AALS

This is your Captain speaking.  AALS Flight 2010 landed at Lake Point Conference Center on beautiful Lake Dardanelle at approximately 4:00 p.m. on Friday, June 4 for the Top Gun Officers Candidate School, i.e., the 2010 AALS Leadership Retreat.  With boarding passes in hand, we entered Hickory Lodge and were greeted by our flight navigators, Janice Miller and Linda Adair.  After checking into our rooms, we enjoyed visiting with the other passengers on the patio overlooking the Lake.  While visiting, we learned that we had 4 first-timers join us on this leg of our flight:   Shelley Jackson of NWALSP, Dianne Meriweather of Saline County LSP, Sheila Brown and Roxanna Shah of Greater Little LSP.

After some visiting and networking, we left for dinner to different points of interest.  When we returned, Janice Miller taught us that “Delegation is not a bad word.”  Then AALS Ways and Means Chair Danny Looney “artfully” entertained us on the piano, raising money for the AALS treasury…we paid him to quit singing!  More visiting and networking with our new passengers was done in the atrium room, while enjoying in-flight snacks provided by the EC, then it was off to bed.

After a restful night aboard this flight, we awoke on Saturday morning to a beautiful sunrise over the Lake.  Most of us enjoyed our breakfast on the patio by the Lake, which was a wonderful way to start the day.  We then relocated to another gate in the terminal, i.e., the Conference Center, for the scheduled CLE sessions, where we selected our seat numbers for each session.  Stacie Givens-Allen and her Flight Crew did a great job of putting together a wonderful day of CLE sessions for us.  Chris Hockaday’s session on Bridging the Gap taught us how to deal with our generational differences.  Stacie and Danny Looney, with preparation help by Ann Simmons, assured us that we are an ASSET not just overhead.  Midflight, a boxed lunch was served, and most of the passengers chose to eat their lunch on the patio by the Lake.  The afternoon session, Aerial View, that I put together consisted of why we need Strategic Planning and Long Range Planning, and I appointed a committee to put together some plans for the members of AALS to review and discuss at the fall business meeting.   Hopefully, we will be able to put these plans into action so AALS can “keep on cruising for many flights to come”.  Departure was at approximately 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 5.

For those of you who missed the final boarding call and were unable to attend the Retreat, you were certainly missed and I hope you will be able to join us on the next leg of AALS Flight 2010, which will be the AALS Fall Business Meeting in Saline County on September 17-18, 2010.  If you were at the Retreat and enjoyed it half as much as I did, you had a great time.  Thank you to Janice and Linda for taking the time to find this new landing site for us to relax and learn.  Stacie, you and your crew members, did an outstanding job of planning great CLE sessions for us.  To everyone who had a part in making this Retreat weekend a great success, THANK YOU.

Judy Davis, President

AALS 2010-2011

Tags: Retreat