Gary McCormick, PRSA director from the Southeast district,
has resigned from the board with two years still to go in
his term, becoming only the second national director to leave
mid-term.
Gary McCormick
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The other one was the person McCormick succeeded in 2004
Sherry Treco-Jones, a Decatur, Ga., counselor.
Treco-Jones quit in March 2004, the day after the national
board voted 8-6 to reject proposals for governance reforms
that had been made by a committee of which she was a member.
She told PRSA she quit because of pressure of her counseling
business.
McCormick, who took over the third year of Treco-Jones' term,
also said he is quitting because of added duties at his employer,
Scripps Emerging Networks.
He remains active in several PRSA activities
including helping PR Student Society of America.
Scripps is donating an initial $30,000 to fund
the annual Bateman contest staged by PRSA.
Students
Want to Open Membership
Yeaney
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McCormick, during a discussion about PRSSA, noted that 2004-2005
PRSSA president Sarah Yeaney and her board proposed that students
be allowed to join PRSSA from any college in the U.S.
Currently, only students from the 270 colleges that meet
certain criteria set by PRSA can join PRSSA. They are required
to be members of a chapter of PRSSA and required to have five
"sponsors" from a local chapter of PRSA. There are
about 4,000 colleges in the U.S. with about eight million
undergraduates. PRSSA has 9,000 members.
Yeaney, while a student at Penn State University, interned
at Hill & Knowlton and also worked at Fleishman-Hillard's
PA division. More recently, she was at Articulate Communications,
New York. Attempts are being made to reach her.
The Educators Academy of PRSA and past presidents have been
against at-large student membership. A group of 50 past presidents
and PR professors signed a petition in 2002 that resulted
in the removal of the at-large topic from the agenda of the
2002 Assembly.
Betsy Plank, 1973 PRSA president who is an active counselor
to PRSSA, said the PRSSA proposal is that students in colleges
without PRSSA chapters be allowed to join as "auxiliary"
members of PRSSA.
They would not be able to describe themselves on their resumes
as regular members of PRSSA. The national board has had the
proposal for more than a year. The students were responding
to a request by the PRSA Educational Affairs Committee for
an at-large student membership proposal after discussion of
an at-large proposal was removed from the agenda of the 2002
Assembly.
Robert Pritchard, assistant journalism professor at Ball
State University and chair of the Educators Academy, said
he favors some form of PRSSA membership for students in colleges
not recognized by PRSA but has not recently seen the proposal
put forth by PRSSA. He feels the "integrity" of
PRSSA must be preserved. Employers should know what they are
getting when they employ a former PRSSA member, he said. Scott
Iwata, 2005-2006 president of PRSSA, could not immediately
be reached.
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