From Paul Clark, SASAF President, February, 2013
Hello Schutzites!
Some of you may know that I was cornered into accepting the Presidency of the SASAF at its 2012 membership meeting last July – congratulations and good luck with that! I think this was as much out of my guilty feeling from having done very little over the years to contribute to the organization, as knowing how much fun it would be to have an opportunity to get to know you all better now in our latter years and have the excuse to get reacquainted with the friends I loved back in those old Schutz days. (For those who don’t know me, I attended Schutz as a day student starting mid-year in 1960 (4th grade) through 1964, and then as a boarder for my 9th and 10th grades, leaving to return stateside in 1966.)
Although you have heard nothing from us – the board – I take this opportunity to let you know that we have been hard at work on your behalf, including thinking of some new things that we might suggest to you in the future to enrich our time together and get more alumni involved by adding new activities at our reunions and in other ways. So with that said, allow me to report to you on what we have been working on.
First, we have revamped the committee system into two standing committees. One, the Budget and Finance Committee, is chaired by Steve Jamison, our treasurer. This committee will be responsible for managing our accounts and budgeting, dues collections, and working on any new fund-raising that we might see as being worthwhile and realistic for some new activities.
The second is the Communications and Community-Building Committee, chaired by Carmen Rosser. This committee has a lot on its plate, starting with finalizing a communications plan that was put together under the guidance of Marina Moraitis last summer. This plan has been posted on our website (schutzalumni.org) for your reading pleasure and comment. The committee has also considered ways that we might modify our reunion planning so that more Schutzites have easier access to meetings, including moving our annual get-togethers to different parts of the country. We want your thoughts and suggestions on this question, especially.
While on that topic, we are going to hold the 2013 meeting at Carmen’s home in South Carolina just outside Spartansburg in the northwestern corner of the state, over the weekend of July 19-21. We hope to see many of you there, but we also plan to conduct at least the formal meetings in a webex mode so that those of you who can’t be with us physically can join-in by internet.
The board has also approved funding to engage a design specialist to help us work on improving the website, including making it easier to handle dues notification and payment tracking ($20/year, people – cheap! cheap!), making the alumni database more accessible and functional, and to facilitate posting news, reminiscences and other items by individual alumni in some way that is easy to search and find. We hope the new and improved website will be up and running by the time of this summer’s meeting. Again, all suggestions most welcome!
You should also know that, at its meeting last July, the membership voted to hold the next Grand Reunion, in 2015, again at the 4-H Center in Washington D.C. An ad-hoc committee was appointed in July to work on these plans.
Speaking of which, we all feel that getting new blood involved in our organization means finding ways for more people to contribute to our programs, and thinking about our programs, and so I want to stress that we as the board hope to hear from those of you who want to help us work on new ideas and be part of informal committees that we create down the road to take the lead on these things. Please, let us hear from you when that time comes! From time to time, we will post information on the website discussing such ideas as we think are worth exploring, which we hope will stir your imagination and interest.
As for enriching lives, I had the good fortune as part of a business trip to visit Schutz again in 2006, after a 40-year absence, and I have posted on the website my ‘trip report,’ with photos, from that experience.
We all have many memories from our time at Schutz, and I don’t think that any of us will ever be able to fully describe why that experience was so important to us. Schutz was, and still is, a great story, and I am also happy to report to you that Charlotte Gelzer and Alice Meloy are hard at work completing the Schutz history project which I can tell you has involved an immense effort by these two individuals, having seen what they have done to date. Our thanks go to them for their heart-felt dedication and the hard work they have put into this project.
That’s all for now, and keep your eye on our website for more details forthcoming on the 2013 meeting this coming July in South Carolina.
Paul Clark (’68)