The new teacher contract for Fairbanks North Star Borough School District has cleared its final hurdle after the school board voted Tuesday unanimously in favor.
The new teacher contract for Fairbanks North Star Borough School District has cleared its final hurdle after the school board voted Tuesday unanimously in favor.
Teachers and school support staff in Fairbanks are still working without union contracts. Negotiations between the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District with both the Fairbanks Education Association, FEA, and the Education Support Staff Association, ESSA have stalled and neutral, third-party negotiator will try to move talks forward.
Sandi Ryan, 69, is a lifelong reader. She reads mysteries, non-fiction biographies, political histories and, on the days she volunteers to proofread Braille translations at the Iowa Library for the Blind and Print Disabled, she reads a bit of everything.
Ryan, whose eyes were removed to treat a rare early childhood cancer called retinoblastoma, has been a patron of the library for nearly 60 years. When she was 10, her mom discovered the library’s services and they regularly ordered audiobooks, or talking books, which came on vinyl records they played in their Nevada, Iowa, home every weekend.
Ryan, who now lives in Ames, sometimes wishes she was 10 again because the library’s youth services have expanded so far beyond what she had access to as a kid. Today, its instructional materials center helps more than 100 Iowa students who are blind, have low-vision or a reading disability to access their schoolwork. It s also in the process of building a new area for children and you