In addition to announcing the 2013 award to Massachusetts' Anne Ziaja, the Kevin Harrington Award selection committee gave special recognition to Janet B. Goehring, the longtime leader of NCSL's America's Legislators Back to School program who died prematurely this past spring. Here's a video honoring Jan presented by Massachusetts Senate President Pro Tem Richard Moore, a past president of NCSL, at the Legislative Summit in Atlanta last month:
In addition to this celebration of Jan's life, I also recently received a letter from Olga Batishcheva, an alumna of the 2009 international Legislative Fellows Program who worked with Jan and me at NCSL and is now director of the Center for Democratic Leadership in Ukraine. Olga enclosed a book of articles and papers from a conference on civic education that the Center had sponsored. Olga says,
At the end of the book there is a short essay compiled from some postings by Jan Goehring in The Thicket that I translated into Ukrainian. At the end of the 2012-13 adcademic year, we also organized a competition among students on the best student research paper devoted to issues in civic education. This year we named the competition in honor of Jan.... This is my small tribute to Jan's memory.
Thank you for this touching memorial, Olga. Jan's reach in democracy education was truly global.
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