Dear Minister Eggen and Premier Notley, With only a few short weeks before the new school year, I contacted your Press Secretary Nolais to inquire about the status of the promised meeting with you. Although your press secretary along with half a dozen other staff including the Wildrose Shadow Education Minister Mark Smith were there the day you verbally agreed to meet again, Nolais bluntly replied that you did not promise a meeting. May I remind you Minister Eggen that when we briefly met on June 24th after our team had tabled 3000 signatures against the Inspiring Education initiative, you agreed to meet again in July because the short encounter then did not permit a thorough discussion of our concerns. Unfortunately, your other engagements in July took priorities over our children’s education, but I did not begrudge that we were deferred 'til August. I and our team, in the meantime, were able to meet with some of your kind staff (Nolais, Hambrook,Panwar et al) on July 20th. Neither the Deputy Minister Rosen, the Chief of Staff Blanchette nor yourself were present at such an important meeting wherein a bright and articulate young student made a powerful statement illustrating how Inspiring Ed had negatively impacted her. Despite your absence, I held onto hopes that your highly capable staff would listen, understand, and subsequently relay the urgency to finally put a stop to the Inspiring Education initiative and the discovery math curriculum by the new school year. However, there is rumour that you are surreptitiously seeking to waste hundreds of thousands of taxpayers' dollars to hire new staff to carry out the Inspiring Ed "vision". This blatantly unscrupulous step in the face of opposition by thousands of parents, students and teachers and the dismissive email from your staff is a slap in the face from you Minister Eggen and Premier Notley. As a medical doctor and mother of three young children whose future are at stake, I am sick and tired of being dismissed by the government and your bureaucracy. I don't care for games and least of all, ignorance, complacency and arrogance. If you don’t care about what this one mother has to say about the state of our children’s education under this Inspiring Ed experiment, then you better care about what the nearly 20,000 Albertans have to say through their united stance against the direction of education in Alberta. When many of those are doctors, dentists, nurses, experienced teachers, lawyers, engineers, scientists, accountants, business leaders, etc --- a large cross-section of highly educated individuals with key roles in the health, justice, infrastructure, scientific and literary advances in society, you better give a damn. And if you don’t give a damn about all those Albertans, then you better start giving a damn about the children themselves --- my children and the nearly 600,000 other children whose future are at stake under this misguided and ill-informed un-inspiring discovery/inquiry-based educational experiment. I had high hopes that your NDP government would be different, but so far, the only difference is that at least former Education Minister Jeff Johnson did finally listen and effected some positive changes by the school year. Will you meet with us urgently to prove that you can do better? Will you move mountains for all our children's sake, to protect the quality of our children's education, re-establish our world class education and preserve academic excellence? It’s time for you to give a damn. Kindest regards, Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies, MD Calmar, AB