Once More, With Feeling!

Urgent! Call Chesterfield Senators John Watkins (804-698-7510) and Steve Martin (804-698-7511) and let them know that as a professional educator, parent/grandparent, registered voter, and tax paying citizen you strongly want them to vote NO on HB576.
(If you live outside of Chesterfield, the full list of Senators and their contact info is at the bottom of this post.)

The final vote on HB576, the bill that will eliminate continuing contract rights for all future teachers in Virginia will be voted on by the full Senate within the next two days. Supporters of the bill (which include the Virginia School Board Association, Virginia Association of School Superintendents, the Virginia Board of Education, and private business groups) continue to maintain that this bill creates parity with other PRIVATE workers in the state, and will somehow magically improve education by removing due process rights from employees.

Former Robious MS Principal and now Deputy Secretary of Education, Javaid Siddiqi, offered testimony that the people who had had the greatest reservations with the original language [i.e. the VEA] should now be appeased since they had been grandfathered in, and he proposed that this new language would somehow improve instruction and bring into greater alignment the work being done by principals and teachers to improve classroom instruction in the future.

Once again, the rhetoric is completely disconnected from the change in the law: how does taking away an employee's right to know WHY s/he is not being offered a new contract, as well as an opportunity to appeal the decision, "bring into greater alignment the work being done by principals and teachers to improve classroom instruction in the future?" It would seem counter-productive to strengthening the relationship between principals and teachers for the former to be able to destroy the career of the latter without having to give any evidence to support the decision. I suspect that will create a very cautious and guarded relationship, not one that promotes open exchange of ideas.

Senate Phone list (call the Capitol Office, not District at this point):
http://apps.lis.virginia.gov/sfb1/Senate/TelephoneList.aspx

"We wore black by the thousands last week. Now we need to take action by the thousands…this is a serious attack on our professionalism and we must not let it stand!"
~Kitty Boitnott, VEA President