TASC 2009 Leadership Retreat/ Board Orientation

On Wednesday June 17, 2009 state officers and district presidents traveled to the beautiful T Bar M Camp in New Braunfels, Texas for our first leadership retreat. Some officers traveled only a few minutes, some took planes. There was a unique mixture of presidents from schools of only a few hundred, more particularly a girl with a class of 18, and of schools with 4,000 students. I always knew Texas was big, but I didn’t expect the wide variety of differences at our officer retreat. It’s truly amazing to get to collaborate when all of us come from so many diverse backgrounds.
Some really great work came out of this retreat. We had many group discussions on different qualities of leadership, parliamentary procedure, and business etiquette. We all learned new group activities and icebreakers and got a greater understanding of how TASC works. After all these informative sessions, the students and advisors broke into two sections. The advisors continued discussing state and district policy, but the students began “strategic planning.” We were given the task to create our top areas of concern which TASC should focus in the upcoming year and to give a professional presentation to the advisors on our plan of action to solve these problems. The officers were split up into small groups and asked to brainstorm problem areas in our schools. After making a huge web of all our concerns, these were the main areas we focused on:

-Involvement
-Energy and Environment
-Drugs and Alcohol
-Cultural Awareness/Respect
-Global Issues
-Internet safety
-Academics
-TASC

I bet these topics are also problems at your school. If you have any more which you think should be added to the list please let me know!

We came up with our topics list and then moved on to trying to pick one main concern area. After voting, Global Issues was chosen as the top category which students wanted to improve. The Global issues category contains many other issues, such as E&E, Health Awareness and education, so this was a way to connect many of the top categories. Once Global Issues was selected, the students analyzed which specific global issue should be addressed. Poverty was chosen as the specified type of global issue that the students would like to focus on because poverty connected involvement, health, and cultural awareness. This whole process inspired us to focus on Global Issues in the upcoming year and pursue this through our state project and theme; however, these projects and themes are not finalized.

The officers also emphasized improving the connectivity throughout TASC. They felt that TASC needs to improve connections between each district to continue and enact statewide goals. The students found that connectivity could be increased through improvements to the TASC website and the creating connections throughout the state.

TASC is in the process of making a new webpage. If you have any suggestions, please let us know. You’re the one using it – so we would love your input.

All officers presented this information to the advisors and they were supportive of our ideas. Because of the strategic planning, this blog now exists. Through our New Braunfels meeting your state officers are working toward establishing a state project, a state theme, a better website, and speakers, so you can have the best year in stu co possible.

All of these ideas are not final. These ideas are just the first session of brainstorming about this upcoming year. Things may change, but ultimately you need to know what your officers are thinking.