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