1996 Annual Report ENGAGE PARENTS IN EDUCATING

School Administrator, March, 1997 by Paul D. Houston

The Year in Review

The American Association of School Administrators prides itself on being a leading-edge organization. After all, the edge is where the action is; it's where things happen.

In many ways these past 12 months proved to be a watershed year for AASA, a time when we moved from an era of solving problems to one of creating new solutions. We achieved a significant financial turnaround and began rebuilding our membership base, after a major reorganization and downsizing.

We implemented and strengthened new programs and services--including an outstanding web site--to address the needs of our increasingly diverse membership. We also re-instituted and revitalized the Women's Conference.

Each of us joins associations to expand our voice and our reach. AASA served its members well this last year by doing just that. Our focus on serving the needs of children, building communities, transforming schools, and building leadership capacity was evident on local, state, and national fronts and in cyberspace.

One of our real contributions to members was our leadership on the national scene. AASA has become a premier national professional education organization for addressing the needs of children. We have done that in large part through our national voice in the halls of Congress and through our activities with the national media. And we have done it by reaching out to other national child advocacy groups to make the plight of America's children an ongoing concern for all adults.

We have focused on building community through our efforts with our members, who hold great potential for community building because of the central role schools play in the lives of our communities. AASA has also reached out to others to build collaborations and partnerships.

One example has been the "Wingspread Collaborative," a coalition made up of AASA and the National School Boards Association, as well as the national groups representing mayors, city and county councils, and city and county administrators. That collaborative is focused on bringing all parts of the community together to weave a web of support around our children. (Other partnerships are outlined in the External Funding and Strategic Planning sections.)

We have enhanced school leaders' ability to transform their schools by building on the good work people were already accomplishing. Numerous publications, meetings, and workshops helped sharpen that focus. (AASA's book entitled Telling the Truth About America's Public Schools is already in its second printing.)

AASA continues to stand apart by raising its voice against critics who believe that nothing good has happened in public schools over the past few decades and that those working in schools lack the ability or willingness to make them better. AASA has fought hard to correct these misperceptions, not so we can become complacent with the work we've done, but so that we can be given proper credit for the hard work that has occurred and so that educators can be empowered to tackle the even greater task that lies ahead.

We have tried to help members and the public understand that our role is much more than managing schools. Our role is to lead our institutions and our communities toward building a brighter future. That's what our motto "Leadership for Learning" is really about and why each of us chooses to be part of this great national professional organization.

MEMBERSHIP

During the past fiscal year, we recruited more new members (1,443) than anytime since 1991, and we continue to be cautiously optimistic. Our membership count by category is now at 14,898. More than 11,000 of these memberships are active members, which is the category that continues to increase. First-time superintendents, women, and minorities have been our priorities for membership recruitment.

Our relationship with state affiliates continues to improve and we now have 27 states collecting dues for AASA, up from 25 last year. We are also contacting non-renewing members to ask them to renew their membership or to learn why they are not renewing.

Tremendous energy has gone into revising our legal support program, streamlining it, and making it not only more responsive, but also more accountable.

We are working with the National School Boards Association to carry out their 1996 endorsement of membership dues to AASA as a component of superintendent employment contracts. We will continue to work with them on that initiative.

Among the more modest achievements in membership are these: instituting member/non-member pricing for publications; analyzing and expanding our membership benefits package; expanding the resources available to members by including titles by outside publishers in our catalogue; streamlining the fulfillment process through an outsourcing arrangement to provide AASA staff members more time to work with our members.

BUDGET AND FINANCE

We installed a sophisticated accounting system.

The new system provides governance and management staff with monthly financial reports that ensure accountability and increased ability of managers to oversee their budgets, monitor the budgets of cost center managers, and significantly boost management's ability to operate the association as a business. By accounting for all costs, we can avoid year-end surprises and ensure decisions on programs are based on complete information.