Dear SRIS Members,

For those of you who have been involved in SRIS since the days it was a mixed-group caucus, the past 4 years may seem a bit unreal. You worked so hard drawing up governing rules, setting up ambitious goals, trying to increase membership and meet the many requirements for official IS group status. During these 4 years, SRIS has been functioning fairly smoothly but with new challenges. Among these has been compiling a newsletter—a major requirement for maintaining IS status. Our editors have utilized multiple backgrounds as well as suggestions and advice from other ISs and come up with a very professional set of guidelines, so that now the SRIS newsletter can be seen as competition for other ISs much older than ours. Thanks so much to the whole team!

Increasing our membership is another goal to work on during the coming year. Hopefully we will have lots of visitors at our IS booth in Dallas and will convince them to join us. It has been said many times before that SR is a great umbrella for many other interests and concerns in all teaching situations, so we just need to project ourselves with that in mind. By the way, SRIS this year is sharing a booth, and lots of volunteers are needed to keep it staffed during the conference. Comfort, the SRIS chair, is circulating the timetable as I write this piece.

Another great task is to entice more of our members to participate in the various tasks SRIS needs to accomplish. Of great importance is volunteering to serve as an officer, on a committee or advisory group, become an abstract reviewer—just to name a few.

To our outgoing chair, Comfort Davis Mingot, we extend appreciation. To our incoming chair, Jeanne Malcolm, all best wishes for SRIS to have an even better year! We promise to work together toward that!

Sincerely,

Earlene Gentry