Urgent Updates from the BOD - March 26, 2020

Greetings Washington FBLA Members, Advisers, and Partners:

Your Board of Directors and Board of Advisers met together today, followed by an official meeting of the Board of Directors.

We will have much more information available to you early next week, but we do want to share with you what we know at this point in time:

  • SBLC is going to be a virtual experience and it will run from April 15 to May 15.
  • We need email addresses for every single student! Please be prepared to load email addresses for all attendees into Blue Panda during the extended registration time period.
  • The registration portal (Blue Panda) will reopen next week and will remain open through April 10.
  • The SBLC fee has been adjusted to be $135. Now, through April 10, you may add additional students at the adjusted fee. Anybody who previously was not registered because of travel restrictions or conflicts may be added to SBLC at the revised fee of $135. Any students who are now at home in virtual learning that want to join—can be added. Any new students may be added to SBLC 2020.
  • If you remove any students that were registered for SBLC, there is a $50 cancellation fee per person that you remove. We have backed up all data as of the registration deadline, and this policy was set by the Board of Directors.
  • Online testing has been extended to run until 5 p.m. on April 24. Online tests may now be proctored by a parent—there must be an adult in the room monitoring the testing and all other testing policies remain the same. You may send testing logins and passwords to parents now.
  • The requirement for students to have “qualified” in a competitive event have been suspended. All students may now compete in a total of 6 events—a maximum of 3 of these can be performance/demonstration/interview events. You may add additional competitions for students in Blue Panda.
  • You may not add students to events that required an online upload of materials on March 6. Those events are closed to additional competitors and will move forward as they existed on March 6. These materials were already distributed for judging.

The Board of Directors has suspended our late fee policy until October 1, 2020.

The Board of Directors has also suspended our national conference travel policy for 2020—Washington FBLA will not be offering a state travel package for the 2020 National Leadership Conference to allow students, chapters, and families who attend NLC to travel for the number of days most appropriate for them.

We will continue to provide you with more information as it becomes available—and anticipate a large amount of information to be ready by midweek next week. In the meantime, please start collecting email addresses!

Mike Oechsner, MBA, CAE, CMP
Executive Director
Washington FBLA
Direct: 360.219.6342/FAX: 360.539.1865
mike@wafbla.org