“To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. … The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.”Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Welcome to the 2010-11 school year!
And congratulations! Your hard work last spring and during your summer “vacation” paid off. On August 10, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act, which provides $10 billion to save the jobs of nearly 161,000 educators nationwide. Virginia received $247 million of that stimulus funding, of which nearly $13 million will be coming home to Chesterfield County for use in the public schools to, as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan put it, “avert a crisis for this year," noting that three-fourths of the nation’s school districts will be opening school with fewer teachers than they did last year. Chesterfield is one of those districts.
Congress did not just pass this bill out of the goodness of their hearts; in fact, both of the House members (Cantor and Forbes) elected to represent Chesterfield voted against the bill, and while both Virginia Senators (Webb and Warner) voted in favor of saving educators’ jobs, it took frequent contact to help them reach the right decision. That’s why I congratulated you at the start of this letter: you convinced them. NEA, VEA, and CEA activists like you—maybe you were even one of them—brought your influence to bear in the form of over 400,000 phone calls, letters, and emails to Congress. That’s more than just basking in the Politics of Hope, that’s turning Hope into Action!
Association Leaders like YOU have played the pivotal role in promoting professional standards for educators in the workplace, increasing salaries and securing access to quality health care benefits, defending employee due process rights, influencing education policy at the local, state, and national levels, and perhaps most importantly, being a source of information and inspiration to colleagues new to the profession. Truly, the things that you do make a difference; not only in the lives of students, but for fellow educators as well.
As Leaders of this Association you give from your own souls and exert your influence. In doing so you help to further the ideals of this organization, to help it develop, to realize its nature more perfectly. Your leadership helps our Members to resist the politics of fear spread by the opponents of public education, the cowardice of politicians who would rather cut a teacher than raise a tax, and the selfishness of those members of our own community who see more value in a plasma TV on their bedroom wall than a Promethean Board on the classroom wall.
This year I ask you to make a promise not to me but to yourself, a promise that you will develop your own leadership ability even further, that you will not be afraid of yourself, your instincts, or your influence, that you will not forget the duty you owe to yourself. You are a professional educator, and it is not unprofessional to ask, to demand that you be treated like one. If we are to help the children of Chesterfield County realize their natures more perfectly, then we must begin with ourselves; that is what we, CEA, are here for.
