A Letter From the PA State Chairman
Fellow PA-PBL State Members & Advisors:
It is with a heavy heart and profound disappointment that I write to inform you that we will be cancelling the PA-PBL State Leadership Conference scheduled for next weekend, March 20 – 22nd, in Harrisburg, PA. This was a very difficult decision to make and I lost a lot of sleep over it the past few nights. Please accept my apologies for holding off on communicating this decision until now, but I wanted to make sure I had all of the facts necessary to make an informed decision.
I did have a number of conversations with the Hotel about continuing to hold the Conference and what additional steps and precautions they were taking internally regarding the Coronavirus issue. However, yesterday two important factors were overwhelming in pointing to this decision. First, the safety and security of our students and advisors was paramount. Second, the number of schools cancelling classes and placing moratoriums on travel was so significant in the past 48 hours that 80% of our registered attendees had cancelled their participation in the conference.
As a result of this decision, you will probably have a number of questions. The State Board will be meeting this weekend to address a number of issues; please be patient and grant us a few days to discuss and formalize plans that we will communicate to you as soon as possible. There are three items of immediate importance that I want to share with you:
Hotel reservations—you will NOT need to contact the hotel to cancel your individual school’s reservations. At approximately 3pm today [March 12, 2020], the Hilton Harrisburg will cancel all of the reservations related to the room block. You should be receiving email messages confirming that your reservations were cancelled; if you don’t receive something by end of day on Friday I would suggest calling the hotel to ensure that your reservation was cancelled.
Qualifying for the national leadership conference (NLC) in June—because students did complete their objective tests, we do have the ability to report results in all of the objective testing categories which will therefore qualify students to compete at the NLC in late June in Salt Lake City. The State Board will also be evaluating if it would be possible to effectively judge the performance events in some type of online format so that our students could compete in those categories at the NLC. Please watch your email for additional information on this.
My thanks to all of you for all that you do for our students and for our organization. Thank you for your patience, support and understanding at this challenging time.
Regards,
Robert J. Kollar, CPA, CGMA
Pennsylvania Phi Beta Lambda State Chair
Assistant Professor of Practice—Accounting
Duquesne University
Palumbo-Donahue School of Business
600 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15282