From Fairfield County teachers

The following comes from Fairfield county teachers.  Time is short.  We need more letters & more phone calls. 

Okay, so three of us met for nearly two hours with a state rep on the Education Committee today, and there is quite a bit to report. 

First, the only real changes to the bill are likely to come in the next ten days -- yes, you heard it, ten days. Though the bill itself can come out to be voted on anytime between its departure from the Ed Committee and the start of May, when this session of the legislature ends, little of major import is likely to occur after the bill leaves the committee, which must happen no later than March 28. There will probably be some hearings and meetings of the committee; there may not.  

So any substantive changes we want to propose MUST be made as soon as possible. 
The people to contact, then, are the members of the Ed Committee. Here's a link to that list; you can check to see if a representative of your district is on the committee: (see below for an easy click)http://www.cga.ct.gov/asp/menu/MemberList.asp?comm_code=ED 

Because CT has some pretty impressive campaign finance laws, there is no legal way big money can influence elections of reps who are involved in a close race. But these reps might be especially vulnerable to pressure from their voters, you. So if you know that your representative or state senator had a close race last time around, might be worth getting a group of people to really pressure him or her. You can bet the bad guys are doing the same thing. 

The legislator also mentioned some names of key Ed Comm members we might want to focus on. It's really hard to tell at this point who is tightly allied with Malloy, and no one knows how the two committee chairs stand, but one, Andrea Stillman, is very tight with the state head of the AFT, Nancy Palmer. 

Stillman's email is http://www.senatedems.ct.gov/Cap/php-bin/form.mail/Stillman-mailform.php; a back door route to her might be through Nancy Palmer if anyone has any connections with her.
The other chair is Andrew Fleischman, who talked with teachers for quite some time earlier this week, perhaps signaling something good -- who knows. His email is: Andrew.Fleischmann@cga.ct.gov 

The others we were told you might want to focus on are Toni Harp, who is a very powerful senator, chair of the Appropriations Committee and a co-chair of the Governor's task force on the achievement gap, both big deals; Gary Holder-Winfield, and Jason Rojas, who is also on the achievement gap task force. A number of the names I've given you also are on the governor's task force on the ECS, basically studying how towns are allocated ed money. Finally, Auden Grogins on the Ed Comm is actually a Staples alum, and Toni Boucher is the leading Repub on the committee. She represents Wepo but seems pretty anti union. 
Here are the emails for the above members: 

Toni.Boucher@cga.ct.gov
http://www.senatedems.ct.gov/Cap/php-bin/form.mail/Harp-mailform.php
Auden.Grogins@cga.ct.gov
Jason.Rojas@cga.ct.gov
Gary.Holder-Winfield@cga.ct.gov
Bottom line is that no one has any idea how this will all play out. The committee may get hit with a slew of proposed amendments; it could vote straight up on the bill as written. It could be broken into smaller parts and voted on separately.