We survived!

The first week of this month Ronny attended a Computer Science conference in Alberta, British Columbia, Canada. He was gone for week and had lots of fun networking with fellow students, professors, and hopefully potential employers. During his time away Ron's sister Anjanette came for a few days to help out. And oh let me tell you, did she help out. She's awesome and wonderful for just being willing to come. Our kids adore her and were so excited she could make it. We are also appreciative to James for being such a supportive husband in our time of need! You rock too!

We had great fun that week and I was able to get the great majority of our Christmas cards and packages mailed off. The week went by smoothly and without any great emergencies! We could definitely tell the Lord was watching out for us. That same week was the week of the great floods here in the Northwest. We didn't pay much attention to them until the announcement came that I-5 was closed indefinitely. This is the highway Ronny would be coming home on. Thankfully the waters receded and the road crews were able to get the road back up and running in time for Ronny's homecoming!

Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of the time with Anjanette, however she did so you'll have to check out her blog.

Victory!

Its been a while since we have blogged but for good reason I think. Directly following Charley's baptism and Thanksgiving we finally received word from our school district regarding our kindergarten complaint. They have decided to comply with our three complaints and reverse and rewrite their kindergarten procedures. We informed the reporter who originally wrote a story about our process last June and she decided to write a follow-up story. This started the media frenzy we have had at our home the last two weeks. Ronny was interviewed for the News and to date we have had at least 6-7 articles written in various newspapers through-out the state and country about our story.

The State Attorney General's office has finally issued their opinion that no parents should have to pay for kindergarten (which was our hope from the beginning) and the State Board of Education Superintendent has told all districts in the state that they should no longer charge for full-day kindergarten and that they should consult their own attorney's regarding this practice.

This has all somewhat snowballed and escalated much faster than we had imagined. Yesterday we received an email from the office of our state representative who we asked for assistance earlier in our process. In the email we were informed the Senate Education Committee is convening a special hearing on our topic and has asked us if we would be willing to testify. We don't as yet have a definite time or place (although we assume it will be at the capital in Salem) so we will keep you posted on these events. If you are interested in our story you can Google Bjarnason Refund and find all kinds of articles. We have been doing this ourselves and keep finding new stories (some of which have quotes from us yet we never spoke with the reporter writing the story). You can find the complete story at our blog corvalliskindergarten.blogspot.com