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Features

Sale of Headquarters

As most members know, the DKG headquarters building in Austin, Texas,
has been sold, and staff have moved into temporary leased office space. The
Constitution requires that money from the sale be placed in the Permanent
Fund. Currently, the Constitution only allows the Society to rent office space
or construct a headquarters building. A PA gives the administrative board the
additional option of purchasing a building or purchasing land and constructing
a headquarters building. This amendment gives greater flexibility in acquiring
the best possible headquarters building at the most economical cost.

Identity

The history behind Founder Annie Webb Blanton’s decision
to name the Society with Greek letters—Delta Kappa Gamma—
is firmly established. Simply put, she “chose a name that would
be ‘acceptable’ in a time when women were not allowed to
organize in professional groups…shield[ing] the Society by using
a name that sounded like a sorority—a type of organization that
WAS permitted in 1929” (CE, 2018, p. 7). In 2018, members
wondered whether that name “confuses others who assume
DKG is a sorority rather than a professional society of women educators” (p. 7)
and adopted changes to terminology that promoted the sorority image, such as
“initiation.” A PA to alter the name of the Society did not pass at that point but is
being offered again in 2022. If adopted, this amendment would change the name
of the organization to “Women Educators Society International (DKG).”
International Conferences

and Conventions

Responsibility

Another key area in which PAs seek to capture and update current practice relates
to clarifying responsibility for the business side of international conventions and
conferences. Again, a bit of history helps. Input from members in multiple surveys in
varied years preceding the 2018 international convention indicated that, although they
loved the networking and friendships that evolved from regional conferences and the
opportunity to visit new places and do new things, they had concerns about the costs in
time and money for these events. Accordingly, in 2018, proposals to reframe the regional
conferences as international conferences were accepted by the convention body.
To be clear, the changes did not eliminate the basic regional structures
within DKG but only the conduct of conferences. “Regions were designed to
provide a convenient structure for activities and oversight. Based on feedback
from members, the convenience and effectiveness of this arbitrary structure
have diminished. One might even argue that as our Society… has evolved,
the structure has begun to outweigh the focus” (CE, 2018, p. 11).

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