Written By: Dalene Whitlock, District Administrator

It has been my honor to serve the Western District as its District Administrator since January of 2015.  Having served as an officer of the District, it was my pleasure to work with predecessor Jenny Grote, who was the District Administrator for nearly nine years.  The District’s Bylaws indicate that, “The President, with Board concurrence, shall appoint the District Administrator and charge the Administrator with the responsibility of keeping the historical records of the District and other duties deemed necessary by the Board.”  As Jenny recently noted to me, that last clause is a doozy that covers an extremely wide range of potential duties.

Upon accepting this position I was tasked with several high profile projects as well as a myriad of other minor ones.  The biggest project, most of which is still staring me in the face in the form of 30-plus banker’s boxes, is to take the District’s archives and convert them to a digital format.  To that end I routinely drag a satchel full of papers home with me at night that I go through and flag for scanning and saving, including where the information is to be saved.  I’m lucky to have help with this last part, but reviewing the documents and making the decisions about what to do with them has been and continues to be a big job.  I hope to have all of the boxes gone in the next year, but certainly before my five-year term is up.

Under that catch-all phrase that the DA has “other duties deemed necessary by the Board,” the highest priority task set for me by (now) Past President Carlos Ortiz was to deal with the fact that the District didn’t have any Articles of Incorporation, and this document is required by banks in order to open an account as a non-profit organization.  Digging through the records available to me in those 30-plus banker’s boxes as well as a hard-drive packed with information provided by Jenny Grote, I found that while the District has a 1989 letter from the IRS granting us non-taxable status under code 501(c)(3), there was nothing documenting our incorporation.  Since the IRS letter is addressed to us as ITE “Incorporated” it seemed reasonable to assume that at some point in time we had obtained Articles of Incorporation.  If such documents exist, they were never received by the District nor were they filed in any of the thirteen states that comprise the District.  With this information in hand, an attorney was hired who specializes in helping non-profit groups and with his guidance the District was recently certified as a “Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation” in California.

Current President Cathy Leong’s highest priority was to get our Bylaws updated to better reflect how business is currently being done by the District due to changes in technology and just the simple passage of time.  Working as a committee with outgoing International Director Jenny Grote and our incoming ID Walter Okitsu, we individually updated and commented on the document, then as a group went through and came to a consensus on exactly what changes we will be recommending to the Board at the District’s Mid-year Board Meeting in January.  One fly in the ointment of this process was discovering through our attorney that, as a California corporation, there is a whole bunch of language that we need to include in our Bylaws to make us legal.  The committee still has some work to do in that regard, but we will have it all done in time to present it to the Board and then to the membership as a whole, who will be asked to vote on it next summer.

Speaking of voting, overseeing the election is one of the things that we’re proposing to change in the Bylaws.  Back in the day when we sent out paper ballots it was the Secretary-Treasurer’s responsibility to receive all of the ballots and ensure that they were in the hands of the Teller’s Committee, who missed lunch so they could count ballots during the Annual Business Meeting.  I remember hauling a big box of them to Kalispell during my term as Secretary-Treasurer.  However, upon converting to e-balloting (probably the very next year), the responsibility was somehow transferred to the District Administrator, and this change in our operation needs to be reflected in the Bylaws.  It was also one of my tasks earlier this year to work with electionsonline to get our ballot set up and the email addresses for all of our voting members into a compatible database, address any problems (of which there were numerous) and finally, work with the Teller’s Committee to report the final results.

Finally, because the DA retains the records, they have also traditionally assisted Sections, Chapters and Student Chapters if they want to update their Charter or Bylaws.  Over the course of this year Charters and Bylaws were approved for a new Chapter in Fairbanks, Alaska and new Student Chapters at Fresno State and Northern Arizona University, and the Bylaws and Charter were updated for the Idaho Chapter and the Utah State University Student Chapter.  I’ve also located copies of their Bylaws and/or Charter for numerous Sections, Chapters and Student Chapters, and am always available to dig this information up for others if you need it.

Though I’ve been involved at the District level for about twelve years, there is so much history that came before my time, but that, as DA, I have somewhere in that stack of banker’s boxes.  I look forward to delving through our history and occasionally popping a great nugget of our past onto the website for all to enjoy.  Thank you to the Board for giving me this opportunity to continue serving the Western District.