Business Meeting
ARPAS Election Results
ARPAS Annual Membership Dues Adjustment Beginning in 2021
ARPAS Now Offering ONLINE EXAMS
ARPAS Symposium Postponed
ARPAS Now on Social Media

ARPAS 2020 Business Meeting – OPEN TO ALL ARPAS MEMBERS
The ARPAS 2020 Annual Business Meeting will be held virtually, via Zoom, on Thursday, July 30, 2020. The ARPAS Business Meeting is open to all ARPAS members. The annual business meeting provides an overview of ARPAS governance activities for the prior year, and the installation of the 2020–2021 officers will occur. Relevant reports for the 2020 Annual Business Meeting are provided in this 2020 Summer Newsletter. The Zoom information will be sent via email to ARPAS membership before the meeting.

This report provides a brief accounting of my activities on behalf of ARPAS since our meeting with ASAS in Austin, Texas, in 2019. Without a doubt, the past few months have been filled with the most world-changing events of our lifetime. Being older than most of our members, that is quite a long time for me. ARPAS, as an organization, was affected as well and your leadership is diligently working to adapt to our new environment.

This report is divided into two parts. The first part will focus on some of the changes that have been made since early March to allow us to function as an organization given the constraints we now face.

The coronavirus shutdown presented ARPAS with a new challenge. If ARPAS was going to give exams, they would have to be administered online, most likely in the exam taker’s home, and without an ARPAS member present to ensure the security of the exam. How could we proctor an online exam?

After a couple of conference calls, a lot of reading, and learning different ways that universities were proctoring online exams, it was decided that ARPAS would purchase a Zoom Pro account, and Zoom would be used as an exam monitoring tool. Several universities were using Zoom in various ways to monitor exams. A side benefit of purchasing a Zoom account is that the Zoom annual fee is cheaper than the system ARPAS has been using for conference calls.

Through the first quarter of 2020, our National ARPAS organization continues to remain in a solid but general declining financial position. Year over year, through March, our Total Net Asset position is behind March 2020 by $130,020, due mainly to a fall in membership services, unrealized investment losses, and accrued FASS and Elsevier fees. Two shining beacons of hope are the growth in Annual Registry Sponsorships and growth in Applied Animal Science journal page charges.

Membership update, June 15, 2020:
MEMBER TYPE

The Membership Committee has now completed two videos for ARPAS: "Navigating the exam" and "Benefits of joining ARPAS"

Chapter directors are encouraged to record video footage of chapter ARPAS meetings and ARPAS member interviews about the importance of ARPAS.