Dear Jaleh, 
 
Best wishes as you move on. As a former adult educator and current administrator of adult literacy with staff development duties I have found the information available through your efforts very helpful. LINCS is a valued resource in my office. It is so unfortunate that our field of education is not valued more. 
 
Thank you for your many efforts to support those of us in the field. 
Laurie Bargstedt
 
 
 

JALEH.BEHROOZI at nifl.gov wrote:

Dear Colleagues and Friends;

My last day at NIFL will be October 1, 2004. I started working at NIFL eleven years ago with much enthusiasm and hope, and I end it with great pride in our many achievements and some anguish over the uncertainties and challenges that remain. 

With Andy Hartman’s leadership and a dedicated team of professionals—my colleagues Sondra Stein, Alice Johnson, Carolyn Staley, and my very dear friend Susan Green, we enthusiastically embraced the literacy field’s vision reflected in Literacy Act of 1991 and created NIFL’s major projects—EFF, Bridges to Practice, NIFL policy efforts and LINCS—which we thought were fundamental for our field. In our effort, we had the backing and support of the adult literacy advocates and many practitioners. The outcomes indicated we were right in our assessments of the needs as well as our approach of involving practitioners in the field in developing these projects. LINCS was created with great input and support from practitioners nationwide, who took ownership in what needed to be done and made it an integral part of their work. 

LINCS, as a national network of literacy practitioners, professional developers, and trainers, as well as a communication tool and an information retrieval teaching and learning resource on the Internet, has been serving the literacy community in numerous ways. One of my very dear colleagues, David Rosen, told me last week that he cannot imagine the literacy field without LINCS nor the direct impact LINCS has had on his own work. Today, LINCS includes over 200 people working in different capacities to make the system useful for the field. It includes more than 45 state agencies partnering with LINCS through Regional Technology Centers, 11 high-quality special collections with over 70 literacy field experts working to select high-quality resources for them, a national library team of catalogers who are using LINCS standards and criteria to populate the LINCS databases, 14 discussion lists with several thousand participants, and a technical team of qualified professionals who !
have been serving NIFL and LINCS for the past several years. Moreover, the newly relaunched America’s Literacy Directory (ALD), an addition to LINCS, is another foundational infrastructure that is the only comprehensive national ABE and literacy directory providing access to programs for learners, volunteers, and potential funders. 

I know there is a lot more to be done to enrich the goal of a fully literate society, and we as a field still have a long way to go to ensure that we are providing quality services for our learners. However, over the past few years our achievements have been undermined and the direction and worth of adult education questioned. I strongly believe that despite these attempts, as educators and practitioners, we must take pride in the systems we have built and continue our work toward enhancing the quality of the literacy outcomes and practices. 

Leaving NIFL was a very difficult choice, and I leave with wonderful memories of our work together. I am also very grateful for the opportunity that was given to me and thank you all for being a part of this great endeavor. LINCS belongs to the literacy community and all who have helped build it and the many who benefit by it.

Jaleh Behroozi Soroui 
National LINCS Director 
National Institute for Literacy 
1775 I street, Suite 730 
Washington DC, 20006 
Phone: 202/233-2039 
FAX: 202/233-2050 

www.nifl.gov/lincs 
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Laurie E. Bargstedt 
Coordinator of Adult Literacy and Incarcerated Education 

HFM BOCES Career and Technical Center 
212 Co. Hwy. 103, Johnstown, NY 12095 
518-762-4633, ext.158 fax 762-9361 

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
-Ghandi


		
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