Letter to the NBEA Membership

Dear NBEA Members,

I am writing to thank you for all your hard work and to ask you to help me publicize some of the great things going on in our classrooms.

These are difficult times for teachers, other school staff, and other public employees, both nationally and here in New Bedford. We hear a lot of criticism and face a lot of proposals from outside groups of non-educators telling us how to do our jobs. As president of the NBEA, I am often defending our members and our schools in meetings, but I don’t always tell you – the members – what a great job you are doing. I am in and out of our buildings all the time, and I see a lot of good teaching taking place by caring, dedicated, and competent teachers.

You have a very difficult and important job. You have to educate all students. Unlike private schools, charter schools and vocational schools, we can’t pick and choose which students fit our schools best or will give us the best test scores. We are truly public schools. We take them all, and do our very best to give them all a quality education.

New Bedford residents hear of the political squabbles and disagreements, but they rarely get to hear about the great work you do. Will you help me tell them? I would like to regularly publicize positive education stories in the NBEA blog, website, through press releases and in public forums. But I need your stories. I need small stories as well as big ones. Do you know a student who used to hate to read but now has a favorite book, thanks to a school librarian? A student who went from struggling in math to now wanting to take higher level math classes? How about a great field trip, choral performance, history re-enactment, science project, art display or creative writing exercise? How about a student who is the first in her family to head off to college? Or a parent you convinced to come to her first-ever parent-teacher conference?

Please send NBEA your stories. Of course protect the privacy of students and parents, though feel free to include student names when the successes are public and permission to use the name is granted. To pass stories along to the media, we will need names and details. For ones cited on the blog I can be more general. If you have great photos to illustrate your story, send them along, too.

I look forward to hearing from you.


Lou St. John