TEXAS AFT LEGISLATIVE HOTLINE--FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2009   * Federal Funding for H1N1 Flu Response * Social-Studies Standards Still Under Political Pressure      Federal Funding for H1N1 Flu Response:  School nurses are on the front lines of the national and state public-health response to the H1N1 flu pandemic. Our national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers, is working to identify funding streams that can be used to support school nurses and other health specialists dealing with H1N1 flu.   For example, Congress has appropriated $260 million in grants to the states under a Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund in order to help. More than $20 million of that funding is earmarked for Texas.   While the bulk of the state's grant money will likely be used for vaccination purposes, the federal Centers for Disease Control also suggest using some of the funds for "community mitigation strategies include providing staffing to schools and other settings to screen students, employees, and visitors" and to purchase "masks for health care personnel," among other items. Texas AFT will be contacting state officials to see how much of the grant funding can be put to work in schools, possibly helping to meet the demand for sanitary supplies and protective equipment.   Social-Studies Standards Still Under Political Pressure:  Writing teams primarily made up of teachers are trying hard to do a professional job on the proposed rewrite of Texas curriculum guidelines for social studies. But the State Board of Education continues to make the task more difficult than it ought to be. Some ultra-conservatives on the 15-member elected Board see the current revision process as a chance to put their ideological stamp on the state's curriculum, and they are keeping up the pressure on the writing teams.   This week the drafters received new suggestions from Board members such as former Board chair Don McLeroy, who according to the Dallas Morning News called for a new standard mandating that teachers of U.S. government instruct their students in "the Judeo-Christian influence on the founding documents" of the nation. (McLeroy was ousted as chair of the Board last spring by vote of the Texas Senate, which refused to confirm his appointment to the chair by Gov. Rick Perry in light of his stated determination to "politicize" the work of the State Board on curriculum, among other provocations. However, McLeroy remains an active member of the Board.)        Other Board members aligned with McLeroy offered parallel arguments for a new standard governing the teaching of U.S. history, echoing the argument of one of their appointed "expert" curriculum reviewers, Peter Marshall, an evangelical minister from Massachusetts with no teaching expertise. Marshall heads up an organization that describes itself as "dedicated to helping restore America to its Bible-based foundations."   Attempts to skew the process to fit the ideological preferences of the ultra-conservatives have occurred in the meetings of the writing teams themselves, as Texas AFT witnessed directly today in the case of the history team. Discussion of drafting issues in that group was repeatedly driven off track by a "citizen member," with no teaching experience, who inveighed, among other things, against U.S. involvement in international organizations, against anti-discrimination laws, and against the legacy of the social-reform legislation enacted as part of the Great Society under President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.   Texas AFT is keeping close watch on this often-dismaying process of curriculum revision at the State Board, which will discuss the latest draft of the proposed standards next month and will vote on a final version by March. At risk of infuriating the "ultra" faction and its allies even more, Texas AFT will continue to keep you posted and will offer tools you can use to make comments of your own on the curriculum-revision project, in furtherance of the ideal of democratic participation in public policy-making--another one of those alarming reform ideas of the 1960s.