86-Introduction and Overview National Partnership for FCS Educators with Jan Bowers, PhD, CFCS and Lori Myers, PhD, CFCS

<p>•  The National Partnership is a group of over 14 national level organizations that are all an integral part of family and consumer sciences education. All of them care about recruiting, preparing and supporting FCS educators. We found that these organizations were all doing great things among themselves for FCS ED, but we didn't have a way to organize and share the resources with each other so sometimes we had service duplication and service gaps. We formed the national partnership with the focus of working together to recruit, prepare and support FCS educators and to maximize the use of our resources. It has been really rewarding to work with all the different groups. We're working with K-12 teachers, post-secondary students and faculty, the Career and Technical Education Association, teacher educators, State Program Managers, AAFCS, FCCLA, FCS extension, and the National Coalition for Black Development. It has been really exciting and a great group of people to work with.  (6:22)</p><p>• We created a national map of FCS educator preparation programs and identified state certification offices, so individuals can see where to go to get certified in FCS education.  We provide scholarship and financial aid information and an online course repository, if individuals need to take online content courses for their certification. We also have a resource library that provides access to curriculum materials for quality instruction. Our webinar library has professional development opportunities on current FCS topics. These are just a few of the resources created by the National Partnership. It has been very successful in pulling together and providing free resources and tools to recruit, preparer and support FCS educators. (10:23)</p><p>•  We created the National Partnership website to be a one-stop shop where resources and tools could be posted in one place for FCS educators to use. We also added some additional information such as on the February 16th Family and Consumer Sciences Educator Day. This day of FCS celebra