Welcome Our New Leaders!
Welcome Our New Leaders!
Democracy is alive and well at NCSS. Members’ votes for the 2017–2018 Board of Directors and Officers were tallied, and the results are as follows:
Our new Vice President is Tina Heafner, and she is in line to become NCSS President in 2019.
NCSS members also elected four members to three-year terms on the Board of Directors. Joseph Karb, a teacher at Springville Middle School, Springville, New York, and Shannon Pugh, a Secondary Social Studies Teacher Specialist for Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Annapolis, Maryland, were elected to second consecutive terms on the NCSS Board of Directors. Joining the board for their first terms are Anthony Roy, a Teacher at Connecticut River Academy, East Hartford, Conecticut, and Jesse Haight, a Professor at Clarion University, Clarion, Pennsylvania.
Also in July 2017, President-Elect Terry Cherry, a consultant from Mesquite, Texas, will begin his term as president, and Vice-President India Meissel, a Teacher at Lakeland High School in Suffolk, Virginia, will assume the office of president-elect.
We welcome these new leaders of the social studies profession! READ MORE at http://www.socialstudies.org/tssp/news/2017-ncss-election-results
At our recent Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., I ran into many participants who were happily overcome with the ideas they were gathering and materials (books, fliers, maps, flash drives, etc.) they were receiving at sessions, poster displays, workshops, and in the Exhibit Hall to take back to their schools. These educators of every stripe were excited about the speakers they’d heard in rooms large and small and the conversations they’d had over lunch and while simply walking from one event to another. (Read about some of the main presentations in the New, Views, and Who’s Who section of this newsletter.)
The Conference was a lifetime experience that I’ll never forget. Two of my New Mexico colleagues—who were first-time attendees to an NCSS Annual Conference—found it to be “inspiring” and “humbling to be around all these people who are dedicating their lives to generating a more engaged and thoughtful America.”
Finally, the theme of this conference showed a sense of how we as citizens and teachers can use our curriculum for civic engagement, to promote a greater understanding of how our country has developed over time and how it is constantly changing. NCSS can play a huge part by advocating especially that our main subject areas – history, geography, civics, and economics—be taught in elementary, middle, and high schools every year in every state of our nation. I will challenge our newly elected officers and board members to continue this effort as we move forward in this New Year. 2017—Here we come!