Monday, March 23, 2009

Salt Lake City Day 3

Wow these days are exhausting! An ACS meeting goes from Morning till night so you can get really tired. I am writing this on Monday and we have the long promised snow. It is really very light and not sticking to the ground but I hear the mountans are getting it so the skiing will be good tomorrow.
Yesterday, Sunday, was the day of the Committee on Minority Affairs meeting. We started with sub committee meetings in the morning, followed by a break and lunch and then he full committee meeting.
I am on the education sub committee and we discussed a proposal for funding of minority chemist to take a course. This will roll out next year. We also discussed who would be the next minority chemist to highlight like Percy Julian. I suggested Dr. Marie Daly the first African American women to get a PhD in chemistry. She did a lot of other things in her career. The committee will decide whether or not to chose her when they see the supporting information.
We also discussed how to get more minorities into science starting at the K-8 level. We came up with a lot of ideas to get students and parents more interested in science ssome that are already being done by local sections and some that need to be done.
CMA now has an awards sub committee to manage our awards and I hope to suggest people to nominate minorities for National Awards.
We branstomed ideas to be done at Regional meetings and came up with three, teacher workshops, networking programs, and symposia about a local minority sucess person with a take away kit for teachers. We will try to implement these programs.

The liason from the Committee on Professional Training (CPT) came to the meeting. They had run a series of Workshops with the minority groups, Native American, African American and Hispanic. The reports are on the CPT website which is reached from the ACS home page by clicking on about us,governance, committees,professional training, reports,special reports. (The url is too long to print) Our committee was asked to read the reports and comment on the action items. I reccomend that you do the same.
The Committee on persons with disabilties has a new version of the book Teaching Chemistry to Persons with Disabilities. I reccomend that every teacher have a copy of this book as it is free.
The Merck Index will be donating copies of the Merck Index to every high school in the nation. They will be distributed via the local sections so we will get some of them. I hope some of you will help me distribute these books to your children's high achool. We will give you something to distribute while you are there.

The ACS Diversity Partners are organized and have set goals for 2009. The diversity partners were featured in C&ENews a while back. I will scan the information about this group and put it on the NJACS miniority Affairs webpage. I am hopeing to get one or two of them to come to North Jersey to help organized our local section CMA group.

We learned that Project SEED has received an award for public service from the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation. The award will be given in May.

2011 will be the year of chemistry. The ACS is planning for this by printing materials in four different languages.

This is a good summary of the CMA meeting.

I went from there to the Town Hall meeting. Once a year the four people nominated by Nominations and Elections are presented at a Town Hall where they field questions about what they would do if elected ACS president. This year there are three women and one man running for ACS President elect, Dorothy Phillips, Nancy Jackson,Cheryl Maring,and Berkley Cue. Dr. Cue was ill so he was not at the Town Meeting. The three women did well. The councilors will cut the field down from four to two at the council meeting on Wednesday. I want to congratulate N & E for fielding the most diverse slate ever! Any one of them would make a good ACS president.

After the Town Hall, Councilors meet for an hour to Caucus, by region. Our region is the Middle Atlantic. Our regional director spoke to us and we also heard from Budget and Finance about the state of ACS finances and what they are going to reccomend as to what will be the dues for 2010. I will not devulge that figure now as we have not yet voted.

The 2010 MARM meeting will be held in Willmington DE in April.

After the caucus I went to the CMA open meeting and reception which served as dinner for me. After that I was shot so I went up to my room and went to bed.
It was a long day!

Jeannette Brown

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