New School Year

Yes, this blog has been silent for a year. My apologies!

This new year has started and I wanted to give information through the blog again.

We will be having a regional meeting of TEA on August 23 at Cookeville High School, in the Lecture Hall. If anyone wants to carpool, let me know. I'm presenting information on recent law changes. We will also have a meeting in Manchester on the 29th at Coffee County Central. I'll also be attending that meeting and presenting the same information.  

These meetings will give members information on evaluation, tenure and new laws.

Hope to see lots of SCEA members at a meeting.

Tracy

Sorry for the delay in postings

Most of you know, my mom was very ill this summer and being with her was the most important thing I did all summer! Thanks for the prayers as I deal with the loss of a wonderful mom!

Denise Hackett and Scott Apple were invited to a conference this summer as guests of NEA. The conference was in Washington, D.C. which is the national office of the NEA. Scott claimed all he did was go to meetings, but I have pictures to prove otherwise. They truly represented SCEA well!

From SCEA

RIP - Rural Initiative Project

Denise and Tracy are currently in training, we are actually the trainers! Isn't that scary. We are talking about how to blog and how to be involved in political action. We are in Cookeville and we are meeting with a bunch of other education associations.

Currently, there are six other associations at the meeting. We are having a train the trainer session right now and tomorrow morning we will have the big presentation.

Dannise McKinney is presenting on how to present. :)

Bargaining Cluster Meeting

Tracy represented SCEA at the Bargaining Cluster IV Meeting. Many items were discussed. The teams from local associations in Uniserv District 12 were present. They looked at differentiated pay plans and were updated with the current state approved plans. The teams looked at collective bargaining and interest based bargaining. Interest based bargaining (IBB) is new to our area and we discussed the different approaches of IBB.

Summer Happenings

The Smith County Education Association (SCEA) sponsored a School Board Candidate Forum on July 8, 2008 at the Smith County Chamber of Commerce Building.  All candidates were invited to attend.  Candidates were:  Karen Shoulders, District 1 (opposition not present); Dick Fulton and Chris McCall, District 2;  Sonja Hammonds, District 7 (current board member not present) and Tommy Manning (running unopposed) from District 5.  Each candidate made an opening and closing statement. 

Questions that had been submitted by members of SCEA were presented to the candidates concerning: open meetings, rotating Board of Education (BOE) meetings to different schools, their favorite teacher and subject,  evaluations of the Director of Schools, his job extensions and taking applications for the position, changing board policies and opening board policy up to the public or posting it on line.  Mr. Manning expressed surprise that the board policy was not on line since the BOE had paid the Tenn. School Board Association to do so a couple of years ago.  Several candidates also expressed new ideas to add to the effectiveness of the Smith County Board of Education.  All the candidates present spoke positively about the schools, students and teachers of Smith County.

The Smith County Education Association hopes to continue forums in the future to help promote awareness of education in Smith County .