by Melanie Brunson, Acting Executive Director
This is my first report to you as acting executive director of ACB. Let me just touch on a couple of things now, and tell you at the outset that we will be giving you more detailed information as 2004 progresses.
First, I want to thank all of you for helping us, during the past year, to carry the ACB advocacy and legislative agendas through the halls of government. We could not have done what we’ve done without your help and I urge you not to lose heart. True, we have lost some skirmishes and some of those losses are disappointing. However, we are by no means out of the game! There are many more opportunities for us to carry the day, and we can succeed. For instance, the Senate is still considering IDEA reauthorization and their bill, though far from perfect, does contain the key elements of the Instructional Materials Accessibility Act. If these provisions are included in the final version of IDEA, they will greatly improve quality of education for blind students. We need to shepherd these provisions through the Senate’s final floor action and on to the conference committee.
IDEA reauthorization is just one of the important issues that we expect to include on another very full legislative agenda in 2004, and we can use all the help we can get to carry our message to Capitol Hill. Therefore, as you start making plans for the coming year, I hope they will include coming to Washington, D.C. in March. At our legislative seminar, we expect to consider a wide range of issues. Specific information about the dates and location should be available by the time you read this article, so call the ACB national office and get the particulars. We’d love to see you and to make sure that your representatives in Congress become better acquainted with ACB during the year ahead.
In the meantime, I want to close by wishing all of you a happy, healthy and rewarding new year.