Notes from Camp, 2009: July 4

Saturday, July 4

Ohio's caucus began today a few minutes past 7:00. NEA delegates have been busy: as of Friday afternoon, delegates had submitted 46 New Business Items. (The deadline for submitting NBI's is noon today, so there will undoubtedly be more.) Evidently The Screening Committee had been busy too, because they had developed recommended positions on NBIs up to #26. The caucus considered those recommendations and reached decisions on its positions on those NBIs. OEA President Patricia Frost-Brooks ran a pretty expeditious caucus, and we finished our work for the day about 8:30.

At the RA, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel indicated that he planned to start the morning session with 90 minutes of New Business Item consideration and hold another 90 minutes in the afternoon. So we were barely in our seats when the parliamentary fur started to fly. This year's NBIs seem particularly pithy; I won't reflect all of them here, but you can get more information at the link provided below.

Delegates passed the following:

• NBI E, which puts NEA on record as supporting equal access for same-sex couples to rights of medical decisions, taxes, inheritance, adoption, and immigration. NEA remains neutral on the question of what these relationships should be called.
• NBI 2 calls on the federal government to commission a definitive study to determine the risks associated with parents' decisions whether or not to vaccinate children.
• NBI 10 re-establishes the Men's Issues program as part of the Annual Meeting. (The Men's Issues Conference was suspended several years ago.)
• NBI 14 reinstates GPO-WEP reform to its previous place as a high-priority legislative objective. (For more information on GPO-WEP, see https://hems.nea.org/lac/socsec/latestnews.html.)
• NBI 15 sets forth a strategy to promote reform of GPO-WEP. (For more information on GPO-WEP, see https://hems.nea.org/lac/socsec/latestnews.html.)
• NBI 17 establishes a program to organize NEA's estimated one-million Republican members to advance "a pro-public education agenda within the Republican Party."
• NBI 18 calls for publication of an NEA guide to parliamentary procedure for use by members and affiliates. (As the world's largest deliberative assembly, the RA should know something about this.)
• NBI 19 calls for RA planners to provide space for AA meetings at the RA site.
• NBI 21 calls for NEA to use its communications vehicles to inform members about laws regarding military recruiter access to students.

RA actions made it clear that delegates have serious misgivings about misuse of charter schools: they passed some NBIs dealing with charter schools and defeated others. Some state affiliates are organizing charter school employees; others (including Ohio) have rejected that idea; but the debate makes it clear that the term "charter school" has such various meanings in different states that it is difficult to use the same term to describe them all.

Today was Independence Day, so the RA held an Independence Day celebration. Also, in keeping with the significance of the day, the first round of elections took place. Ohio-endorsed Joyce Powell of New Jersey was elected to the NEA Executive Committee; a runoff vote will be held tomorrow between four other candidates, including Oklahoma's Greg Johnson, whom Ohio delegates have endorsed. Delegates elected all of the three Ohio-endorsed candidates for ESP (Education Support Professional) Director-at-large.

In the evening, delegates dispersed around San Diego, some watching the fireworks from their hotel windows, others from ships in the harbor, and some from piers and the walkway outside.

WSL

For a look online at the work of the Annual Meeting, check out www.nea.org/annualmeeting.
For NEA's Annual Meeting Blog, go to http://nea-ra.blogspot.com.