A Century of Service Looking back at 100 years of member communications By Kelly Hagen, NDU Communications
A century ago, the North Dakota State Teachers Association mailed a copy of its first-ever periodical, The Associated Teacher, to every teacher in the state. The association’s first executive secretary, R.L. Brown, had begun work as field secretary for the Teachers Welfare Committee on Jan. 1, 1921, concentrating on membership drives and planning for district and state conventions. By November, he added “editor” to his list of job duties. “A monthly bulletin was started a year ago last month,” he wrote in a report to the Executive Committee in late 1922. “The purpose of this experiment was primarily to bring to the teachers of the state and the members of our Association the information we wanted them to have. I feel the experiment has proven this to be a fundamental necessity if we are to do the work we should.” One hundred years later, a lot has changed. For one, the Association would change its name to the North Dakota Education Association, and it would grow 4
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to represent all educators in our public schools, including K-12 teachers, administrators, education support professionals, and even faculty and staff at our public universities. Membership would steadily grow, especially in the first half of the 1920s. Enrollment in 1922 stood at 3,628 annual members, and that number grew to 4,488 by the end of the decade. Membership numbers fluctuated across the years, until seeing its largestever enrollment after 2013, when a Representative Assembly of members of the NDEA and the North Dakota Public Employees Association voted to merge and form North Dakota United. This new organization, the state’s union for public educators and employees, currently represents approximately 11,500 preK-12 teachers, ESPs, higher education faculty and staff, city, county and state employees, retired workers and college students of education. What hasn’t changed is the importance of joining your union.
