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Letter Writing Tips for DoDEA Employees

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Title 5, Section 7211 of the U.S. Code protects your right as an employee to address your concerns to Congress. It reads, "The right of employees, individually or collectively, to petition Congress or a Member of Congress, or to furnish information to either House of Congress, or to a committee or Member thereof, may not be interfered with or denied.

If at any time you feel your rights under the above quoted law are being violated, contact your FEA attorney immediately.

Get addresses or find email forms for your elected representatives at www.senate.gov and www.house.gov.

Sample Letter to Congress

The following is a sample letter you can use or adapt in order to write to your Congressional representatives. Copy the letter content from this page and customize it with the name of the elected official you are writing to, as well as your own name and any other information you would like to add. We suggest you send this letter to both of your Senators as well as your Member of Congress.

The Honorable (name of your Senator or Representative),

I am writing to you as an employee of the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) and a member of the Federal Education Association/National Education Association to ask you to help us save our outstanding school system.

Since being appointed Director of DoDEA in the summer of 2008 (without any public notice or consideration of any other candidates), Dr. Shirley Miles has engaged in a smear campaign aimed at DoDEA students, faculty and staff. Despite our school system's widespread recognition for outstanding student performance, the lowest minority achievement gaps of any state system, and highly qualified educators, Dr. Miles has repeatedly berated the performance of our students as "stagnating." This despite the fact that DoDEA schools routinely score well above national averages (typically within the top 5 state systems) on standardized tests such as the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) and the Terra Nova.

Dr. Miles has repeatedly spoken to audiences of DoDEA parents and stakeholders, trying to foment a false crisis about "stagnation" in our schools and blaming "uncaring" teachers for the situation.

This is not only insulting to me as a professional educator, it is detrimental to our military families and their quality of life. DoDEA schools have long been recognized as a valuable component of military Quality of Life. By fabricating a crisis of confidence in our schools, Dr. Miles is doing immeasurable harm to an education system many have always considered a major benefit of being a military family.

Were the situation true, and our schools actually floundering, it would of course be a necessary and even valuable service to cause such upheaval in the name of reform. But as I indicated above, as evidenced by numerous test scores and customer satisfaction surveys, such a crisis simply does not exist.

Dr. Miles seems to be working very hard, however, to bring about such a crisis. Here are just a few of the moves toward "academic excellence" she has made in the year since her appointment:
  • diminished meaningful professional development opportunities for educators
  • eliminated successful intervention programs in reading and math for at-risk elementary students
  • infringed upon teachers' time to grade papers and do other classroom preparatory work by using their preparation period for trainings traditionally held during specified training days
  • threatens to increase class sizes in all DoDEA middle schools by unnecessarily cutting staff positions
  • treats disabled pre-school children differently than other students by denying teachers the ability to make home visits prior to the start of the school year. All children in DoDEA below first grade are allowed to have visits in their home by the classroom teacher during the first week of school except for those children who are disabled.
  • added roughly 200 new management positions to DoDEA schools to perform administrative duties already assigned to principals and other employees (while reducing the number of positions directly working with students).
  • threatened to cut classroom aides from full-day kindergarten classes (after public uproar over this plan Dr. Miles then changed her mind and is now attempting to take credit for reducing kindergarten class sizes)

Our excellent school system is already suffering a severe blow to our morale and I fear that, if left unchecked, Dr. Miles will succeed in destroying something that took decades to develop: a world-class education system that enjoys the confidence and appreciation of the military community that we serve, staffed with well-trained, highly motivated education professionals.

I ask you to do anything you can to stop this from happening. Thank you, as always, for your efforts on behalf of our military families and especially DoDEA schools.

Sincerely,

(your name)