We need your help, once a week!
Demonstrate your concern for education. Make a difference. Join us in fighting for our schools.
How? Become part of the Manhattan Beach Blue Team. Wear blue every Wednesday. We’ll be organizing activities – a different activity every Wednesday through the end of this school year. Encourage your friends and neighbors to join us. We need to generate a groundswell of community activity in support of our schools, from parents and non-parents alike.
See how easy this is? Join us. It doesn’t take much time and we will make a difference. Wear blue and send your emails on Wednesday.
Week 7 Activity – May 6, 2009
Whether or not the propositions pass on May 19th, California will have to make additional cuts to expenses for 2009-10 because their revenues are estimated to be lower by $8 billion (CA budget is less than $100 billion, so this is a large reduction). If the propositions do not pass, revenues will be even lower and even more cuts will have to be made. As education is a large portion of the budget, it would be easy for a significant portion of the additional cuts to be applied to education. We anticipate receiving the May Revise budget from Governor Schwarzenegger around June 8th. K-12 Education already received a large cut in the February budget. This activity is designed to explain to California decision-makers that the cuts to education, in particular, MBUSD, have already been too deep. We are advocating that “NOW is the time to stop cutting our education funding.”
We hear that CA legislators are receiving numerous emails and that right now, letters are read more closely than emails. We ask that you personalize the letter template (you can use the same personalization as you did with the federal letters of a few weeks ago), create letters for your assignment of 12-14 decision-makers, print, sign and mail the letters. It is critical that each decision-maker receives many letters. If you have time, please do more than your assignment!
You have two choices. You may use our mail merge system or you may cut/paste in word. To get to either option, go to www.gvpta.com/?page_id=165 to click on the link for mail merge or the files for cut/paste. This might be your first use of mail merge. This was my first use and once you do it once, it is easy. Alternatively, to cut/paste, copy the letter template (Blue_Team_Activity_05_06_09_Letter_Template.doc) and the appropriate address file based on the first letter of your last name (e.g., Addresses_for_A-C.doc). After you personalize the letter template, you can use the address file to cut and paste the addresses to print a copy for each decision-maker.