Hello Piranhas families! As is required by our by-laws, the board reviews the by-laws every two years and may propose updates to the by-laws, which must be reviewed and approved by the team's General Membership (i.e. all of you) to take effect. As promised, the updates that we are proposing are up on our website for you to review at this link: https://www.casselhillspiranhas.com/sites/s3_files/87308

Allow us to summarize what we are proposing (and why):

- In Section 1, we changed the wording of "non-profit" to "not-for-profit". Non-profit implies that we have registered as a 501(c)3 non-profit with the IRS, and while we are actively looking for ways to do this, we have not yet gone through the process to achieve full non-profit status. Doing so is quite an undertaking and may come with additional expenses, which may or may not be within our reach as a team. So we changed the wording slightly to reflect this. It does NOT change how we operate the team from a financial perspective, though.

- In Section 5, we changed the number of possible at-large board member positions from 3 to 5. As the team has grown, so has the amount of work required of the board to keep up. We are moving the Volunteer Coordinator position back to an official board member post. Having it not be on the board was a request of a previous coordinator, so we are moving it back to the board now. We may need an additional board member in the future to manage some of our increased work, so we are creating space for that now.

- Also in Section 5, we added some language to ensure that any actions taken to change the board occur with sufficient representation of the team. We renamed the Information Officer position to Communications Officer, and expanded/diversified the roles that are performed by the board. We also added language that allows us to, when necessary, solicit volunteers from the General Membership to perform some of these roles, and to offer some perks to those who might do so to encourage that assistance.

- Also in Section 5, we added language to specifically exempt the Volunteer Coordinator position from performing the usual volunteer shifts and paying registration fees for their children. This has always been traditionally granted to the Volunteer Coordinator due to the high-stress, critically important nature of the role, but we felt it important to cement that into the by-laws for visibility and transparency.

- In Section 6, we added language to cover executive sessions of the board relative to any non-board volunteer positions that were added in Section 5. We haven't held an executive session in the 3 years I've worked on the board, but we wanted to cover our bases.

- Section 9 has the updated date for the banquet.

- There were a few grammatical changes made throughout to improve conciseness (mostly changing "in order to" to simply "to").

Please review the updated version of the by-laws prior to next Thursday's banquet and team meeting, and if you have any questions, please reach out!