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March 2004 - Carrie Lucking, Hopkins

I began to write letters to legislators and the newspapers as I realized policy decisions were affecting my classroom more and more over the past few years. Last fall, I attended some of the town hall meetings sponsored by the Department of Education and realized that people were angry and they were giving input into the social studies standards, but that nobody would do anything about it. I realized that somebody had to do something more.

In January I attended the first Senate Education Committee hearing on the social studies standards and met others who shared my concerns. I decided to start a grassroots organization, but I didn’t really know what that meant. The first thing I did was send out an e-mail to basically everybody I knew and asked, “I’m going to start this organization, do you want to be part of it?”

Then I started a Web site, which was really easy. A lot easier than you would think. Things really took off when I started an online petition calling for the Senate to block the confirmation of Cheri Pierson Yecke. The petition went live in March. Within two weeks we had 2,000 signatures. It tapered off for a little bit. So I sent another email to the people who had signed the petition. From that we got another 2,500 signatures. We went to a few community events that added another 800 signatures. In the end, we had 5,200 signatures.

I picked the issue of blocking the confirmation because I realized that the standards were only one policy issue, but that the overall policy direction was coming from the commissioner. So much of what was coming out of the Department of Education was harmful to my students—they were writing harmful standards, harmful policies, and actively publicly bashing public schools at every opportunity. I figured that if we were ever going to get a new policy direction, we had to start at the top.

Once the confirmation hearings started, I began to e-mail updates to people about where the process was at. I asked people to call their senators and write letters to the editor of their local papers. It was really important to get the message out at the local level.

One of my big rules was that I didn’t want to send junk e-mail. If I chose to send an e-mail there had to be a specific issue or a specific call to action. I usually gave sample text to help people get started. Some people would cut and paste the sample text and send it in. Others would write their own letters and send them back to me with a note about what they had done and the response they got.

Some people got an angry response from their senators. When that happened and they forwarded the response to me, I contacted that senator to follow-up. I wanted the senators to understand that the people contacting them were concerned constituents. I wanted them to understand that they needed to be treated respectfully regardless of whether or not the senator agreed with them on the issue.

These efforts made a voting difference.

At the beginning of the session there were questions about whether or not the Senate Education Committee would even hold the confirmation hearings. There was a lot of talk that they weren’t even going to address the issue. If that had happened the Commissioner would have been commissioned by default. So the first thing we were able to make happen was the confirmation hearings themselves. (By we I mean all of the people contacting their elected officials through these and other efforts.)

The second thing was the actual vote. A week before the floor vote, there were five or six senators on the fence–enough to lose. I sent out an email and made follow-up calls to people in those senate districts, asking them to contact their senators by phone and e-mail and to have their neighbors and friends do so as well. All six of those senators voted against the confirmation. Rumor has it that one of these senators received over 600 contacts from constituents.

A third outcome is that the tone at the Department of Education seems to have changed. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better so it seems we’re moving in the right direction.

One of the biggest things I learned is that you have nothing to lose if you ask the question. I had no idea what I was doing when I started. I know I made mistakes along the way, but I was kind to people, I listened carefully, I did my best. I met so many amazing people that support public education. It was inspiring.

I’m a teacher and I’m not a parent, so what I had to do was reach out to parents because I knew my voice wasn’t enough, and the voice of my colleagues wouldn’t be enough. That’s unfortunate and a whole separate issue, but I think it’s a very powerful message for parents to hear that it’s their voice that counts.