Kansas Citizens for Science celebrates 10th anniversary

From KCFS President, Harry McDonald

Unbelievably, Kansas Citizens For Science just celebrated the 10th anniversary of our founding. We remain at the forefront of the struggle to promote science and good science education.

Looking ahead to 2010, we will find ourselves once again facing the prospect of losing control of the State Board of Education. Five of the 10 BOE seats are up for grabs in the elections. With numerous state races garnering most of the attention, KCFS will need to work all that much harder to ensure that science and science education are on voters' minds and that voters know where the candidates stand on science-related issues.

Now, the following will catch you up on what we've been doing the past year:

At our annual meeting in November, we elected the following officers, Harry McDonald - President, Cheryl Shepherd-Adams - Vice-President, Keith Miller - Treasurer, and Charlotte McDonald - Secretary. In addition, we welcomed Gene Garman as a new board member.

• Individual board members accepted invitations to speak at a number of events locally, across the state and nationally.

• KCFS retained its presence at KATS Kamp, the state science teachers' convention.

• KCFS continued its support of the Hays Science Cafe’ and organized a new Science Cafe’ which will begin in Johnson County in January.

• We adopted priorities to increase activities in non-science standards issues and function as a science resource; continue outreach to teachers; emphasize the teaching of established science in all our activities; and to emphasize the Year of Science 2009 in all our activities.

• Our President registered as a lobbyist for Kansas.

• We created several new flyers.

• Members monitored state board and state legislature activities that could affect science education, both in Kansas and across the nation.

• We continued to network with like-minded organizations across the country.

• KCFS co-sponsored science-related events in communities across the state, including several celebrating the Year of Science.

As always, our greatest influence came as the result of individual efforts of members acting in behalf of our shared values.

The KCFS website has been static recently, but the new year brings hope for change. A friend of KCFS has volunteered to clean up the site and keep postings up-to-date. The plan is for you to be able to go to our website, www.kcfs.org, and find out the latest news and happenings.