Learning: ESP on the Team
Counting Everyone

Mesa, Arizona school secretary Alice Swinehart knows the Census count is important to her community.

Education support staff and teachers in Mesa, Arizona, are lending support to efforts to make their local Census 2000 count as accurate as possible.

This March, when tens of millions of households across the country receive seven-question Census 2000 surveys in the mail, education support personnel in Mesa, Arizona, will be ready.

"The Association is more than a job insurance package--that's why we've gotten involved in the Census," says Mesa Education Support Personnel Association President Alice Swinehart.

This Mesa local, which represents 4,000 support staffers, is letting the Census Bureau use its office to orient and test for part-time Census jobs, in effect turning the Association office into a Census hiring hall.

Some 50 or more Mesa support staff will likely end up working for the Census, estimates local UniServ Director Dave Henderson.

Other ESP and teachers in Mesa are participating in sessions to learn more about the Census--and sharing what they've learned with students and their families.

Meanwhile, at the national level, NEA is working with the Census Bureau to encourage widespread "affiliate and member participation in Census 2000 activities."

Why all this Association interest in the Census? Ensuring an accurate count, it turns out, is a vital education issue. Census data determine both funding for federal education programs and state and national legislative districts.

Unfortunately, previous Census counts just haven't been accurate. The 1990 Census missed 8.4 million people, more than half of them children.

The Children's Defense Fund estimates that this Census, if it undercounts by the same amount as the last, will miss 52,000 children in Los Angeles alone.

Counting the people likely to be missed by Census 2000--people disproportionately young, poor, and minority--requires a community-wide effort. That's where support staff come in.

About 75 percent of NEA ESP members in urban areas live in the school districts where they work. And the percentage of rural support staff who work in the same school districts where they live is nearly as high.

"ESP know the community--we know who's afraid to be counted," says NEA Executive Committee member Iona Holloway, a LaPlace, Louisiana, paraeducator. "We know these people, and they're not afraid of us."

Mesa ESP leader Alice Swinehart, a school secretary, notes that many families in Mesa speak only Spanish.

"To them, the Census is associated with other government agencies that they want nothing to do with, like the INS," she explains. "Most of our members live in Mesa--they can be a big help in finding and reassuring these families, so that they can get counted."

And if everyone gets counted, schools and students benefit.

Team Player
Ensuring Safety and Health

As school safety officer, Oscar Vega is responsible for helping to keep more than 38,000 employees and students safe and healthy.

Name: Oscar Vega

Job Title: Safety officer for Salem-Keizer Public Schools in Salem, Oregon.

On the side: I am also the President of the Oregon School Safety Officers Association, a group of people that are responsible for safety and health in school districts across the state.

Previous Experience: 20 years in safety inspection positions with GTE WESGO. Five years as a school board member in Redwood City, California.

What I do: My primary responsibility is ensuring the safety and health of the employees and students in Salem's second largest school district.

How I keep the schools safe: I believe it's important to create a positive safety culture in each school. From the principal down to the students, it's everyone's responsibility to help keep themselves and others safe and healthy.

Knowledge is the key to safety. I regularly educate employees on proper procedures, and they incorporate these procedures into their daily routines and classrooms. From playground safety to first aid, I give a variety of presentations to educate co-workers on important safety issues.

I also rely heavily on teams of educators and staff who make up safety committees in each school. I can't be at 55 schools at one time, so I train teams to perform inspections and monitoring injuries. They submit notes from their monthly meetings to me, so that I can monitor the schools for reoccurring problems and know what areas might need more training.

Regular inspections are also important. I accompany state and fire inspectors on visits to the schools to ensure we meet the Occupational Safety and Health Administrations standards as well as fire codes. If something needs to be corrected, I make sure it is done swiftly.

How I see the schools today: I think we've made a major turnaround in the safety culture in our school district, through education and heightened awareness. We've made safety a big part of the educational program in our schools, and, as a result, we have a better learning environment.

Going the Extra Mile

Last winter, two students who slipped under a school bus were saved by the safety practices of Chuck Raviart, a driver for Pennsylvania's Hempfield Area School District.

Here's how Raviart's system works: An older student exits the bus first, stands at the rear of the vehicle, and signals the driver by a hand wave when all the departing passengers are clear.

When two disembarking students slipped on the ice and fell under Raviart's bus, this procedure saved their lives-because Raviart did not receive the all-clear sign and would not move the bus until he got it.

The procedure worked so well, in fact, that Raviart wasn't even aware of the incident until the following morning. Upon learning of the averted tragedy, he was moved to tears.

Parents and children who live at that stop, the Suburban Acres Mobile Home Court, gave Raviart a plaque to express their appreciation for his devotion to kids and their safety.

No sooner did the cheers die down for Chuck Raviart than Michigan's Grand Rapids-Forest Hills school district honored its own heroic driver, 14-year veteran Sue Baker, with a plaque, a watch, and a dozen roses.

Last August, Baker quickly evacuated 42 elementary students from a brand-new bus when her yellow warning lights flashed irregularly and she saw smoke coming from under the hood.

No problem, thought Baker.

"We practice fire drills on the bus three times a year with the children," Baker points out. "The kids really reacted well."

The riders out of harm's way, Baker emptied her fire extinguisher on the flames-ignited by an electrical malfunction-and bolted from the bus. In less than five minutes after the driver noticed the light problem and smoke, the bus was engulfed by an inferno.

When the smoke died down, Baker received countless thank-you cards, letters, and flowers from grateful students, parents, and well-wishers. And parents of students riding the flaming bus have given the hero a trip to California to visit her sisters-but not while school is in session.

That's because highly professional ESP like Sue Baker are the best insurance a kid could have.

Illinois ESP leader David Arnold never misses a chance to link people together. That's what makes a good organizer.

In 1998, this Brownstown custodian served on the Illinois Education Association's Communications Committee with IEA-NEA Student Program member Lisa Webber. When Webber graduated college and went on to work as a kindergarten teacher in Shungnak, Alaska, she stayed in touch with Arnold-who is now the committee chair.

"After school started this past fall," Arnold reports, "Lisa E-mailed me and told me a little about Shungnak and her students. I saw there was a good comparison between her class at Shungnak Elementary, which is above the Arctic Circle, and the kindergarten class in my school in south central Illinois."

Arnold linked Webber and her kids with teacher Suzanne Stinebring and her kindergartners at Brownstown Elementary.

The rest is, well, elementary.

Resources

Help with IDEA 97 Training
The National Information Center for Children and Youth with Disabilities has produced a comprehensive training manual on the provisions and requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Amendments of 1997.

The training package contains a 500-page curriculum binder with background information, resources, handouts, and training scripts and an overhead binder of 145 transparencies, available in English or Spanish. An addendum to the training package, currently being written, will provide information about the Federal IDEA regulations released March 12, 1999.

Nearly all of the materials may be downloaded free, in HTML or PDF formats, from the NICHCY Web site at www.nichcy.org (note that there are a large number of files to download). Printed copies of the training manual can be ordered for $175 a set from NICHCY, P.O. Box 1492, Washington, DC 20013 800/695-0285.

Got My Eye on You
The use of video cameras on school buses was a hot topic recently on NEA's ESP E-mail discussion list. Video cameras have been installed by school districts around the country with the stated purpose of helping maintain student discipline and safety on the buses.

But, based on experiences in their districts, several ESP activists believe that some employers are more interested in using the cameras to monitor the behavior of drivers than students.

As the NEA Resolutions put it, education employees must be guaranteed the rights of privacy, including freedom from audio or video surveillance without the prior written permission of the individual.

The ESP E-mail discussion list is a forum for NEA ESP members and staff to exchange information and opinions about ESP job issues and the issues of ESP within the Association.

Check the box at the right for information on how to subscribe to this free list.