Dear Members,
You all should have received your WE 2.0 newsletter in the mail today or yesterday. Inside the newsletter is a petition signature sheet for I-1351, the class size initiative that WEA voted to support and work to get on the ballot at our Representative Assembly earlier this month. If each of us gets only five signatures and every member across the state does as well, then we will reach the adequate number of signatures to get the initiative on the November ballot. It’s that easy.
We are setting up a system of getting each of our members a signature sheet, but we have not gotten to everyone yet, so the petition in your WE 2.0 comes at a very opportune time. This is a valid signature sheet and we ask that you use it to get five or more signatures from family, friends, or neighbors over this weekend. We didn’t want you to miss this chance when many of you will be celebrating Easter on Sunday and have a very easy opportunity to get five signatures. If you have any trouble getting them to sign (which you probably won’t) just let them know how crowded your school, your busses, your cafeterias and your classrooms are and how difficult it is to achieve all the goals the state and district require to get kids over the achievement bar with so many kids and so few staff. Make sure you sign on first. If you can get 10—all the better. But with five signatures, you have completed our minimum ask of your time.
The signature form asks you to return this to the Federal Way office. But we would rather that these forms come back to our local building so that you can get credit for reaching our local goal of signatures.
So, when you have your five signatures, just hang on to it, keep it safe in your home or car, and bring it with you to your school building on Thursday sometime before or after school or during duty-free lunch at the staff lounge, library or wherever. It is important that you get the signature sheets back to a building lead so that you can sign yourself into the tracking sheet that will confirm that you have completed the ask for five signatures or if you have not completed the five, whatever number you have. You will get more sheets soon to continue gathering your full five or more if you like.
Please attach a sticky note to the petition form with your name and building on it so that we can get credit towards the total number of signatures that our local is gathering. Do not write this information directly on the petition sheet.
We cannot talk about this signature gathering campaign on our school e-mail and cannot leave copies of the petition on our desks or where others would see it. Our signature gathering, like all other political work, must be entirely voluntary and no school resources or time may be used to do it.
We hope you take this great opportunity to get signatures this weekend! We will have more petitions available when you are finished with this one (or have your five signatures) and look forward to being able to say that our local had 100% participation in moving this to the November ballot and assuring that our students have appropriate class sizes and enough adults in their buildings to have the optimum opportunity for success.
Keep checking your home e-mail regularly for more announcements about this campaign.
Thanks and have a great weekend.
Lisa Radmer
SVEA President
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