Cincinnati, Ohio: March 18-20 2011 Minutes

The 2010-2011 International Thespian Officers are:
Sarah Davenport, Chair and International Liaison
Troupe 2971 from Atlanta, Georgia
Susan Cherry, Webmaster and Secretary
Troupe 6548 from Crooksville, Ohio
Jeremial Light, Region I Representative
Troupe 6971 from Aurora, Colorado
John Stark, Region II Representative
Troupe 4274 from Grinnell, Iowa
Ariel Thilenius, Region III Representative
Troupe 2445 from Gainesville, Georgia
Bobby Kirwin, Region IV Representative
Troupe 7171 from Strongsville, Ohio

Review of Group Goal
- Our group goal was to encourage every troupe to become involved in at least one service project. Part of our goal was the creation of the new “YOU” page on GOBO. This page has ideas for service projects and a section for Thespians to submit their stories about past community service projects and experiences at Festival.
- We feel as though the Festival Stories part of the “YOU” page is working, but the Service part is not. Thespians simply don’t have a reason to submit their stories. For this reason, we feel that we have only partly achieved our goal.

Silly Band Idea
- We decided to slightly modify Jeremiah’s plan to sell silly bands at ITF. Instead, we will sell gold and yellow wristbands.

SSO Master List
-Sarah distributed a list of the current SSO from around the country. We discussed using this list to make the SSO more involved at ITF. The list will also be useful to the ITO traveling to state conferences.

Communication
-Our communication seems to be working well. We respond to emails promptly and keep connected, even if it’s just through texts. Our lines are always open.

State Conferences
- This year the ITO attended a record amount of conferences. We feel that we are spreading information about and building the credibility of the International Thespian Officers and the International Thespian Society. Teaching leadership workshops at state conferences also gives us great practice for our leadership seminar at ITF.

Auction Items
- We need to work to find more auction items. We also discussed requesting registered troupes to donate and sending emails to chapter directors. We will either ship the items we currently have or bring them with us to Lincoln.

Scholarships
- We awarded Cody McNeely the Jhon Marshall/ITO Outstanding Student Achievement Scholarship and Alex Saur the Jhon Marshall/ITO Outstanding Student Technical Achievement Scholarship.- After much discussion, we decided that instead of awarding one Student Achievement and one Technical Achievement, two Student Achievement Scholarships should be given. All students, including those previously eligible for the Technical Award, will now apply for the Student Achievement Scholarship.

GOBO
- We discussed creating a permanent ITO blog on the EdTA website (schooltheatre,org). We would update information to this blog, while the GOBO would remain as a place for static information. We will be working with Jim Talkington, the EdTA webmaster, closely in the next few months to finalize plans.

Mr. Peitz
- We discussed plans for honoring Mr. Peitz at ITF. We will speak briefly and present him with a gift.

BC/EFA at Festival
- We will use the buckets to raise money for BC/EFA at Festival again. We will continue to use Coin Wars Boys vs. Girls.

Expanded Leadership Workshops
- We ran through our expanded workshops, fine tuned them, and discussed any supplies that we will need. In addition, we voted to not teach the extra workshop session during ITF.

RTN
-T he purpose of the RTN is for the ITO to communicate with the entire delegation of Thespians at Festival. In the past years, however, we feel as though the printed version of the RTN has not been effective. This year we decided that the best way to connect with Thespians is to turn the RTN into a Festival Blog on schooltheatre.org.

Next up is the International Thespian Festival in June!