| Vice President’s
Letter
Bylaws to live by
By Portia Stewart,
National Vice President;
Editor, Firstline
My 8-month-old doesn’t understand
rules. He operates on impulse. If the dog’s
tail looks good, it must taste better,
and in his mouth it goes. And 3:00 a.m.
seems like just as good a time to play
as 3:00 in
the afternoon.
Those of you with
little ones might remember the agony
of the first several months with
a newborn, when sleep is a prized commodity.
You can imagine our chagrin when the pediatrician
told us our son should be sleeping through
the night. What were we doing wrong?
My theory is that there’s usually
a solution in a book. After a few false
starts I finally found one that promised
a gentle sleep solution with fewer tears.
It outlined a two-week program to train
babies to sleep better. Great! I’d
found my book. It worked. We woke up giddy one morning,
full on sleep. We crossed our fingers when
we went to bed the next night — success!
We felt like super parents.
Well, you guessed it. The next few nights
were chaos. No sleep. Why was he waking
up? What changed? It wasn’t him.
It was us. We broke the rules. Once we
achieved a good night’s sleep, we
got complacent and we stopped following
all of the sleep rules outlined in the
book.
After a few tears and a few more nights,
we finally got back to our routine. But
we learned something important. When we
didn’t follow the rules, no one slept.
ASBPE’s bylaw revisions I’ve read the book countless times
now. Every few days, I pull it out and
remind myself of our sleep rules. And that’s
what ASBPE did recently. We pulled out
our rulebook —the ASBPE bylaws — and
gave them a good look to remind us of the
rules that keep our organization running
smoothly.
Why is that so important?
We can’t
follow the rules if we don’t remember
and understand them. So we spent a lot
of time discussing our rules. We talked
with a lawyer and revised and revised again
to give you a set of rules we all can live
by. And while we were looking, we updated
them. For example, we expanded membership
categories to include special designations
for freelancers, journalism faculty, and
students. We also brought them up to date
according to Illinois law.
We will need your
vote
Now it’s your turn. We will be sending
you your own copy of our proposed bylaws.
We’ll be e-mailing them to you before
our National Editorial Conference on July
20 and 21 in Chicago. You don’t have
to read the bylaws every night before bed
(although they are a great sleep technique — almost
as good as my son’s sleep book).
But I do have
one request: Read them through once. We need
your vote to make it official.
So please take a few minutes to give us
your thumbs up if you think we’ve
done a good job.
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