Committee Reports
Federal Relations

The Federal Relations Committee continued to meet via telephone conference on the 2nd Monday of each month to review pending issues, plan for action needed on legislative initiatives, and schedule any activities (e.g. Hill visits). We had several new folks join the committee during the year, and several “retire”, deciding to join other committees or to lessen their outside involvement for a period.

The Committee coordinated a Summer Hill Visit between TriState FRC and NYASFAA FRC July 20-21, 2005 at the Latham Hotel in Washington, D.C. Kudos to Ingrid Valentine and Taisha Winters for ensuring that we had a great agenda, nice quarters, good food, and a way back and forth from the Hill. The “Men of Purpose” group from Montgomery College and students from Georgetown University and Columbia Union accompanied us on our visits to legislators’ offices. We saw democracy in action during the “mark-up” phase of work on Title IV. We are hoping to have the chance to reconnect with the NYSFAAA group and to have the Virginia ASFAA folks join us in a future Hill Symposium.

Reauthorization continued to be incomplete, despite a large number of issues pertaining to the Higher Education Act being addressed in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which was signed by the President on 2/8/06. We anticipate that within the year we’ll see most of the remaining issues resolved in some reauthorization legislation, and will continue to function under a Continuing Resolution until 9/30/06. It has been an interesting “ride” and will likely continue to be, considering that there will be no Negotiated Rulemaking. It appears that this will be a “learning curve” kind of year, or two. We anticipate that we will be continuing to watch legislation, as in the past, with an emphasis on what may be coming down the path as we head towards the finalization of Reauthorization.

FRC also participated in a Financial Aid Literacy program on April 26, 2006, at University of Maryland, College Park with the Outreach Committee, meeting one of our goals to be involved with or supportive of other committees’ efforts in educating students.

Taisha and I had the honor, during 2005-06, of being asked to serve on EASFAA’s FRC, and were very involved in reviewing the DRA of 2005 (in addition to dissecting HR 609 beforehand) and submitting synopses so that EASFAA could provide materials to the membership to aid in better understanding what we would be seeing once the DRA was implemented.

Taisha resigned her co-chairmanship in April upon securing a position outside of financial aid, and her presence was missed as we headed for the end of this year. I really appreciated her support this past year as co-chair, Ingrid’s extremely hard work on the Hill visit, and I can’t thank all of the committee members enough for their support and hard work all year long. As outgoing chair, I will miss that role, but I know that this committee will be very ably led by Ingrid Valentine and Ken Robinson, our incoming co-chairs, and I look forward to the successes I know they will have. I also want to thank our 2005-06 FRC members:

Sarah Bauder, Rachel Brinkley, Sandy Brown, Scott Filter, Bob Foultz, Zhanna Gholtzer, Rich Heath, Angie Hovater, Andrea Mansfield, Jerry McKeen, Beth McSweeney (Co-Chair), Michael Poma, Pat Rhodes, Ken Robinson, Ingrid Valentine, Cissy VanSickle, Bridget Watson, Nancy-Pat Weaver, Taisha Winters (Co-Chair), Tara Yancey, Holly Zaglaniczny (ex officio), Larry Zaglaniczny (ex officio).