Exciting and Busy Year Begins for Academics
By Treva Dayton, academic director | Thursday, August 26, 2010 8:49 PM
Welcome back to yet another new school year! We hope it is an exciting and successful one for you and your students. It was wonderful to see so many of you enthusiastically preparing for another season of academic and theatre competition at our largest ever Capital Conference in July. You can see and hear more about the conference through a slideshow posted in this Leaguer.
If you attended the conference and turned in your attendance hours for CPE credit, you need to go to the academic Web page and print your certificate before Sept. 30.
As you can see from the totally new look of our website, UIL staff has been working diligently to provide more user-friendly, effective communication with member schools and the general public. Please take the time to explore the site to locate those links and resources you most often use and to discover the many new features now available. With a little patience you can find everything you need at this time of year. Honest.
We will continue to post additional material and links as the year progresses and urge you to make visiting the UIL site a regular part of your work schedule. Campus academic coordinators should go online now and register for 2010-11. The database includes mandated tasks for some UIL coaches, directors and officials and must be purged each year. If you haven’t already registered (and thanks to the many of you who have), go to the pull-down tab on the Academic page for Resources and then select Academic Coordinator Resources.
We have mailed an Academic Coordinators Manual to every high school so if you did not receive yours, check with the people who distribute mail on your campus.
At this time, there are no mandated tasks for academic coaches or coordinators, but registering to participate in OAP is now done online and not by returning the former participation card, which so often mysteriously disappeared somewhere during the process. The Academic Spring Meet Online System will be activated for academic spring meet officials and campus coordinators later in the year.
The Student Activities Conference schedule is posted (no surprise, it’s under the pull-down menu for Conferences), and we are excited to be headed for El Paso for the first SAC there since the mid-80s, as well as returning to Tyler, Corpus Christi and UT Austin. We hope you will join us at one if possible, and bring a busload of kids. It is still free, and no registration is required.
We know that our rotating SAC schedule makes it difficult for some schools to attend every year due to travel distance, but we are trying to serve member schools as best we can given the size of the state and the limitations of time, staff, available facilities and funds.
We greatly appreciate our SAC hosts and all the work they and their staffs do to make these conferences possible. Each hosting site has to deal with other events on their campus, arrange for rooms, signs and audio-visual equipment, and provide the staff to handout programs, greet visitors, give directions and perform many other chores. It is certainly not the most carefree way I can think of to spend a weekend. So those of you who do attend, don’t forget to say thanks to your hosts!
We look forward to working with administrators, coaches, coordinators and directors as we begin the League’s second 100 years, those brand new to the process and those who are seasoned veterans. We learn from all of you, and welcome your suggestions for the academic program and our service to schools. Please contact the League office if you have questions or need assistance, and have a great year.