Greetings and Salutations! I hope that 2010 is going to be a prosperous and exciting year for each of our members. It will definitely be an exciting year for OCRID. As many of you already know this is my final six months as your President. I am looking forward to turning over the reigns over to new leadership and the opportunity to work with and train the next OCRID Board. I really want to encourage each of you to consider how you might get involved with OCRID and lead your organization into a new decade. It is an exciting time with exciting possibilities and there is room each of you at the table.

 

Currently we are gearing up for our spring conference that will be held May 14-16, 2010 at the Cleveland Marriott East in Beechwood, Ohio. While we are still finalizing some of the details we will be sending out the Calls for Committee, Presenters, Interpreters and Support Staff in the next 2 weeks. Registration forms will be sent out in the next month so be on the look out and make sure that you get that early bird rate! Our conference will offer 1.2 CEU's total for the weekend. Workshops will start on Friday night at 6:00PM and start up again on Saturday morning at 8:00 am. In lieu of the typical Saturday night banquet we are working on hosting the first Ohio viewing of the the first full length feature film in ASL - Universal Signs. This event will be open to the entire community and we are very excited about the opportunity bring this movie to our Deaf community here in Ohio. Tickets will be included in your registration and extra tickets will be on sale for guests!

 

Another big project we have on the horizon is the complete rebuild of www.ocrid.org. We know that this is a source of ongoing frustration for our members and we are deeply apologetic for the inconvenience that this causes. We know that we have been saying the same thing for the past two years and we are doing our best to get a cost effective and working web site for the organization. In the spring of 2009 we unveiled what we thought was going to be a new and improved web site designed by our current web hosting company. Unfortunately these changes were not for the better and the Board decided that it would be best to look for a new web site company. The prices for web site design and hosting have risen significantly in the past several years. We know that the web site is our most important tool and we are diligently working to select a company that will meet all our needs and as well as be affordable. We are hoping to make that decision in the next two weeks. In the mean time we are considering some other temporary measures that will allow us to post information in a timely manner.

 

As always, I would love to hear from you!  If you have any questions, compliments or concerns, please feel free to email me at http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102931491579&s=2&e=0018U558KiNWW0YRrSVqZlfzJ8h5M6OYHFQ59dxRxVv_E7Adp_Mq-HRJORI-QgJmK5kX6Fl8Z-6iqvtIvryjhh8F30RqNr_BwWvWgFTTQJf4CX7dq8SqTNs4M3fe9gR_kVj2L-8iMld6cm_aTVehgY-YFQbaO56ECaDRhCiepPVgOw=.

 

Melanie Somnitz