Colleagues contribute to a portrait.

Staff members in the various departments at AASA share their expertise with our small contingent at the magazine regularly but often invisibly by offering their ideas for future stories and future contributors and passing along feedback collected on the road about published pieces.

In recent months, we've drawn substantially on our colleagues. Members of the Program and Resource Development Department, notably Ericka Plater Turner, Rebecca Roberts and Kelly Beckwith, helped us plan the magazine's January issue devoted to the connection between healthy bodies and healthy minds. Staff affiliated with the AASA Center for System Leadership have lent their best thinking to a number of issues in the last few years.

This month, we are indebted to Kathi Levin for sharing her wealth of knowledge about the role of the arts in K-12 education, pointing us to some of the leading advocates and policy researchers and generally helping us to shape the issue that appears in your hands. You might think she's a peculiar choice for informing the editors on the topic of the arts given that Levin spends most of her days dealing with the AASA Executive Committee and the Governing Board as the association's director of governance. Kathi, a painter, previously worked as director of the Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education Network.

Her article, "Bucking Trends: Expanding Arts" (page 18), details the efforts of a half dozen school districts to integrate the arts into the schoolwide curriculum, defying the narrowing effect of NCLB that constricts so many other schools.

A public thank you here to all AASA staff members for lending ideas big and small to the pages of The School Administrator. And a final note of gratitude for Amy Moss, our editorial assistant of the past seven years. She's chosen to be a full-time mother to a baby boy, and we know she'll be a success at that too.

Jay P. Goldman

Voice: 703-875-0745

E-mail: [e-mail]

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