Mary Ellen Angeletti: Minutes of July 20 CORE meeting on reorganization

From: Mary Ellen Angeletti, July 21, 2006

Subject: Fwd: Minutes of the CORE Meeting, July 20th, 2006

These minutes have been approved by the CORE Advisory Board and the CORE members present at yesterday's meeting. They can now be sent out to CORE email chains.

The CORE Advisory Board met at STRS on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 9:30 a.m. The meeting was sparsely attended. Present were Ryan Holderman, Molly Ganz, Molly Janczyk, George Justice, Dave Parshall, and Mary Ellen Angeletti. Mary Ellen served as scribe.

Dave Parshall reported on the balance of the CORE financial fund. He also shared that he would be establishing a date for the CORE/Damon group for sometime in September and that the subject of telecasting the STRS monthly meetings would again be brought up.

A handout of Nancy Hamant’s suggestions for the proposed reorganization of CORE was read and discussed by the group. Although folks liked Nancy’s idea of having four full meetings a year, concerns were expressed that this change might be interpreted as CORE losing support. The group did agree that we need to reorganize to become more effective. We agreed that we need to continue to monitor all STRS meetings but felt reluctance about 22 different CORE folks attending. The concern was maintaining continuity and perspective from one meeting to another. Obtaining 22 volunteers to sign up for a date in advance would be laden with conflicts and requests for changes. We felt it might work better to have the CORE Advisory Board members attend as usual BUT with a team of subtitute attendee volunteers to back up the Bd. members if they could not attend. We agreed that CORE’s strength is in its rapid response to issues so the Alert Email system needs to continue but it was felt by some today that it is underused. One suggestion offered today was to have John Curry (our CORE Alert emailer) send the alerts to a designated person in a region of Ohio. That person would then be responsible for sending the alert to CORE folks within his region. That person would also be responsible for keeping the email list up-to-date (names and email addresses). We have many alerts bouncing back as invalid and undeliverable. It was agreed that Nancy’s idea of having all four corners of the state as well as the central area covered by CORE folks who would agree to serve on the CORE Advisory Board BUT how do we obtain names of those who would like to serve on the Board? The terms of officers was covered in the later discussion of a constitution for CORE.

Ryan Holderman then presented the proposed CORE constitution and bylaws which had been researched and prepared by Paul Boyer and him since the last (June) CORE meeting. Each article of the proposed constitution and bylaws was discussed in detail and some revisions were made. The finished proposal will be presented at next month’s
(August 17th) CORE meeting. All CORE members are encouraged to attend this August meeting so that each person can get their copy to study. As soon as our webmaster returns to Ohio in August, we will have him post the proposed constitution and bylaws on the CORE website. We will also ask John Curry to send out a CORE Alert of the proposed constitution & bylaws. We want everyone to have the document well in advance of the September meeting. Voting on the proposed document will occur at the September 14th CORE Annual Membership Meeting at STRS.

We decided to defer a discussion of the direction and focus for CORE for the coming year to the CORE Annual Meeting in September when hopefully more people will be in attendance. The question of whether CORE should make endorsements for political offices will be discussed at the August CORE meeting.

Under new business, Lenora Wood’s suggestion that CORE approach the 9 statewide organizations to join their effort to amend the Ohio Constitution to solve the school funding problem, it was suggested that we ask Dean Werstler, Lenora’s son-in-law, to approach this group with an invitation to send a spokesperson to address CORE at one of our upcoming meetings. It was also mentioned that the Health Care Advocates & STRS are meeting with all of these 9 groups.

Also discussed under new business was the possibility of CORE sending a mailing to our data list of members in order to update their information. This was suggested as a way to reach those members who do not have email. Also discussed along this line was the possibility of having an actual mailed newsletter once or twice a year. Both of these suggestions would be expensive and would have to be voted on and decided by the CORE Advisory Board.

The next CORE meeting will be Thursday, August l7th at STRS in the cafeteria room behind the Sublett Room at 11:45.