Love Your Schools

Let’s celebrate!  A recent survey conducted by  Niche Rankings, a national independent organization – found Canandaigua Academy and Canandaigua Middle School ranked 6th out of all schools in our local area.   Love Your Schools congratulates our local school board, administration, teachers, staff, students and of course YOU – local taxpayers who make it possible for our students to enjoy the quality programs in Canandaigua.

We thought this news matters because it points to the value we are getting as taxpayers.  It shows us why Love Your Schools even exists and why we could use your help.  There is a small core group of us keeping Love Your Schools going because we see the value in taking our time and effort to conduct advocacy to our local and state legislators reminding them why we need equitable funding for our school.  We also conduct educational efforts aimed at helping demystify the complex issues that affect our ability to keep the quality of our education as high as we can.

We could use your help as it is getting harder and harder to do this as other issues make it more and more difficult to get the necessary state funding we need.

What we are fighting for is what helped Canandaigua rank so highly.

Check it out — You can access The Best Public High Schools here.  The ranking provides a comprehensive assessment of the overall experience at public high schools in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. It uses data sourced from various government and public data sets, Niche’s own proprietary data, and 4,625,227 opinion-based survey responses across a variety of topics from 287,560 current students, recent alumni, and parents.

We hope that you’ll join us in celebrating our schools not just today – but each and every day!  Send and email to loveyourschools@gmail.com to get on our email list or please consider attending our next meeting January 15 6:30 at Wood Library in Canandaigua to learn how you can help us!

We did it! And yes, all of us at Love Your Schools are doing the HAPPY DANCE!

Thanks to all of you who supported the Love Your Schools Thanksgiving gratitude campaign by signing a postcard! We collected over 1250 postcards and distributed them to our local and State legislators.

Thanks to teachers, parents, students, staff and area residents our voices have been heard in Albany.  A special shout out to Roberta Bittel and 36 Canandaigua Academy students who hand delivered our postcards to our Governor Andrew Cuomo personally while they were in Albany right before Thanksgiving.

We were very excited to learn the students took postcards with them to their student government event in Albany and obtained signatures on over 300 postcards.  They combined these with the postcards we had collected and hand-delivered a nice big bundle to  Governor Andrew Cuomo personally while they were in Albany right before Thanksgiving.  Here is a photo of the group of students from across the state (somewhere in there are the 35 CA students who did our special delivery!)

The team at Love Your Schools is grateful for your support. Thank you for caring about our kids and helping us advocate for a more equitable school funding formula.  Go ahead and do your own Happy Dance!  You deserve it!

Join the Love Your Schools Advocacy Effort by signing our  online letter!

By signing this “thank you letter” your name will be printed out and delivered with the many post cards we are also getting signed.  It takes two minutes to sign – please do so now – and won’t you forward this to 5 friends to help us spread the word a meet our goal?

CLICK HERE

Thanks!

Love Your Schools is kicking off our latest educational advocacy effort this Saturday at Canandaigua Homecoming!  We felt it was the perfect time to show our gratitude for what our district offers and the role it plays in the success of our community.

We hope if you are attending Homecoming that you will stop by our Advocacy table and take a few minutes to sign a post card. We’ll take care of sending it to our lawmakers.

We want to express our thanks for the aid they did restore last year — and the work they are doing to help eliminate GEA and change the funding formula to be more equitable. And we want to encourage them to do more!

If you can’t be there Saturday to sign a card with us  – join our campaign by downloading a letter from our Downloads page on this site or Click Here ThanksgivingThankYouFlyerWEB final.

Click Here to find out your senators.  Click Here to find out your NY State Assembly Members.  Click here to get Dr. John B King mailing address — our  NY Commissioner of Education.

If you miss us at Homecoming – don’t worry – we’ll be setting up advocacy tables at upcoming school and community events between now and the week before Thanksgiving!

We are working on a gratitude social media campaign – so stay tuned for that!

Thanks for your time and effort.  Let’s keep the Pride Alive!  Educate. Advocate & Act!

Did you get one of these stickers today? If not – there is still time. They are free. All they cost is you taking time to exercise your right to vote and help us keep a quality education in your school.  You can also ensure that the Wood Library will continue to meet the needs of our community!

According to a PEW research study – voters fall into four categories: Regular voters; Intermittent voters; Registered but rare voters and Unregistered adults.  Regular voters make up of roughly 35% of the population — 20% of us don’t vote regularly and 23% of registered but rare voters make it to the polls most likely because they don’t know enough about what is up for vote (76% reported this as the reason).  And unfortunately 22% of our population are not registered so they can’t vote.

If you want more info on what the school budget vote is and the propositions go here.

Which category will you fall into today?  Please get out and vote!

We need all of us to ACT NOW.

Our state legislators are NOW FIRMING UP OUR STATE BUDGET. It was our impression that our Senators and Assemblymen/women were finally getting the message from us — that we need them to eliminate the Gap Elimination Adjustment quickly. We thought there was movement toward reinstating some of this aid to our schools. That is NOT the case.

On March 14 — it appears that the supportive rhetoric and promises of help have been broken, ignored or gutted by both the Senate AND the Assembly in their one-house budget bills.

Each house bill did precious little to restore the significant GEA deductions we all have had to bear over the past four years because they have introduced new proposals to channel that money elsewhere.

This has to stop and if you don’t do anything about it NOW – it won’t.

PLEASE click the links below and take a minute to call or email our Senator and Assemblyman NOW and ask them to NOT support this diversion of funds. We need some of that promised funding to come back to us – not go elsewhere.

Please – I urge you to do this now before you forget. You don’t have to attend a meeting – please just do this now. We can make a difference if our voices are heard.

CLICK HERE FOR A SAMPLE LETTER you can use for calls and e-mails/letters.

CLICK HERE for sample Tweets for your use.

CLICK HERE for contact information for state Senators.

CLICK HERE for contact information for state Assembly members.

THANK YOU!

  We want you to attend our next Love Your Schools Meeting – Feb 6th in the Ewing Room at the Wood Library in Canandaigua.

Come join us as we  brainstorm how we can improve our May Celebrate Schools Rally (this year it will be May 17th) as well as organize our communications plans for school budget information; voter registration outreach and firm up plans for two roundtable discussions being planned with two of our legislators right here in Canandaigua!  (Yes, they answered our letters and you’ll get an opportunity to sit across the table and have a conversation about what is important to you!)

SOOOOO.. Please put this date on your calendar — we NEED you!