Updates about the SOS March and a related two-day educators' conference in Washington D.C., this weekend have been all over Twitter and Facebook for months now.
"The Save Our Schools March is being held in response to recent destructive 'reform' efforts which have undermined our public educational system, demoralized teachers, and reduced the education of too many of our children to nothing more than test preparation," reads the event website.
The Save our Schools March & National Call to Action runs July 28-31 and centers on the march in Washington, that will attract everyone from actor Matt Damon to edu-pundits Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol and many more.
There will also be thousands of educators from around the country, including from Wisconsin. Based on the tweets I've seen there will be folks from Madison, Lake Geneva and other Wisconsin locales.
According to a source, MTEA president and Rethinking Schools co-founder Bob Peterson is attending and running a Rethinking Schools workshop while there. At least a couple dozen teachers are expected to attend from Milwaukee and the Madison Teachers Inc. reportedly has a couple buses headed east to the rally.
About 10 Milwaukee teachers have RSVP'd on Facebook for a meetup on Saturday morning in Washington. The rally begins at noon at the Ellipse and marches over to the White House, where it is expected to arrive at 1:30 p.m.
Among the many speakers on tap at the D.C. rally is what the SOS website describes as "A Wisconsin education delegation, led by Amy Mizialko."
Mizialko is an MPS district mentor and former teacher.
Related events are taking place across the country, in cities like St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Seattle, among others. A rally in support of the march is being held at the State Capitol in Madison on Saturday at 3 p.m. That event has about 200 Facebook RSVPs at the moment.
An SOS Film Festival is already underway in D.C. screening films like "Race to Nowhere" and "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman."
It will be interesting to see if President Obama or Secretary of Education Arne Duncan show up in support of public education this weekend, too.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
