The Activist

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The Activist

Issues and Lobbying

Visit Lee's new blog, http://LeeAsks.blogspot.com. The content will target economics, politics, education, and social issues.

Lee has been an activist throughout her life. She believes in emailing, writing letters, making phone calls, attending meetings, and doing whatever is necessary in order to focus attention on a change that needs to be made for greater safety and a more positive world. Among the issues in which she has been and/or is currently involved are:

Children's Safety - Lee has been active in helping to stop exploitation for many years. She has lobbied to stop sex predators in prison from gaining access to information about kids.

Chess as a part of the curriculum - this is one subject we can teach that will tremendously help students to think at higher order levels. Lee taught herself to play chess as a child and played through college, winning quite a few games on her college campus in Atlanta. She has taught her children and grandchildren to play.

click here for America's Foundation for Chess

click here for Susan Polgar website

click here for David Weinstock's Chessmate site - David is very knowledgeable!

Why chess? These are the academic benefits: Children learn to

	plan - develop long range goals and implement those goals
	think in abstract terms - see patterns and apply them to various situations
	think quickly and make independent decisions
	problem solve
	focus on what is at hand
	analyze various options and select with a good reason
	multi-task
	visualize
	there are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the first 10 moves in chess - talk about choices!

Civil Rights - Lee marched for Civil Rights in the 1960s and continues to be active in promoting the equality of all individuals on our planet.

Dyslexia and Discalcula - Lee has been very active in identifying students with these brain glitches and once identifed, ensuring interventions are available. See Educator page for free PDF documents.

Equality in Education - It is vital that every child be given as many opportunities to learn as possible. Lee supports the ideas of No Child Left Behind and Inclusion as well as promotes accountability in education.

Equality for Women - This is another area in which Lee supports equality.

Voices of Youth - Young Women's World Forum

UNICEF - helping children around the world is Lee's passion. She has worked with Children United, founded by Belinda Ruggeri.

Global Education - Global SchoolNet

Juvenile Justice and Education - It is much cheaper to educate children than to pay for prison beds for them, especially considering the recidivism rate (return to prison after being released) is extremely high. We could send students through Harvard for what we're paying for prisons.

Lee is involved in the POW/MIA issue because her friend, Larron "Bucky" Murphy became MIA in 1970. For more info on Bucky and others, click here. Other sites to visit are:

All POW/MIA

National League of POW/MIA Families

US Govt. Database

Seatbelts on school buses - Lee has lobbied for this issue for many years and firmly believes a little money spent here will save lives. In Texas, seatbelts are coming. The 80th Texas Legislature passed a law requiring seatbelts and Gov. Perry signed the law in May, 2007.

Teacher incentives using growth rates and not just TAKS scores - Lee began lobbying for this in 2005 by emailing Texas state legislators and the Governor's office. Growth is a more equitable way to measure a teacher's effectiveness.