Happy New Year fellow administrators, members, and supporters of NHAE, I am hopeful that 2021 will be better than 2020. We know that in a week we will have new leadership in Washington and, if confirmed, a Latino Secretary of Education. These are very welcomed changes to our membership and the communities we serve. This change cannot come soon enough as many of us witnessed on television the siege of the seat of democracy last week by extremists who have bought into disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. As leaders of schools many of us have as a goal educating our students to become productive and contributing members of society. To do so we must ensure that our students have a strong foundation in social science and civics education. In addition, with the prevalence of social media platforms and news media outlets online, we must teach our children how to check sources and understand how to identify when information being shared is not factual and has a nefarious purpose. Not doing so will lead even more of our future voting citizens down a dangerous path. This is an important part of providing our communities a quality education, which is one of the goals of this organization. As a social science endorsed educator, I cannot stress this enough. As we continue supporting our teachers with providing our students a quality education in a remote setting, we must now prepare to support our teachers with doing this in a different and more challenging context - one in which they may have students both in front of them in the classroom and at home simultaneously. I hope today’s presentation , here at NHAe, helps provide us some clarity on how to best support our teachers for this scenario and lay out for them a foundation for success with this new teaching model. We know as leaders we must face these challenges through the lens of adaptive leadership and engage all stakeholders to find solutions to this constantly evolving context caused by the current pandemic. Once again, I am hopeful we can do that as long as we support each other throughout this crisis. Please continue advocating for the communities you serve, and most of all remember to take care of yourselves. Dr. Antonio Acevedo President of the Network of Hispanic Administrators in Education
January13, 2021