Carl Davis- President, Alabama Vocal Association Beginning, Middle, End.
Ecclesiastes 7:8 indicates that, “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof…”. I am grateful to begin the second half of my term as AVA president. As we begin the school year, we are experiencing all of the aspects of beginning, middle and end. Pat Blackwell, after serving the AVA board as the executive secretary for seven years, retired, ending her seven year term, giving notice at the beginning of April that her last day was would be June 30th
.
Rebekah Stevens of Northport began working before her official first day on July 1st
. This is a one-year interim position and
we will repost the job for applicants in January, 2016. Rebekah also assumed the responsibilities of webmaster. We encourage you to be patient as we are dealing with a huge handicap. Both positions - executive secretary and webmaster - have a huge work load in the late spring and early part of the summer. Rebekah is doing - and is going to do - a great job this year. My prediction is that she will be a great customer service asset to our organization. You certainly will want to attend the fall workshop and meet her.
Communicating with and within our organization is an essential. To more effectively communicate and to maintain a trouble free emailing service, we have moved all of our AVA board email accounts to Gmail. Now when AVA board members rotate on and off the board, email addresses will stay the same even though the people change. The permanent addresses of the AVA Board positions are:
PresidentOfAva@gmail.com - Carl Davis
PresidentElectAva@gmail.com - Ginny Coleman
VicePresidentAva@gmail.com - Jody Powell
RecSecAva@gmail.com - Jane Powell
ExecSecAva@gmail.com - Rebekah Stevens
District1Ava@gmail.com - Michelle Reburn
District2Ava@gmail.com - Hilen Powell
District3Ava@gmail.com - Ginny Hughes
District4Ava@gmail.com - Cathy Spence
District5Ava@gmail.com - Meg Jones
District6Ava@gmail.com - Jerry Cunningham
District7Ava@gmail.com - Daniel Massey
ala breve
Each of these new gmail accounts provides each board member 15 GB of free storage on google drive to maintain AVA documents. This will allow smooth transfer of documents to the next person who takes a board position. After Fall Workshop, your AVA board will only use the above addresses for communication as the @
alavocal.org addresses will be closed.
Maintaining a current up-to-date database of our membership facilitates our ability to communicate. Last year, I indicated that one of my goals was to move our organization into the 21st
century in the areas of
communication and registering for events. I think that we are on track for both of those. This past year we provided information by which you could enter your biographical data on the AVA website as practice. This year, to be able to register for any AVA event, after Fall Workshop, you will have to have entered your contact information on the AVA website. This will be a yearly requirement and will afford us an up-to-date database for communication. Visit the AVA website and complete the following steps: 1. Visit
www.AlaVocal.org. 2. Click the “Director Portal” 3. Enter the Case Sensitive Username and Password (all lower case) Username: pat Password: blackwell 4. Under the “Membership” Heading, Click the “Member Registration” button. 5. Enter you data. You will receive an email (at all addresses provided - home and school) indicating the information submitted. This is your proof of registration. This endeavor should yield our organization a current year- to-year reliable database of information. I also project that we will collect registration information for one event this year via our website. More instruction will come later concerning collecting registration data online instead of mailing or faxing paperwork.
The 2015 AVA Fall Workshop will be held at First Baptist Church, 305 S Perry St, Montgomery, AL, on Friday, September 11th. Again this year the fall workshop is a
13
one-day event. Dr. Debra Spurgeon will present four sessions: 1. Improving the sound of your school, community, and church choir: Targeting sopranos and altos; 2. Tried and true and overlooked: Recommended online repertoire and resources for the middle and high school choir. 3. Arranging your choir for success: Standing formations, spacing, and recent research on choral acoustics; 4. Reading Session. The twenty titles will be bound in octavo size and are included as part of your registration cost. We will also have 3 mini-sessions. These sessions will address: All State Music and Auditions (Carl Davis); Honor Choir and Screening (Ginny Coleman) ; Physical Expressivity in Performance (Dr. Marvin Latimer); If you have taught one – three years, please register for the free New Teacher Luncheon.
Cathy
Spence and Dr. Debra Spurgeon will present some relevant information at that luncheon.
Remember to join or renew your NAfME membership before the fall workshop. I wish you all the best as you begin your new school year.
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