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Half Price Offer Ends At Midnight!
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 First TED-like Mini-Talks Announced for AERO Conference
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On Friday Morning, June 29th, we will kick off the AERO conference with six TED-like mini-talks. This has become one of the most popular features of the AERO conference.
The first announced
mini-talk will be by North Star founder Ken Danford. North Start is a pioneering homeschool resource center, but much, much more than that. It has been so powerful and successful that nine similar centers have now been created with their help and many more are in the planning stage. It could be argued that this is the wave of the future.
Talks by students and graduates of North Star have been presented at AERO conferences and have always been mind-blowing. Here's a link to one from our video archive.
The second announced
mini-talk will be by Maysaa Basna, founder of
Pono, a democratic school in West Harlem, Manhattan. Pono was started as an outdoor school and maintains strong elements of that approach. Maysaa was a graduate of AERO's School Starter Course.
We will premier a documentary about Pono students "that will be submitted to film festivals about a survey that the children have completed on the presidency." Some people may remember that they were filming part of that at last year's conference. People who went to their workshop were stunned by the young students' articulateness and insights.
Register at the early bird rate
here!
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2 for 1 Half-Price Offer Ends At Midnight!
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Some of you have discovered that we've been trying out some special offers on Facebook to promote the AERO Conference. We're doing that again right now, just for 24 hours and we are including you in on this one.
We were very pleased with the result of our post to our Facebook followers last week. It brought us many new registrants. This week if you can get a new AERO Conference registrant, someone you know or one of your Facebook followers, for example, you can use a special coupon to register for the AERO conference at half price. So that's two for the price of one, at the early bird rate! We're only doing this for 12 more hours in order to continue the momentum building for this terrific AERO conference. As soon as we get to half full, prices will go up to the current $225 early bird to the regular $250 rate, still very reasonable for such a long and in depth conference. But for 12 hours you can register at $112.50 if you can get another to register at the same price.
Just use the coupon code FACEBOOK at checkout.
You can register here.
AERO's 15th Conference, in our 30th year, will be here in NY from June 28 to July 1st. This one will be special and back to our roots.
The theme is the Spectrum of Democratic Education, and Henry Readhead, grandson of Summerhill founder A.S. Neill will be a keynote, along with public democratic education pioneer Dave Lehman and famed author and nutritionist Dr. Joel Fuhrman. Also presenting will be Clonlara School founder and home education expert Pat Montgomery.
Many schools and programs plan to attend and some have already registered, such as Raw Learning in Virginia, Houston Sudbury, Ridge and Valley Charter School, Alpha II in Toronto, Self-Design, Makarios Community School, TX, Clonlara School, MI, Pono Learning, NY, Summerhill School, Agile Learning Center, Education for Life, Self-Directed Path, Awareness Through the Body, All Children Great and Small, The Circle School, Rivers and Roads, and The Farm School, TN. Also Varvara of the St. Petersburg Park School in Russia is planning to come!
But it may end at any time without warning.
We also have shared room and single room package deals available.
Register at the early bird rate
here .
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Don't Let My Classmates' Deaths Be in Vain
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Related: See AERO original broadcast from Columbine massacre and Chris Mercogliano article below.
By
CHRISTINE YARED
Parkland, Fla. - I am a freshman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. In the days since the attack that killed 17 people here, I have continued replaying those terrifying moments in my head.
It began when a fire alarm went off just before school was supposed to end. We thought nothing of it. People in my finance class had already left, and I grabbed my backpack to evacuate. The next thing I knew I heard people running and shouting, and my teacher yelling at us to get back in the class.
I sprinted to her closet and crammed myself against shelves filled with papers and binders. The rest of the closet filled up with the other students. We thought it was an active shooter drill. It wasn't.
Read the rest here. |
| Parkland Students Want to Know: Will the Shooting at Their School Change Gun Laws? |
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Students and community members grieving the largest mass shooting at an American high school express a common sentiment that's as much a challenge as it is a prediction: Nothing will change.
The prediction: Politicians who right now express sympathy and call for safer schools will follow a familiar pattern after school shootings by letting what happened in the South Florida community fade from the headlines without making meaningful changes to gun laws.
The challenge: Don't let that happen this time.
read the rest here. |
| WATCH: Parkland High School Shooting Survivor Emma Gonzalez's Powerful Speech Demanding Gun Control |
In Florida, as funerals continue for the 17 people killed in at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida, survivors of the school shooting have launched an unprecedented youth-led movement to demand gun control. At a rally on Saturday, survivors of the school shooting demanded politicians stop accepting money from the National Rifle Association. For more, we broadcast the full speech of Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Watch the speech here. |
AERO Podcast: The Columbine Shooting.
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Nineteen years after the Columbine shooting tragedy we have just had yet another horrific school shooting. I happened to be in Colorado at the time of the Columbine shooting, at a public alternative school in the same district. In fact, the school was locked down because of it.
At the time I had a weekly national radio show on the TalkAmerica Network. I interviewed Arnie Langberg, founder of the Jefferson County Open School on my radio show. If you click the link at the bottom you can listen to that show and two others made while I was in the Columbine district.
In an article in our Education Revolution Magazine in 1999 I said,
"I managed to reach Arnie Langberg, the founder of Jefferson County Open School. He came on my show to give his take on what had happened at Columbine High School. He said he believed that one of the biggest problems was the anonymity of students at big schools: "This couldn't happen at an alternative school because their small size encourages closeness
between adults and children, and because the schools have conflict resolution
strategies," explains Arnie."
Also below is a lengthy and incisive article written at the time by Chris Mercogliano of Albany's Free School. See if you agree with me that Chris' article is even more relevant today!
Listen to the podcast from Columbine
here.
The Teachings of Tragedy
By Chris Mercogliano
Will we remember where we were the day the Littleton massacre went down, like those of us from a generation ago when JFK was shot? I hope so. Though it's only the latest in a string of school mass murders, we must make this tragedy the one that freezes time long enough for the information encrypted in the event to be decoded. We have got to get the message. Enough is enough. So much has already been said and written about the tragedy. The Tom Brokaws and the Times and Newsweek' quickly turned it into the Littleton Show. For days afterwards the Denver dailies featured entire special sections on the killers and their victims. But as the immediacy begins to fade, will the public discourse move beyond the hype, the hysteria, the scapegoating, the layers of denial into some deeper understanding that might help prevent another such disaster? If history is our guide, then there's little reason to be optimistic. How does one come to terms with the causes of such an abominable event?
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Several New Job Openings
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Links and Calendar
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Links
Ongoing
Calendar
Please send us feedback on this issue. also, we would like to have more articles written by AERO members and about AERO school and organizations.
Thank you for your ongoing support. With
your help
, we will make learner-centered alternatives available to everyone!
In Service,
Jerry Mintz
Executive Director
Alternative Education Resource Organization
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