I want to thank everyone for their efforts in our Park it and Picket campaign and our open house leafleting campaign in 2007-2008. The mediation process, fact finding, and a final settlement would not have been as efficient or successful without you.

 Let’s give ourselves a big round of applause for coming together last year.

 Teaching is one of the most noble professions and because of our altruistic and selfless dispositions, some of us are reluctant to demand fair wages for fear it will have an adverse impact on our students and tarnish our reputations. Nothing can be further from the truth.

 Students need quality teachers in the classroom and quality teachers will not tolerate unfair compensation.

 Furthermore, the community does support what we do as indicated by the e-mail responses we received thanks to those of you who volunteered. 27 community members sent letters on our behalf.  Every board member received copies of the e-mail responses sent to our website. 

 We have a couple years of negotiations peace to look forward to enabling us to focus our collective efforts on other important areas, namely, the upcoming school board elections.

 Our strategy to attract and retain quality teachers and provide fair compensation is to promote school board members and candidates who are strong teacher advocates. To this end we need you to be just as supportive and active as you were last year in order to make this happen.

 Again, I can’t say how proud I am of what we accomplished last year and know we will keep the momentum going into 2008-2009.

 Have a great year!