For the past two months, we have been fighting against a proposed budget cut to Adult Education and Family Literacy. This proposed cut was $965,000 and since adult education is funded at less than five million dollars, this would have been a very severe cut and would have crippled adult education programs and/or closed some. Because of this, DC LEARNs and its members made a concerted, prolonged effort to try to prevent this cut from happening and we were successful.
We will be posting a more in-depth post about how we were able to accomplish this soon, but our campaign basically involved getting adult learners and adult education staff to show up at a budget hearing of the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, conducting a letter writing campaign with students, and conducting an email campaign with volunteers, staff, board members of programs, and other supporters of adult education. We also used this blog to let people know what we were doing and we used it to post a sample email and let people know how to help.
If you helped with this effort, we would like to express our gratitude. We could not have done this without you.
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This was a superb group effort by many, many members of the adult literacy community. Your voices truly were heard. You deserve not just thanks but congratulations. And while it was a true group effort, special kudos to D.C. LEARNs’ Board Member Ben Merrion for his incredible leadership throughout this process.
And thanks to Chairman Gray and to the entire D.C. Council for being our champions this year.
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