I’ll be reporting more on what happened during our annual membership meeting we had this past weekend as I get the time. For now, here is the President’s Report Joe Wolf submitted:
I would like to spend just a few minutes talking about what we have done this year and our goals for the coming year.
We certainly have come a long way in this, our first year. Quite a bit of organizational groundwork was done, which now enables us to concentrate on the work at hand: promoting and defending science in Florida. We are now officially a not-for-profit corporation. We’ve written and adopted corporate Bylaws that govern the way we operate. We’ve created a brochure that introduces our organization so that we can spread the word about what we are all about. We have a web site, blog and message board along with our e-mail listserv. We’re establishing contacts in the media and slowly getting our name out there. In other words, the foundation is down and we’re ready to build!
We’ve also made alliances with a number of progressive organizations in Florida, not to mention sister organizations working to improve science education across the nation. The most important alliance so far is probably with the Florida Association of Science Teachers. We hope to elect at least one member of their board to our board today.
We’ve also written a strategic plan, which I hope we adopt today. That plan will give us guidance as to where we are going.
Most importantly we have started a project to rewrite the Florida state science standards. We know from other states and from some experiences with the current state standards that this will be a hotly contested issue. The opponents of good science education are gearing up for a fight. We decided that our best strategy is to be proactive.
Where are we going? Assuming we adopt the strategic plan today, we will be working on the following next year:
- We will continue to work on and complete our project to write new state science standards. We will present these to the appropriate state personal in Tallahassee and then work to get them adopted.
- We will begin a project to educate decision makers such as legislators and other state and local officials as to the importance of science, what it is and why it is important to them and their constituency. We will need to be careful of state lobbying laws when we do this and to recruit some experienced people in north Florida to help.
- We will begin a program to educate the public on what truly is science and what is not. A major part of this will be discussing evolution: what it is, what it’s used for, and why it’s important.
- Part of the effort to improve science teaching must be the quality and training of teachers. Good science teaching only comes from good teachers. We feel there are other organizations that have been working in this area and we wish to join with them in this effort.
- We also want to continue to make alliances with progressive organizations around the state to improve all aspects of science education in Florida.
Summary:
It would have been easy for our organization to become an anti-Intelligent Design pro- Evolution organization. But we chose to be positive and proactive and to work to improve all science education.
Joe Wolf
President, Florida Citizens for Science
November 11, 2006
