Welcome back to a new school year.  I hope that everyone had a great summer.  This year is an exciting year as we have officially transitioned to the Illinois Design Educators Association with a fresh newly designed logo.  We have a few changes coming to the organization this year.

This fall we will again be offering our fall conference.  However, it will take a different format.  We will now be combing our fall conference with TEAI & Project Lead the Way to have a combined Friday/Saturday program this year in lieu of our traditional Thursday program.  This year there will be no Thursday program.  The Friday will consist of a combined opening session with guest speaker and previews at the Marriott in Bloomington.  If you know someone you would like to nominate for our teacher of the year award there is a nomination form that will be available on our website.  We will also a morning brunch at the Marriott.  From 11:30-12:00.  We will host our annual business meeting for the IDEA.  We would like to see as many of you as possible during that time when we elect board members and discuss the direction of the organization as we move to continue to move forward.  We are always looking for new people to join our board.  There will be three sessions from 12:30-4:30 that will consist of both IDEA sessions and ITEC sessions at Turner Hall on the Illinois State Campus.  We will have a good group of vendors and will also be offering free certifications again through Certiport for any educator who is interested.  There will be an ITEC social Friday night.  Saturday will have morning sessions available.  We voted to move to this unified format as we know that finding substitutes is getting more difficult and it makes scheduling easier for everyone just having the Friday/Saturday program.  The registration links will be on the website and will link you to the ITEC website which will handle registration at a cost of $75.00 for the combined Friday/Saturday program.  Remember that if you pay your IDEA dues by the conference or at the conference the fee is only $20 instead of $40 when you register later in the year.

As we plan for competition season in the spring this year we will largely continue the competitions as they have run recently.  We feel that the team competitions have grown, and all of our competition areas have a decent number of students currently.  We will be working on creating the new team competition problems at the Friday conference again as well.  We are always looking for any suggestions or ideas for new competition areas that could help expand the organization as well.

Lastly, I believe we are currently entering good times to be in our profession.  Vocational careers are expanding, and we need to continue to encourage students to enter the drafting and design fields.  We also need to encourage more students to become future educators in our field to keep our organization and training we all provide students moving forward.  There have been quite a few openings in recent years that have gone unfilled.  Anything we can do to encourage a student to follow into the vocational education field is helpful.  We currently use the students from Illinois State to help with our organization for competitions.  We also offer the Dr. Ryan Brown scholarship at Illinois State that Is open to anyone who has competed in our organization.  As our website continues to expand we are looking at adding more job openings and scholarship/program information for teachers, students, & parents.  Thank you to the students, parents, and educators, & board who keep this organization running and I hope everyone has a great school year.

Brian Rick
President- IDEA