I believe that successes were achieved in every area and again feel privileged to have served you.

The 2002-2003 SASFAA year

Elected Board Members
Each elected board member plays a major role in the association. Although the President oversees the board, it’s the other board members that perform most of the duties.

Debra ‘Dee’ Talley has served the office of Secretary well this year. She not only kept the board minutes and had the final ones put on our web site; she reviewed the bylaws and the policies and procedures manual for changes and completeness. Dee also developed a cover page for the P & P manual with others’ assistance. She contacted each committee chair and officer to get updates to the operational calendar, which will also be posted on our web site. Another one of her duties has been to handle all the arrangements for our board meetings, from meals to accommodations. She has done a great job.

Our President-elect, Ron Day has been busy planning for his year. He has assisted the President by sharing the duties of attending state conferences to bring greetings from SASFAA. During the year of President-elect, you are able to attend other regional board meetings as an observer. This proves to be very valuable in order to gather ideas from other associations operations.

Sonja McMullen has been the Treasurer for the past two years. This position is one of the most important to the association. She was able to work with the finance and audit chair to have the books audited for the 01-02 year. With an association this size, the work of this position is constant. Not only taking in all the revenues from membership, conference registration, vendors, and workshops, but paying all the bill and travel expenses for the board and committees. Although Sonja was unable to complete her second year as treasurer, I appreciate all her hard work and dedication.

The Vice-President is the person in charge of our training activities. This is the main objective of our association. Ellen Green has been fulfilling this role for us this year. The summer workshop for new aid officers has just occurred at Furman University in South Carolina. Attendance was at 111 and everyone had a memorable learning experience. Ellen was also in charge of the one-day new aid officers training session at the annual conference. Once again we held a mid-level workshop with the SWASFAA association, this time in Shreveport, LA. Planning has begun for the Management Institute to be held in December 2004. Ellen suggests moving the selection of the summer workshop site out two to three years in order to have more flexibility. The Site Selection chair should be the person involved in securing this contract.

Clark Aldridge is our immediate Past President. This position actually has several duties. One of these duties is the Nominations and Elections committee chair. This committee presented a dual slate for every position. There were 15 potential candidates considered. The selected candidates represented state agencies, lenders, four-year public institutions, two-year public, and two-year proprietary institutions. There were two African Americans, one Hispanic, two females, and four males. Over 500 of our members cast their ballots.

Another duty of this position is to compile the Governance and Planning report for the board. All the committees submit end of year reports that are scrutinized based on our associations goals. Recommendations are then submitted to the board for future use.

Committees

Conference Committee
This committee was charged with making our 40th year anniversary celebration a very special occasion. Janet Sain and her committee did an exceptional job. Although we were concerned with restrictions on travel budgets and the impending war with Iraq, our final totals were 753 attendees plus another 31 speakers and guests. We were also able to pick up 99% of our room block.

After the opening session, we went across the river to the MOSH (Museum of Science and History) for the president’s reception. Everyone enjoyed the food along with a laser light show. A special SASFAA 40 ice sculpture was prepared for the occasion.

During the conference we had several tracks of sessions to choose from: management, new aid officer, diversity, Department of Education, and technology. We were fortunate to meet the new Chief Operating Officer for the Student Financial Aid programs and had several good speakers throughout the conference. Jeff Baker did the Department of Education update, Charlie Bruce the national chair did the NASFAA update, and Dallas Martin closed the conference with a Washington update and discussions from the Reauthorization Task Force.

The Tuesday night banquet and dance was a true gala event. Many were in their formal wear as we celebrated 40 years of SASFAA. There were seventeen past presidents in attendance, which were escorted in to the banquet to be recognized individually. The committee and all of the local arrangements people made the whole conference a great success.

Diversity
This committee had some tall charges this year. I wanted to have an actual committee that would look at all aspects of diversity, not just a keynote speaker. Deborah Clark and her committee did just that.

There was a pre-conference exhibit that focused on people with physical disabilities. From leader dog exhibits to representatives from organizations that offer services to assist the disabled, people could browse the information. Monday night of the conference there was a Mardi Gras with a dance and international deserts. During the conference there were several diversity con-current sessions along with a general session speaker. On Tuesday there was a multi-cultural leadership luncheon. I thought this was a great event to promote leadership in our organization. Overall, this was a very successful committee.

Electronic Services
This committee, chaired by Erik Melis was charged with making our web site more accessible to our users, and to update several areas on the web site. Erik, basically one of the one-member committees, updated the calendar, the membership directory, posted meeting minutes, the newsletter, workshop information, and the latest Policies and Procedures manual. Information about the conference was posted with the assistance of Lester McKenzie.

Erik was also able to create some committee list serves, which helped throughout the year. Functionality was added so that members could subscribe themselves to the SASFAA listserv.

Erik has identified a new host for our website and has gotten a formal price quotes. The board approved us to go ahead with the design and a contract has already been signed. I appreciate all the hard work he has done during this past year.

Finance and Audit
Jane McNaughton has overseen this committee, which is charged with ensuring the fiscal integrity of our association. Each year the association must file a 990 tax return, which was accomplished after filing an extension. At the annual conference, Jane worked with the treasurer to balance daily receipts. She has been able to consolidate all but one of our investment accounts with the Suntrust Investment Group.

The audit of the 2001-2002 records was completed and new QuickBooks software has been purchased for use by the treasurer. Jane has taken on several of the Treasurer duties towards the end of this fiscal year, since our treasurer has changed positions and is no longer eligible to serve as our treasurer. A special thanks to Jane for taking this on, and working with the incoming treasurer for the transition.

Legislative Relations
This committee, chaired by Karen Fooks did an outstanding job by keeping the membership and board updated on reauthorization issues. Even though Karen was able to select some of her own committee members, versus just using the normal chairs from each state, she still bore most of the workload with the help of a few key members. Volunteerism for this committee has always been low, probably due to the complicated issues that must be understood and researched. Nonetheless, Karen drafted three letters to Congressional representatives concerning the Pell maximums, and developed SASFAA’s reauthorization position that was sent to the House Education Committee, the Department of Education, and NASFAA.

Throughout the year, she provided reports to the SASFAA listserv and presented a reauthorization general session at the annual conference. Karen is also planning to complete the update of the Legislative Guide by June 30 and post it to the web site for our membership.

Membership
Maureen McFarlane headed up this committee for the 2002-2003 year. The membership drive was initiated by using emails to the SASFAA listserv, state list serves, and individual email. In order to solicit members from non-member institutions in the region, a list was obtained from the Department of Education and a mailing sent to those institutions.

The current economy precluded us from gaining in membership this year, although we did have 411 new members in the mix. This was a tremendous increase over the last year’s new members. Unfortunately, we have lost the ability to update the list serve automatically, which created a major challenge. SASFAA is looking at a new service that would improve all of our electronic services. The year ended with 1203 members.

Newsletter
Sandra Neel has been our newsletter editor this year. She was able to review newsletters from other regions to find a way to make our newsletter look more like the printed format our members were used to. Sandra worked closely with the electronic services chair to achieve this goal, also incorporating more standard looking advertisements for our sponsors. Basically, the whole look and design has changed by adding color, pictures, and graphics.

I really appreciate Sandra’s willingness to explore these options in order to make the newsletter a more viable means of communication for our membership.

Site Selection
Ron Gambill is our resident expert on site selection. He has been negotiating several contracts on behalf of SASFAA, with the goal of keeping expenses down to promote more attendance by our members. Two sites were recommended for the 2006 annual conference. The Sheraton Four Seasons, in Greensboro, North Carolina was selected and the contract was finalized.

Site selection is another one-man committee, with some outside help from other members. We will need to consider the budget allotted for this committee chair, as we have been fortunate that Ron’s institution has provided for many of his costs. SASFAA should develop a standard contract that would entail all of our needs so that we can go right into negotiations with our basic requirements.

Sponsorship
This is one of those committees again with one person that is never ending. It’s a continual job to obtain sponsorship for the conference, workshops, newsletters, board meetings, and any other project that comes along.

Alan Whittington has done an outstanding job this year. SASFAA has brought in $132,865 in direct sponsorship just through April 1. Also, in-kind sponsorship was another $4,400. This doesn’t include sponsors for the transition board meeting or the new aid officer’s workshop. It is recommended that we review the sponsorship levels for our vendors, especially at the conference, and set a base fee for those who want a double booth at the conference. It appears we are one of the lowest cost regions for sponsor charges, although we are very fortunate and appreciative for all they do for SASFAA.

Liaisons to the Board
Besides the nine committees that run the operations of SASFAA, we have three agency liaisons that attend board meetings and update us on issues of concern to the financial aid community.

Ken Player has been our state agency liaison this year. He has kept us abreast of activities from the nine state grant and loan agencies. Some of the major issues this year have been the effect of state budget cuts on our grant programs, and the aggressive marketing of loan consolidators. Many of our agencies have put an emphasis on default prevention and debt management, while e-signatures and on-line applications have become popular. This liaison position helps to keep a line of communication open between state agencies and the financial aid community.

Karen Gibson has provided us with updates this year as our lender liaison. She researches the web to gather information that will significantly affect our student borrowers and aid administrators. This was the most successful way she has had to gather the information we need. Even though Karen was unable to gather much information from other lenders, she would like to see a way to create a committee, possibly made up of the state lender liaisons.

Greg Martin again served as our Department of Education liaison. He updated the board on federal issues including how new regulations, and in some case old regulations, would affect the day to day processing of financial aid. Because of federal travel restrictions, and the birth of his new baby girl, Greg was unable to join us for all of our meetings. We always look forward to hearing his report, which many times gives us a preview of things to come.