Action Alert!
Children, parents, and early childhood providers throughout the United States need your help right away. On February 8, Congress passed and the President approved legislation that authorized a doubling of the funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and a big increase in Head Start funding. This long-awaited action makes it possible for all the unfunded mandates of earlier laws to be met, and for quality measures, adequate subsidies, professional education, and child care compensation to be improved.
Congress still needs to appropriate that money. Efforts are underway in both Houses to include these funds in an omnibus appropriation Bill that needs to be approved by March 23, 2018, in order to prevent yet another Government shutdown. Please call your Senators and Representative at (202) 224-3121, and/or write them on their websites ([lastname]@house.gov or at senate.gov), or visit their local office to deliver your concern or your letter. Thank you! For more information on this situation, go to NAEYC’s page Make the Budget Deal Real.
Check our Take Action page regularly to keep up to date with our action alerts.
Teachers of Young Children Aren’t Stupid
or, Why We Have a Peace Educators Facebook Page
Using Facebook can be a mixed blessing or no blessing. But for social change activists it could be a great tool to reach people we don’t know or aren’t in regular contact with. The Peace Educators Facebook page is a great way for teachers working for social change to combine their efforts. You can get it on your Facebook feed by searching for “Peace Educators”, then “like” the Page. 279 others already do so.
Despite the politicians who never seem to take us seriously (or even ourselves) teachers of young children are not stupid. We don’t always speak out in a collective voice. Don’t sell us short.
First-of-all, working with young children isn’t easy. Take 10, 20, sometimes 30 children under 5 with their own issues, add their families their own styles of learning, we think about them for the 8 hours (or more) a day. These children are confined to our class rooms. We plan curriculum for them, plan strategies for their interaction, keep their attention on learning. We talk to a co-teacher, a boss, all the parents, maybe a school board or even a community about the children. You may not think of yourself too often. We don’t like to think about the horrible wages we are paid.
Despite all this, we are pretty smart. We want to know about everything. How things work, where a country is located, how to mix colors, how to keep a guinea pig, what happens when you roll a ball down a ramp, what was it like to travel in a slave ship.
That’s why the Peace Educators Facebook page works. We teachers unite for the goal of peace education. We want to learn about nonviolence, respect, inclusion, nature, empathy, anger, history, science. We want to know how to end racism and sexism. We want to encourage love, cooperation, and joy. We want to nurture poetry, music, reading. We want to empower girls and cheer on boys.
One post recently on gun violence and lockdown at preschools attracted 1,131 views in 24 hours. Our Peace Educators Facebook page shares all these ideas. We can unite the world with teachers. We teach because we want the world to be a better place.
