The Leading Edge

Earlier today, AASA Executive Director Daniel Domenech issued the following call to action for AASA members:

Dear AASA Member,

The cuts of the sequester are drawing ever closer, and it is all but certain that the 5.3% cut will take place on March 1—next week!—and impact federal funds within your school budget for the 2013-14 school year. These cuts would affect millions of students and lead to potentially significant job losses and program eliminations for the nation’s schools, the educators who run them, and the students they educate.

To that end, and in conjunction with AASA’s annual National Conference on Education, I am emailing our full membership to ask you to use AASA’s newest SmartForm to help us gather, analyze and report how the sequester would impact your schools.

Unlike AASA’s Sequestration Invoice, which asked individual members to relay the information to their Congressional Delegation, this SmartForm collects the information in one place. From there, our advocacy team will be able to collect, analyze and report how deeply the cuts of sequestration will impact schools, communicating with Capitol Hill and the Administration.

Using the AASA Sequestration SmartForm is quick and simple:

• Access the form: http://goo.gl/VKcEN 
• On the first page, please list your school district name and address. 
• On the second page, using numbers calculated by AASA’s sequestration calculator, please share the dollar cut your district would face under the sequester for the listed federal programs. 
• On the third page, please report the estimated number of jobs that would be cut and other programmatic/service-related reductions in the 2013-14 school year due to the sequester cuts.

Thank you, in advance, for your help with this. The strength of AASA advocacy rests in the fact that our members remain engaged and active, especially in advocacy outreach on issues as critical as sequestration. Should you have any questions about the sequester or AASA’s SmartForm or sequestration calculator, please email Noelle Ellerson, Assistant Director for Policy Analysis & Advocacy (nellerson@aasa.org).

Sincerely,
Daniel A. Domenech