Short tidbits about distinctive activities spotted around the convention center in New Orleans during the AASA national conference.
Corona Hits 60 Years
It will not surprise anyone who is a regular at these AASA events that Californian Peter Corona is here in New Orleans for his 60th consecutive AASA national conference, having first attended in 1958 at the age of 28.
Corona, who served as superintendent in a handful of northern California school systems and now lives in Walnut Creek, has presented 39 times on various educational leadership topics at AASA conferences over that time.
He remains an educator, teaching a physical fitness class at a local college at age 88. He’s also writing another book. The title is From Adversity to Pride, and it tells the story of the first school district in California to go broke since the Great Depression.
Getting to the 2017 conference took a little bit of effort for Corona. He had planned a meeting with a family member on March 2, but he managed to get it rescheduled, freeing him to extend a distinctive streak that is unlikely to be broken.
Pope’s Confession
In his local welcome to the AASA Governing Board on Wednesday morning, Rogers Pope could not resist sharing an unfortunate coincidence.
The last time AASA held its national conference in New Orleans was 2006, just a few months after the devastating destruction of Hurricane Katrina. This year, AASA’s conference is following on the heels of widespread flooding during the middle of 2016 that has affected a wide swath of the New Orleans region.
Pope, the executive director of AASA’s Louisiana affiliate, was forced from his own home for several months because of the severe flooding, leading to some challenging communication between him and AASA staff leading up to this year’s national conference.
(Compiled by Jay P. Goldman, editor of Conference Daily Online.)