A Message From Our President

Greetings!

Welcome to the Texas Educational Support Staff Association (TESA) website. As the only professional association for paraprofessionals working in education in Texas, TESA offers many benefits to our members. These include reduced rates for workshops and conferences, scholarships, awards, leadership opportunities, and training to become a certified instructor for TESA courses. We hold area workshops during the year, and in June our annual Summer Work Conference. Throughout the year we hold TESA Professional Enrichment Program (TPEP) courses that allow members to earn their Certified Educational Organization Professional certificate by completing a 60-hour training.

It is such an honor to serve as your TESA President for 2022-2023 school year. My theme for this year is We Are the Key to Our Success. Demonstrating goals to our success in everything we do. Our success comes in all sizes, they are not always big, but they are always ours. From arriving on time to a meeting to successfully achieving a college degree. Every time we succeed, we need to be proud of ourselves and celebrate. We play a big role in the success of TESA. Being a member of TESA comes with many perks, such as: networking with other members, sharing ideas, making friends across the state, and attending trainings that will help us in our professional growth so that we can enhance our educational institution. Remember, we each play a big part in the key to the success of TESA by contributing of our talents and skills. We, as members, also have the ability to enjoy and share everything TESA has to offer. By making friends across the state we enhance our networking capability and are able to help each other to better our professionalism for our educational institutions and better ourselves as a whole. Use your Key and see what wonderful success lies ahead for you.

In June we held our first in-person Summer Work Conference since 2019. It was wonderful to see friends, network and attend breakout sessions. During our business meeting, the membership approved a couple of changes. We now have a new more meaningful name for our certification program. The new name is less confusing and describes our program. It is now TPEP, TESA Professional Enrichment Program. The CEOP acronym renamed to Certified Educational Organization Professional. This new name will now encompass all educational paraprofessionals who work anywhere in an educational setting. I am really excited for our very first TPEP Chairman, Yvonne Smeltzer, to get started with classes and training with our new name. Keep your eye on the TPEP calendar for upcoming classes.

Our next Summer Work Conference 2023 will be in Bryan, Texas. Keep your eye on the website as Conference Chair, Teena Hancock, will be keeping us updated on all the volunteer opportunities available and how to be the Key to a Successful Conference.

President Elect Ofelia Barron and I, along with the Executive Board, are here to serve you and help as We Are the Key to Our Success.

Juliana Holmes, CEOP
TESA President 2022-2023