legislative Agenda: Reclaim the Promise!
TAKE ACTION NOW!
LFT Legislative agenda: Reclaim the promise!
An Excellent public education for all children is an economic necessity, an anchor of democracy, a moral imperative and a fundamental civil right. The LFT’s value-based vision of the promise of public education includes a commitment to fairness, equal opportunity to achieve, accountability at all levels, and access to resources for students, teachers, school employees and higher education faculty.
In keeping with the values that our union lives by, the LFT 2014 Legislative Agenda is focused on reclaiming the promise of public education by pursuing policy goals that:
- Create safe, welcoming public schools.
- Cultivate well prepared and supported teachers and staff.
- Develop engaging curriculum.
- Ensure wraparounds services that address students’ social, health and emotional needs.
The Federation’s 2014 Legislative Agenda will address Common Core Curriculum Standards and the overuse and abuse of standardized testing.
- Implementation of Common Core has been a disaster. We must make sure that, no matter what standardized tests we use, students and teachers have all the resources they need to be successful.
- BESE keeps changing school performance scores. That’s confusing to parents and unfair to schools. It has to stop.
- School letter grades unfairly label schools without giving parents the information they need. Letter grades must reflect multiple measures that impact students’ ability to achieve, including poverty, availability of resources, nutrition, etc.
Our 2014 Legislative Agenda will seek to control the public funding of unaccountable non-public schools.
- BESE must stop overturning the decisions of local school boards that decide to reject charter applications. Decisions about spending local tax dollars local should be kept local.
- Voucher schools and course choice providers are not held to the same accountability standards as traditional public schools. Those who accept public funding must be held responsible spending taxpayer dollars.
- Spending money earmarked for state education grants to local school systems on course choice is wrong. Districts must be allowed to use grant funds to improve the services they offer students.
The LFT agenda will seek to undo the damage caused to teachers by the bogus “reforms” imposed in the 2012 legislative session.
- Teacher salaries should not depend on unproven, inaccurate and unfair evaluations.
- Our broken system of teacher evaluations should be de-linked from the granting and taking of tenure and reductions in force.
- Teachers must have real due process so they can challenge inaccurate results of teacher evaluations.
The LFT Agenda will protect the voice of teachers and school employees and defend their right to spend their paychecks as they choose.
- LFT will oppose efforts to prohibit union members from paying their dues through payroll deduction.
- Other private employers such as insurance companies and credit unions also enjoy the right to payroll deduction, and they also use that money to support political activity and lobbying at the capitol. We are asking for fair and equal treatment.
The LFT will work to preserve public retirement systems and keep local economies strong.
- The Louisiana Budget Project recently conducted a study proving that our public pension systems are valuable in attracting high quality workers, and are highly sustainable.
- The state has failed to pay its share of the unfunded accrued liability of state retirement systems. LFT will oppose any efforts to make employees work longer and pay more to cover the UAL of the systems.
- Our local economies depend upon public pension incomes. LFT will resist legislation that punishes local businesses by falling for the “unsustainability” argument pushed by big business.
To see the full LFT Legislative Agenda, please click here.
To download a flier describing the LFT Legislative Agenda, please click here.
TAKE ACTION NOW.
Louisiana members discuss Reclaiming the Promise
TAKE ACTION TO DEFEND EDUCATION THIS LEGISLATIVE SESSION!
More than 100 AFT members from New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, East Baton Rouge and other Louisiana cities and parishes turned out for an AFT town hall meeting at a downtown New Orleans hotel on Feb. 12.
The town hall gave the members, as well as parents, community activists and others, an opportunity to hear from AFT President Randi Weingarten and Steve Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, and to provide feedback on the Reclaiming the Promise program. Weingarten applauded the Louisiana members and their unions for standing up to those who have used Hurricane Katrina to undermine traditional public schools and the educators who work at them, particularly in New Orleans. She noted that polls show the community overwhelmingly supports its public schools and has “the same grievances and gripes that we do—and the same aspirations.” Several of the Louisiana members who spoke expressed concern about the out-of-control growth of charter schools in New Orleans, the gap between haves and have-nots and its impact on schools and education, and the overtesting of students and use of those tests to evaluate teachers.
Jefferson Federation of Teachers member Maria West, a teacher for 32 years, said she was tired of non-educators and school board members “who have not taught a day in their lives” determining what goes on in public school classrooms.
Beverly Cook, who only became a member of the United Teachers of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, said: “The union is what draws us all together. I could not possibly think about NOT being a union member now.”
Monaghan discussed the numerous obstacles that the LFT has confronted in recent years, many of them a direct result of an unfriendly governor and state Legislature. But he spoke with pride about how the state federation and its members have risen to those challenges, particularly in the courts, where the state federation has won a number of legal battles, including the recent vindication of some 7,000 teachers and school employees who were wrongfully terminated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The LFT president cautioned, however, that “real justice” will not come from court rulings but from success in the political arena, and from the election of leaders who value the voices of teachers, paraprofessionals and other schools employees. “We’ve been making the argument that the promise of public education” should be available to every child and that “we can have schools that actually work for children,” Monaghan said.
[Roger Glass/photo by Les Landon]
TAKE ACTION NOW.
The Share My Lesson Virtual Conference: March 11-13
- Professional development hours.
- Great new ideas for your classroom.
- Lesson plans that actually work with kids.
- Evening entertainment almost as good as Scandal.
If you’re looking for any of these things, then join the AFT’s Share My Lesson in their first virtual conference. Teaching & Learning: Ideas & Innovations 2014 is an online festival of professional learning featuring over two dozen free workshops by Share My Lesson’s content partners, educational leaders, and expert teachers.
Held in the afternoons and evenings of March 11-13, 2014, you’ll simply log into your computer to attend these free events. There is no travel, lost class time, or any cost.
The keynote speaker is AFT president, Randi Weingarten, who kicks off the conference at 5:00 PM CST on Tuesday, March 11th with her message on Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education.
To register for sessions, see the complete online agenda here. Register for each workshop separately to ensure you get credit for your attendance. And if you haven’t yet signed up for Share My Lesson, do so today. Participation in the conference is exclusive to registered users.
We reclaim the promise when we support teachers and help them to be as effective as possible in the classroom. Register for Teaching & Learning: Ideas & Innovations today.
Ideas and Innovations
Ideas and Innovations is a virtual festival of professional learning on the evenings of March 11-13 2014. Presented by the content leaders and partners of Share My Lesson, you will enjoy engaging webinars on everything from arts education and civics to the Common Core. With two-dozen webinars to choose from, there’s something for every educator and parent.
Registration
Participation in Ideas and Innovations is limited to subscribers of Share My Lesson. It’s free to sign up for our site and for the workshops, so if you haven’t done so, sign up for Share My Lesson now. Once you’ve joined Share My Lesson, click on the individual workshop registration link to sign up. You will need to register for each workshop individually in order for us to keep attendance records for those seeking professional learning credits.
Keynote Address
Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education
Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers
Our public schools represent our nation’s commitment to helping all children dream their dreams and achieve them. A high-quality public education for all children is an economic necessity, an anchor of democracy, a moral imperative and a fundamental civil right, without which none of our other rights can be fully realized.
6:00 – 6:45pm EST/ 3:00 – 3:45pm PST — Register
Free Webinars
Choose from two-dozen workshop choices:
Diane Ravitch: “Time to Halt the Madness, Greed, and Insanity”
Diane Ravitch describes herself as a 75-year-old reformed reformer. For her grandchildren and others, she is sounding the alarm about public education and its undoing through testing, accountability, choice and competition. A one-time believer in market forces to achieve reform, the former education official from the first Bush administration now sees that it hasn’t worked.
She is “the conscience of America,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten in introducing Ravitch to a rapt audience of 250 gathered at AFT headquarters on Feb. 4 for a continuing conversation about reclaiming the promise of public education. “Diane Ravitch talks the talk and walks the walk on behalf of kids.”
“The destruction of public education is not progress,” Ravitch warned. “It’s regress.”
She sees the evidence when she looks around the country, she noted—and she’s been looking plenty, both as a researcher and in her travels on a book tour to promote Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
For example, in Philadelphia, they are cutting budgets, closing schools, firing teachers and increasing class size while the governor gives corporations big tax cuts. “I think it’s a disgrace when we can afford so much as a society but can’t afford to give the children of Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis or Indianapolis the schools they deserve,” she declared.
The other disgrace, she said, is the myth that we are a nation of failing schools. She cited National Assessment of Educational Progress scores that refute the myth, as well as the highest high school graduation rates and the lowest dropout rates. Yet in the past 20 years, we’ve labored under a “test-test-test” obsession that has used billions of federal dollars in competitive, punitive ways that have harmed schools and children. She wrote Reign of Error to deconstruct that narrative of “reform,” she said, adding that none of our high-performing competitor nations are privatizing or embracing charter schools or vouchers, as the United States is. The current push for breaking up school systems and relying on testing and data is not working. Her book features facts, data and charts—evidence, not ideology.
The good news is that parents are rising up in rebellion against closing schools in Newark, Chicago and Philadelphia. They are opposing a culture of testing that pushes out the arts, science—even recess—and snuffs out children’s natural joy of learning.
Ravitch advocated a “life-care” approach to education to replace the “madness, greed and insanity” of current ideology. This means investments in prenatal care, early childhood education—birth through pre-K—and wraparound services in schools, including healthcare to address poverty, the biggest obstacle to student success.
There are two different paradigms out there, she said. One, the status quo, says measure and rank everyone, and parcel out opportunity. But she and those who would reclaim the promise of education embrace another. “I dream of a world where the purpose of education is human development, where everyone has a pedagogy of kindness, where we respect people who help children.”
We want for all children what parents want for their own, noted Weingarten in closing: “to develop trusting relationships with adults, to learn to solve problems, to develop character, to acquire the persistence—the grit—needed to confront adversity.” That is what reclaiming the promise of public education is all about.
[Barbara McKenna, Jessica Smith/photos by John Harrington]