Current Af F A E Rs

Florida Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired

Fall 2009                                                                                                                                                        Vol. 26, No. 1

Dear Members:

The current economic crisis affecting our country is also being felt in our school districts, in our community rehabilitation programs, at DBS and within AER and FAER.  Every organization that we represent has made some cutbacks.  From personnel to travel expenses, every organization we represent has been forced to make some tough decisions.  Unfortunately, the boards of AER and FAER have had to make some difficult decisions too. 

AER has needed to increase membership dues and reduce some of its offerings.  Your FAER board has held many conference call meetings this year discussing how we can rebound from our losses in the market and from our rising conference expenses.  For years, we were fortunate to increase our financial stability under the wise management of our lifetime treasurer Gene Newcomb.  We have been able to offer yearly conferences and quarterly newsletters without increasing expenses to our members.  We have also been able to offer scholarships to college students studying to become TVI’s. 

With regards to the newsletter, the board voted to resume the quarterly newsletter sending it via email.  Feel free to forward the newsletter to coworkers who may not be current members.  To continue to cut costs, most of our communication will be through the FAER list serve managed by AER and through our website www.flaer.org.

With regards to our annual Fall Conference, the board has been weighing our options for being able to host a "cost effective" FAER conference for our members and it just doesn't seem feasible for this year. We were extremely limited in the scheduling because most vendors were also participating in the three other conferences in November....AER Regional Conference, Getting in Touch with Literacy, and ATIA in Chicago.  With feedback from agencies and school districts stating that their travel budgets had been cut and with our limited conference resources, the board made the difficult decision to cancel this year’s conference.

We are exploring other options for offering CE's to our members through existing workshops such as Weekends with the Experts, O&M meetings, and possibly some regional meetings.   At our next board meeting we will discuss offering the certification test in conjunction with one of those meetings.   Watch your newsletter and the FAER website for more information.

We will be able to offer a scholarship for a college student working on a degree in our field.  Our scholarship chair, Karen Kane has recently updated the application packet.  The scholarship application can be found on our website at www.flaer.org. 

Although this is well past due, we would like to thank all who attended and supported our Fall Conference last year.  We would especially like to thank all of the very knowledgeable speakers who gave of their time to share with their colleagues.  Overall, the feedback on each speaker was very positive.  We are fortunate to have so many knowledgeable professionals in our State, many who have also spoken at national conferences. 

As Congress and the country continue to debate healthcare reform, we need to contact our Florida leaders.  The following is an excerpt from an email by AFB’s Director of Public Policy, Mark Richert:

To meet the needs of Americans living with vision loss, health reform legislation must:

• allow orientation and mobility specialists, vision rehabilitation therapists, and low vision therapists to be full participants in the professional team providing specialized services to people with vision loss by establishing unambiguous Medicare (or other national minimum benefit plan) reimbursement for the services such professionals

Tell Congress that the vision loss community will not endorse health care reform legislation that fails to address any of these critical needs. We must withhold our formal support for health reform legislation unless and until it passes the test our field has set for it, namely full treatment of each of the three policy priorities to which our field is committed. Half measures and vague language must not be allowed to substitute for the very real changes in health care access and quality needed by people living with vision loss.

The addresses for Florida Congressional leaders are included in this newsletter.  We encourage you to write to your Florida leaders and urge them to include these important issues in health reform legislation.  Finally, I would like to welcome to our board Sylvia Perez, executive director of the Lighthouse of Pasco, representing rehabilitation; Kay Ratzlaff, coordinator of instructional resource services at FIMC, as our President Elect; and Suzanne Dalton and Donna Ross, as legislative co-chairs.  Thanks to each one of you who are FAER members.  We have a strong state chapter because of your participation. 

Sincerely,

Sheryl Brown

President