Notes from Camp, 2009: July 5

Sunday, July 5

Some years ago, NEA delegates--frustrated by a perception that not enough time was devoted to business items--set up rules that require a certain amount of time to be set aside in each session for various kinds of business. One result was that today's session was pretty heavy on business items.

Delegates considered some 26 amendments to NEA's legislative program. Of those, half were passed, four were referred to various committees, and nine were defeated outright. Many of those defeated had been introduced by one delegate from Hawaii, and most of those were opposed by Ohio's delegates.

The RA also continued to slog through New Business Items. The deadline for submitting NBIs has passed, and we now know the work that awaits: delegates have submitted 87 NBIs. Together with the five submitted earlier by the Board of Directors, that makes 92 to be dealt with. President Van Roekel is doing a pretty smooth job of handling the parliamentary discussion, and the pace is actually much faster than in some previous years: by the end of the day delegates had considered NBIs through #48, leaving 39 to be dealt with tomorrow, the last day of the RA.

Delegates also honored the national Teacher of the Year, as they do every year. This year's winner is Anthony Mullen, who retired as a New York City policeman and became a teacher at an alternative high school where a major focus of his work is keeping kids in school. "Every day I's given a chance to save one child and prevent another dropout," he said. "These are the riches we are given as teachers and educators."

Dennis has been announcing an estimate of the time the RA will adjourn each day.Delegates are finding this very helpful, especially since his predictions have been pretty accurate. Today he announced an anticipated adjournment time of 6:00, and the actual adjournment came at 6:03.

Since this was a Sunday and yesterday was the Independence Day holiday, today was the time set for delegate religious services. About 470 delegates attended either a Mass or an interdenominational service, both of which started a few minutes after adjournment in rooms at the Conference Center reserved for the purpose by NEA.

After that it was time for NEOEA delegates to head onto the water for this year's NEOEA Night, a three-hour cruise of San Diego Bay. Our boat returned about 10:30, just in time for delegates to fall into their beds to get ready for another 7:00 caucus tomorrow morning.

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.