The new Director started changing things up during her second year, which was also mine. Her major plan was to cut the ratio of school nurses from the standard of 1-500 to 1-1000…. For every school. This meant many schools would be losing their school nurses. Under The old plan, schools of 1000+ got a school nurse. Schools with a ratio of 1 - 250 to 500 were at a Superintendent’s discretion. The Superintendent could put a nurse in the slot but a teacher’s slot was lost. Schools under 250, you had to share and maybe got one, 1 or 2 times a week. This same plan was to go into effect for school psychologists. Under the new plan, Principals would need to give up a teacher slot if they wanted a nurse. They was no condition made for psychologists….schools would be sharing them. The union stepped in to no avail. So, along with, my VP for Legislation, my board and parent volunteers, we began a letter writing campaign to Our Senate representatives and our members of the House of Representatives. In March the National PTA has a Legislative Meeting in Washington DC. We attended and brought flyers and asked our fellow PTA members to pass them out to the members of Congress they saw. We also met with the Director of DODEA as her office is in DC. She was aware of what we had been doing. We went with facts, figures, numbers etc… that supported the need for these positions to remain as status quo. We also met with Department of Defense people at the Pentagon. They are always very interested at what we have to say. At our convention in May, all the same players came to play. This time I had the President elect for NPTA. We had only two resolutions that year. One regarding the staffing of school nurses. The other the staffing of school psychologists. Of course many stood up and spoke in favor of these resolutions. We even had some letters from Senators and from members of the House to read into the record but the best was from the Under Secretary of the Department of Defense. I do my homework. And, another yes!!! The DODEA Director backed down and the school nurses and school psychologist’s number ratio stayed the same. In fact we even got a school nurse at every school in Europe, no matter the enrollment, Next…as a State President, you sit on the NPTA BoD. At least you used to…they do things differently now. I was one of 10 State Presidents to serve along with the Board Officers, office staff and the company NPTA hired that would be the ones to help move NPTA into the world of technology. We were to be thinking as to what the NPTA might look like in 2000. Computers were really ramping up as were cell phones so a lot of our first work was how NPTA Board and State leaders could connect/work with each other and how NPTA would move the organization forward in a media rich environment. Our committee did a lot of work to get NPTA up and running in a very short time. Around this same time 1996, NPTA was going to be celebrating its 100 th annual convention. Knowing this would be a well attended convention the leadership was hoping that a plan could/would be in place. In 1995, NPTA launched its Children First online forum on the Microsoft Network. Then in 1996, NPTA launched its (www.pta.org) site and links to the national headquarters and state offices. Lastly….in my role as EPTA President I represented the organization as a member of the Advisory Council on Dependent’s Education. This is a committee mandated by Congress as DODEA schools are really the schools of The United States. The Committee is co-chaired by The Department of Defense and The Department of Education. (Representatives). This committee is comprised of highly respected members of the Education community in the US (on my term we had the Superintendent of schools from Seattle and New York) members from the military, military community organizations, DODEA representatives and two high school students. The committee’s job is to make school visits, observing the education process in action, then meeting to discuss and make any recommendations if so needed to the Director of DODEA. The committee is usually broken up into three teams who make site visits to three different schools in three different places. All have the same paperwork and are looking for or are observing for the same things. 4
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