Treasurerπs Report – Lisa Darling

BURCH FORD, PRESIDENT: I would like to introduce now Lisa Darling, who's the head of United World College, and she is the treasurer of NAPSG and will make her treasurer's report.

MS. DARLING: Thank you, Burch. You all have or were handed as you entered a yellow sheet of paper that shows our financial records for the last year. I am here to report some surprising news, I think, to all of you. Despite the incredibly important mission of this organization, despite our proven track record of professional development excellence, despite the superb management of our executive director and his extraordinary negotiating skills, despite a clean review by our auditors, which is on one side of the page, our investments are down. This was shocking news to me, as the treasurer. Actually, United World College would be thrilled if our investment performance, the amount that our investments were down, were as little as NAPSG. You see, we've lost 22 percent since our all-time high of reserve funds and investments that we set aside. And similarly, just as is the case at least in my school and I suspect many of yours, despite very careful budgeting and planning and management, we on the NAPSG Council will be stepping back and looking at the budget after we have the final figures from this conference. Our enrollment, our attendance is down a little bit from the initial planning we had done. Remember all of us making those budgets a year ago when the world was a little bit different place? So we made a budget that was sound at the time, but it didn't reflect current economic realities.

There's no question that we remain a thriving organization. Our dues cover the operation of our organization, our conference fees cover this professional development conference and its expenses. Because of changes this year, we anticipate we will be dipping a little bit into reserves that were very carefully set aside for exactly this kind of rainy day. And we will be doing new forecasting and budgeting, as we're all doing in our schools with new economic realities in place.

Are there any questions about the treasurer's report for this year? My thanks to Bruce, as always, for superb management, but also good information for all of us at this conference. Thank you.