On, 10/13/2002 the PSIA Region 4 annual membership meeting was held at Ski Liberty in Carroll Valley, PA. The purpose of the meeting is for the members of PSIA Region 4 to share their concerns with the leadership of Region 4. The attendance at the meeting has been steadily declining over the years. This year approximately 25 people attended. The agenda for the meeting was broken up into 2 sections: committee reports and roundtables. 

The committee reports section is where all the news comes out. The first piece of news is that Angelo Ross has replaced Bob Shostek as director of Region 4 because he won the election (what a concept!). Bob did attend and expressed relief that someone new has stepped up to relieve him and that since he remains a Region 4 representative and an examiner, that he still remains busy 2-3 times/week working with PSIA-E. 

The Education committee is proud to report that there will be over 100 (65 alpine) events in Region 4 including night events and events every weekend. Just about every resort application for an event was approved. The only exception being applications for exams, where there was a desire to move the exam around from year to year to make the exams more accessible. Note: the alpine exam study guide is now online. 

The theme for Pro Jam this year is "skiing through the years".

Last year was the first pilot for an out of division event - an April clinic at Whistler. This year the trip (but not the clinic) is open to non-members. 150-300 people are expected.

Hunter Mountain is running an experiment on retention of first timers as a result of better pay/conditions for instructors.

Children's committee is being run by Jay and Ellen Minnix. This husband and wife team has their act together. They are working on the multi resort survey of kids to see what we can do to improve our children's teaching. We watched the new Kid's video by Alison Clayton (note: Sue Slick got 2 copies for Whitetail).

Did you know that the management committee spends most of it's effort setting the agenda for the snow sports management seminar (the one that ski school directors go to ).

The certification committee was represented by Alan Highhouse. The success rate for Alpine level 2 exams has grown from 49% to 60-65%. This is a direct result of the format split into part 1 and part 2 exams. 341 people took the level 2 alpine exam in 2001-2002. So now the focus is on level 1. When First Tracks was introduced and the level 1 exam was cut from 2 days to 1, the written test was dropped. Should it be returned? It's under consideration. Part of Alan's duties was to submit 10 questions from the Core, tech or children's manuals to be used on actual written exams. Note that he had to refer to the actual page number in the supplied answer to prove where his question came from.

As far as budgets go, PSIA-E was $41K short of revenue projections due to the bad winter. However, we ended the fiscal year 3K to the good due to cost controls. We talked about the use of the $5 PSIA-E dues increase (as opposed to the $15 national increase). The $5 is being used in many ways. Primarily, it's being used to offset increases in event costs (so that event prices are not being raised or nickel and dimed). Did you know that it costs an average of $322/day for a clinic leader? 18 cents of the $5 was used to increase scholarship funding. $2500 is available this year for scholarships. Last year there were 35 applications for scholarships. This year's deadline for scholarship applications is 11/5.

PSIA-E membership has dropped from 11,050 to 10,894. Given the dues increase and the bad winter, that's not bad. Nobody know how much the First Tracks increase in costs to join has contributed to the drop.

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