Regional Director’s Report, by Gary Lindsay, North Central Regional Director

Membership

Membership in our region remains steady, up very slightly from last spring’s 305 members. To promote membership I contacted each state director and sent a list of the state’s JEA membership. Stan Zoller of Illinois is working hard to increase membership there with a direct mail campaign. Leslie Shipp has done a similar thing In Iowa. Other state directors have communicated with me on their efforts to recruit more members.
Recruitment continues to be a challenge because it is difficult to identify newly named advisers in schools that are not currently active in state affiliates or JEA.

I would like to see JEA partner with the yearbook companies in sharing information so we can better reach out to new teachers.

Events

I am in my fourth year as JEA Mentor for Iowa. Details of that are available in the Iowa report.

IHSPA’s State Conference was held Oct.17 in Iowa City at the University of Iowa. Paul Jensen is the new director of IHSPA, replacing Dave Schwartz, and he and I met several times over the summer and fall. Paul secured an outstanding lineup of speakers for the event including DJ Journalism Teacher of the Year Aaron Manfull. Look for details of the event in the Iowa report.

I attended the Iowa High School Press Association’s Winter Thaw event and distributed JEA information. I had planned to attend KEMPA’s Winter Adviser’s Seminar in Lake Geneva but a family emergency prevented my attending. This past July, I taught the Journalistic Reporting, Writing and Editing seminar for journalism teachers at the University of Iowa.

The Journalism Standards / Common Core committee that Brian Wilson and I chaired last year is now broader in scope, named the Educational Initiatives Committee and is chaired by Candace Perkins Bowen . I have agreed to continue as chair of a sub committee looking into working with the Partnership for 21^st Century Schools. See Candace’s report for further details.

There is no regional Facebook page for our region. I look at the Northeast and Southwest region pages from time to time, and I have queried the state directors in our region and found no interest in a North Central page. IHSPA does have a Facebook page that is widely used, and this will be a topic of conversation at our Meet and Greet session in San Antonio.

Illinois State Report

Iowa State Report

Minnesota State Report

Nebraska State Report

North Dakota State Report

South Dakota State Report

Wisconsin State Report