MARICOPA SCHOOL BOARD
Attention: Personnel
Maricopa Unified School District No. 20
45012 West Honeycutt Avenue
MARICOPA, ARIZONA 85239
Dear Board of Governors:
Thank you for renewing my teaching contract for the upcoming school year with a generous salary increase. Unfortunately, I cannot accept your kind offer due to serious personal health issues. My experience at Maricopa Wells Middle School has been memorable and instructive; if all too brief.
My work with students has reminded me of the fundamental importance of youth as I have interacted with students in search for both the meaning of life and concrete ways to go about living life. I am grateful to my Principal, Ms. Sharp, not only for giving me an employment opportunity, but for reminding us, as teachers, that our students need us as guides who are close at hand to provide not only equality of opportunity but equality of outcomes, so that all students can learn to trust authority figures as partners with them along the paths they are following. Ms. Sharp exemplifies her highly aesthetic values by exhibiting a wealth of warmth and consideration toward both students and staff.
I also wish to thank my evaluator and department director, Mr. Randy George, for his ethical leadership in developing meaningful instruction. I am grateful to Mr. George for reminding me of the tremendous potential for good in our students and the creative possibilities which we can unleash in our charges if well planned instruction can arouse in our young people a need for achievement based on an authentic faith in the future. To my delight, Mr. George’s notions of instructional planning reflect many of the public service values I learned as a youth from late family friend Sen. Barry Goldwater. Randy George truly exemplifies the conscience of educational excellence.
Among my collegues in the classroom, my Association President, Ms. Marie Bialarouki stands out as the first among equals in creating true collegiality among teachers, cultivating respect and consideration among teachers and classified workers; and in building bridges of understanding between employees, administration and the community. As someone who has worked as both a leader and staff member of the Association at the state and national level; I can tell you, Ms. Bialarouki is a leader we can believe in. In many ways, Ms. Bialarouki reminds me of former AEA President Penny Kotterman, when she was first elected as a delegate to our national convention as a local leader.
Finally, I wish to thank Ms. Carmen Lizaragga, the Wells Middle School attendance guru who always made me feel appreciated as a professional educator. No one at a middle school is busier than the head attendance clerk; yet Ms. Lizarraga was never to busy to share a word of encouragement in Spanish or English with the fluency of a professional language teacher. I also noticed that Ms. Lizarraga’s patience with students, parents and others is an example to all of us who occasionally felt harried by the overcrowding engendered by the rapid growth of the community.
I must tell you, as I leave: I have never worked with a better group of people in any public or private school. For my part, I will continue to pray for your community, as well as individual students, teachers and staff I have been inspired to remember in a special way. I pray especially that each of the young people I have worked with will encounter a Friend who will not disappoint him/her; someone he/she can always count on.
Many students at Maricopa Wells question the importance
of standing to say the pledge. Some will not participate despite having no religious or moral issue.
Please read:
John McCain's remarks about the
Pledge of Allegiance
As you may know, I spent five and one half years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. In the early years of our imprisonment, the NVA kept us in solitary confinement or two or three to a cell. In 1971 the NVA moved us from these conditions of isolation into large rooms with as many as 30 to 40 men to a room. This was, as you can imagine, a wonderful change and was a direct result of the efforts of millions of Americans on behalf of a few hundred POWs 10,000 miles from home. One of the men who moved into my room was a young man named Mike Christian. Mike came from a small town near Selma, Alabama. He didn't wear a pair of shoes until he was 13 years old. At 17, he enlisted in the US Navy. He later earned a commission by going to Officer Training School. Then he became a Naval Flight Officer and was shot down and captured in 1967. Mike had a keen and deep appreciation of the opportunities this country-and our military-provide for people who want to work and want to succeed. As part of the change in treatment, the Vietnamese allowed some prisoners to receive packages from home. In some of these packages were handkerchiefs, scarves and other items of clothing. Mike got himself a bamboo needle. Over a period of a couple of months, he created an American flag and sewed on the inside of his shirt. Every afternoon, before we had a bowl of soup, we would hang Mike's shirt on the wall of the cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance. I know the Pledge of Allegiance may not seem the most important part of our day now, but I can assure you that in that stark cell it was indeed the most important and meaningful event. One day the Vietnamese searched our cell, as they did periodically, and discovered Mike's shirt with the flag sewn inside, and removed it. That evening they returned, opened the door of the cell, and for the benefit of all us, beat Mike Christian severely for the next c ouple of hours.
Then, they opened the door of the cell and threw him in. We cleaned him up as well as we could. The cell in which we lived had a concrete slab in the middle on which we slept. Four naked light bulbs hung in each corner of the room. As said, we tried to clean up Mike as well as we could. After the excitement died down, I looked in the corner of the room, and sitting there beneath that dim light bulb with a piece of red cloth, another shirt and his bamboo needle, was my friend, Mike Christian. He was sitting there with his eyes almost shut from the beating he had received, making another American flag.
He was not making the flag because it made Mike Christian feel better. He was making that flag because he knew how important it was to us to be able to Pledge our allegiance to our flag and country.
So the next time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, you must never forget the sacrifice and courage that thousands of Americans have made to build our nation and promote freedom around the world.
You must remember our duty, our honor, and our country.
'I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'
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