Weekly Math Updates

September 19, 2005

Dear Friends,

    I hope that's not too presumptuous but I am grateful for your support in this important fight.  I must first thank the people that helped pay for the radio ads.  With your help, we just signed up over 100 families to our cause and hit 1.5% of the Alpine school district (ASD) being represented (we are glad to have other signatures outside our area as well). 

    Next, thank you if you listened to our ads and responded by signing the petition. At a cost of $450 for the ads, our cost per petition is under $5 each.  This means if all you new signers were to help keep the ads going by just paying $5, the cost of us finding you, we could continue to air these ads.  What we really need since we have 1.5% of ASD represented on our petition, is to have everyone commit to either contributing $15 or signing up 3 more families.  If we could all just do that level of signups, we'd have about 6% of the school district signed up on our petition.  I know not everyone can donate that much money, so if you can do more it will help dramatically.

    We are making progress in getting the word out.  Wednesday every state legislator will receive a copy of our summary flyer (attached if you signed the petition early and didn't get one) and so will the Governor and key people on his staff related to education issues.  Today I also mailed a copy to every state board of education member to ask them to raise the Utah math standards.  This flyer is an introduction to the problem in our area.  Please pass it on to everyone in Utah.  We've opened up the petition to let anyone in the state sign up and hopefully get the state board to stop approving weak curricula.

LATEST UPDATE

    The next link is a relatively new summary page and contains links to a couple of important "must-read" articles about Investigations woes elsewhere in the country.

http://www.oaknorton.com/imathstart.cfm

MY FORUM

    For those that feel like you want to post a statement for or against Investigations, I've been posting most comments on my website as you've sent them to me (pro and con), but I have now created a public forum for which anyone can post a statement and debate the issues (just watch the language--it's a family friendly site :) ).  I hope you'll post your own personal stories about crazy homework, or sad stories about what you've witnessed this program do to children.

http://www.oaknorton.com/forum

Sincerely,

Oak Norton

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