BCS: Building Collegiate Success
TACRAO 2007

The 2007 Local Arrangements Team has been on fire all year preparing for the 86^th Annual TACRAO (Texas Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers) Meeting being held at the Hotel Intercontinental Dallas in Addison, Texas, November 10 – 14.  The theme of this year’s meeting is “Building Collegiate Success,” with an overall football theme for the annual conference.  The Local Arrangements Committee has fondly called this conference “the best TACRAO ever” since last year’s meeting in Austin, Texas. 

 Our very own Daniel Herrera and Gretchen Voight are the co-chairs of the Vendors and Exhibits area.  They have acquired 44 vendors to exhibit at the conference – a TACRAO record!  Not only is it a record breaking year in regards to vendor participation, but the 2007 conference is the largest in TACRAO’s history – nearly 800 attendees representing 44 private and 109 public institutions.  Over 20 DES employees have registered to attend the conference. 

Conference attendees will attend seminars such as “MySpace.com – Recruitment, Retention & Alumni”, “The Renaissance Registrar:  How Technology is Reframing the Role of the Registrar”, “Café Degree Audit”, “Best Practices in Classroom Scheduling”, “FERPA and Today’s Helicopter Parents – How Do You Help Them Understand”, and “Millennial.”  In addition to nearly 100 sessions, TACRAO is also offering a Strategic Management pre-conference workshop on Saturday, November 10. 

TACRAO isn’t just about learning … attendees will have plenty of opportunities for fun!  For the athletes, TACRAO will host a golf tournament at Indian Creek Golf Club in Carrollton on Sunday afternoon, and a 5K “Walk, Glide, Slide” race is scheduled for Tuesday morning.  Sports fans will enjoy the keynote address at Sunday evening’s President’s Dinner by former Dallas Cowboy and Hall of Fame member Rayfield Wright, and will cheer on their favorite team at the Monday Night Football Tailgate Party.  Everyone will enjoy Tuesday night’s special event - a comedian who is also a hypnotist.  Rumor has it that hypnotized individuals will perform karaoke for the audience.   Get your video cameras ready!

The 2008 TACRAO Annual Meeting will be held in Corpus Christi, Texas.  It’s an event you don’t want to miss!  For more information about the organization and next year’s conference, please visit www.tacrao.org.

Question
Which SMU President said that he had no interest in employing paid athletes to beat Texas A&M.

Answer
Robert Stewart Hyer

Yvonne D. Harris, Senior Vice President of F. H. Cann & Associates, Inc.  explained to the participants at the 2007 TxBUC$ conference that one's ability to recover quickly from a disaster is related to the amount of planning you do in anticipation to a potential crisis.

w Do you have a current Disaster Recovery Plan?
w Have your vendors provided you with their Recovery Plan?
w When did you last test your plan?
w Did the plan work/are you confident in it?

Identify the Severity of the Disaster - your response will be different should the problem be a power outage rather than a major epidemic such as the bird flu.

Make sure you have effective ways to communicate - develop calling trees for notification of employees, text messages for students, established ways of notifying vendors, telephone and web based messages for anyone needed information.

Have a relocation plan - discuss temporary and permanent facilities, arrange for telephones and computers, develop ways to transport employees to new site, and provide for banking, mail delivery, etc.

Identify vendors who can replace equipment - make sure they have a list of current equipment and have created a way to provide that equipment in the time of the disaster.

Insure data security and retrieval - redundancy is important.  Data should be stored in several secure servers well away from you work site.