FORUM ON EDUCATION
April 1995

FORUM FUNDING NEWS

Ken Lyons

Many of you are aware that changes have been under consideration in the formula used to determine forum funding levels by APS. This was brought about by a concern from the APS side about the amount of funding going to the forums, and from the forum side (all the forums, not just FEd) with regard to adequate funding for activities such as the newsletter publication.

A task force met in January to consider ways out of the impasse, and concluded with a consensual agreement among all participants for a recommendation to be made to the APS Council. The gist of this agreement, from our standpoint, is that for forums above 3% of APS membership (FEd is close to 10%) the forum will receive $2.50 in funding for each member. A funding floor is also provided to support executive committee meetings, etc. In return for maintaining this level of funding, which is sufficient to maintain our newsletter activity, members will be allowed to receive only two free forum memberships at renewal time, rather than unlimited ones (which would have meant up to six by next year). Additional memberships will cost the same as membership in a Division. This compromise has been recommended to Council with strong support from the entire task force. It will probably be implemented with the next renewal cycle, in June.

As part of our consideration of ways to reduce our expenses, we are considering the possibility of offering an electronic option on our newsletters: so that members would have the option of requesting that their paper copy not be mailed. Members who do this would be notified by email when the newsletter copy is available on the WWW homepage (a few weeks BEFORE the paper mailing date), and they could then access it there. This would make a significant difference only if a sizable number of members were interested--hence we have recently added a question about this to the Member Survey (see related article). At this writing we do not have enough feedback on the question to make an intelligent assessment of the level of interest. If you would be interested in this option, as a way of helping us reduce our expenses, please access the survey on the WWW homepage and so indicate on your response record.