Bylaws/Lunch & Learn Registrations

Our brand new Lunch & Learn series will kick off Tuesday, January 21st with a fabulous session: How to Deal with '"Those" Five Types of Parents.

The Lunch & Learn series will offer free, high quality PD during the first quarter of 2025. We now have the registration links available for the first two sessions.

The first session on January 21st will be hosted by Finalsite. Please click the blue registration button below to sign up so you will receive all information related to the session.

The second session will be Tuesday, February 4 and will be hosted by Peachjar: Getting Started with Video Basics and Filming One-Minute District Highlights Each Week. We have the registration link available for that session as well.

**If you want to attend the Lunch & Learn sessions, you must register in advance by using the registration links provided below.

We have three other fantastic Lunch & Learn sessions lined up for the rest of the first quarter of 2025. You can learn more about them by clicking here.

During the chapter meeting at our February conference, we will discuss proposed changes to our NCSPRA bylaws. The purpose of the changes is to prevent issues we have encountered with conflicts of interest arising within our board. While this is NOT an issue with any current board members, we did face the issue with a recent board, and we want to make sure we don't run into similar problems again. The National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) also dealt with a similar issue and recently changed its bylaws. We used NSPRA's revised bylaws as a guide for our proposed revisions.

Here is a brief overview of our proposed revisions:

• Under our current bylaws, it is possible to serve on our board without working in a school district or even in a communications capacity.
  • Within the past few years, our chapter had someone elected to the board who moved to a position in private industry before the board term expired. This created a conflict of interest when dealing with NCSPRA corporate partners. However, our current bylaws gave us no recourse to correct the problem.
• Under our proposed revision, anyone with responsibilities in educational communications or community relations may be a member of NCSPRA. However, in order to run for the board, candidates would have to be employees of a local board of education as defined by NC law.
• Our board of directors includes two appointed positions (State Coordinator and Presidential Appointee). Under our proposed revisions, these appointed positions could be filled by people not employed by a local board of education. However, if the proposed appointees were not local board of education employees, their acceptance to the NCSPRA board would require approval by a 2/3 majority of the NCSPRA board.
• Our proposed revisions also will provide the ability to correct issues if they arise. Under our current bylaws, the only reason a board member may be removed from office is for missing too many meetings. Our proposed revisions would allow for a board member to be removed from office for substantial reasons deemed detrimental to the organization if at least 2/3 of the NCSPRA board of directors vote in favor of the board member's removal.
• Our proposed revisions also remove references to using the postal service for chapter notifications as we have moved to electronic communications.
• Finally, we are following the lead of NSPRA and adding a Student Membership clause to our bylaws, which would allow college students pursuing the field of school PR to become student members of our organization.

After our board developed the proposed bylaws revisions, we had them reviewed by education attorney Richard Schwartz of Schwartz Law. He examined our entire bylaws and approved of our proposed changes. However, he recommended other changes elsewhere within our bylaws. In most cases, his additional suggestions were minor. They were largely issues of capitalization or moving certain subsections of the bylaws to a different place within the document. He also suggested taking things that are implied in our current bylaws and spelling them out to provide greater clarity. However, none of his additional recommendations would change any of our chapter's current operation.

We have included the revised bylaws below for your review. There is a clean version, which is the easiest to read. It is the version as recommended by our board of directors and education attorney, Richard Schwartz. We also have included the redlined version where you can see all of the changes that are being proposed.

Please review the proposed bylaws prior to our in-person chapter meeting in Asheville on February 14. We will discuss the bylaws and answer questions at the meeting. Following our chapter meeting, all chapter members will have the opportunity to vote via email on the adoption of the proposed bylaws.

The icons below are hyperlinked to help you access details and submission forms.

Info is also available at ncspra.org

NCSPRA is an Exemplary Chapter of the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA). For three consecutive years, NCSPRA has been honored with the prestigious Mark of Distinction Award for delivering outstanding professional development to members and to school PR professionals throughout the country.