Present: Johannah Burdin, Michele Melanson, David Megquier, Rebecca Salsbury, Rebecca Robinson, Chris Yardley.

Old Business:

Treasurer's report
Little action since the beginning of April.
Account balances: Savings $2146.46, Checking $1808.93, Total $3955.39
Money outgoing to finish up Policy Seminar is approx $1800
Next step is to submit for reimbursement from NEOA ($600 - $700 per person x 3 people)
Accepted the treasurer's report.

2001 Conference Planning

• Meeting at end of April
• Received approx. 30 survey responses from membership. Areas of greatest interest ≠ assessments (SDS etc.), stress management, sharing success stories from the field. Another area of interest is computing technologyä 'cyber counseling,' also academic
  1. counseling
  2. how can we understand what students are doing to use computers in an academic sense (distance education, etc.)
  3. learning how to do stuff, use applications, etc.
• Financial Aid speakers. Possibly Demetrius Windom speaking on default loans. Ideas for doing general, basic F.Aid stuff. Idea: invite a panel with representation from UM schools, Tech College system, and a private college.
• Conference Theme: From Theory into Practice
• Brainstorming speakers, etc. to address interests. Still working on keynote speaker ≠ open to ideas. Dave ≠ one idea is Russ Quagliaä need to check with him right away because he's so heavily booked.
• Conference will be at Atlantic Oakes January 3-5, 2001. Atlantic Oakes will likely require a deposit; Becky will do this within the next few days. In years past, this has been in the amount of $250.
• Dave ≠ idea: ask projects to put together a poster project/presentation about projects so that we can begin to learn about intricacies of different projects.
• Idea: Policy Seminar attendees, and/or past TRIO Achievers

Policy Seminar-letters from Congressional Delegation
Johannah provided copies of the letters that the delegates wrote to Chairman Porter. Idea (Dave) ≠ to combine the council's sample letter next year with our own twist on things & hand that to the delegates to help simplify their process of crafting the letters.

New Business:

Loan Forgiveness ≠ Michele
Loan forgiveness issue that was mentioned at NEOA conference. Michele would like to collect info on other loan forgiveness pieces, eg: Perkins loans are forgiveable. Stafford loans do not have a provision in the regulations (ie, the legislation) for forgiveness. Need to put some info out on our Maine listserv, to help Maine TRIO staff look at ways to seek loan forgiveness. We also discussed FAME's program for future educators being a way that some Maine based loans could be forgiven for TRIO staffers.

New Appropriations News
Dave provided copies of a new fax-newsletter that the Council is using to communicate news. This is the second issue (5/11/00) which mentions the appropriation markups which suggest increases from both the House ($115 million increase) and the Senate ($91.5 million increase).

Robert Belle's request for transfer ≠ Dave
Bob Belle has requested to be reassigned within the Department of Education. He has expressed a willingness to stay on until the gig in Miami in June is finished. A brief statement was distributed in the Council's newsletter (sent to all subscribers of Equality).

Looking for a new secretary
Since Rebecca is leaving, we need a new secretary if anyone has ideas about who might like to be involved.

Fall meeting (or at least September)
Friday, September 8, 11:00 @ KVTC

Meeting is adjourned.