Combining YW Classes

My ward is small and frequently combinds the youth activites with the other ward sharing our building. The YW leaders have recently combinded (sp?) the MIA Maids and Laurels classes due to small numbers.

My problem is this:

A Laurel is president, and two MIA Maids are counselors. How do I make this happen in MLS? It appears that the classes are set and cannot be manipulated to make these changes due to the age barrier set in MLS. Besides, what would this be called - Laurel/MIA Maid class?

Next, the Beehive class presidency has a secretary that is from the other ward. She has no membership record in our ward - therefore, she doesn't show up on MLS to add her name to the position. What do I do?

Ozzy wrote:A Laurel is president, and two MIA Maids are counselors. How do I make this happen in MLS? It appears that the classes are set and cannot be manipulated to make these changes due to the age barrier set in MLS. Besides, what would this be called - Laurel/MIA Maid class?

In the Young Women organization the class titles are indeed fixed. There's not much you can do about that. You just need to pick what you would call the combined class. Let's suppose you call it the Laurel class. Then you can go to the Mia Maid organization, and within the Members list, you click on the Remove link by each member in turn, and for the destination organization you specify "Laurels".

The result of that will be to have all the Mia Maids in the Laurel class, and once they are in the class, they can be selected to fill leadership positions.

The age guidelines will control how girls are moved into classes automatically, but you can move them manually into other classes. So when a girl turns 14, she'll move automatically into Mia Maids; you'll then need to manually move her into Laurels. The same thing would happen if a 14-15 year old girl moved into the ward. But those events should be rare, and so are easily handled manually.

Ozzy wrote:Next, the Beehive class presidency has a secretary that is from the other ward. She has no membership record in our ward - therefore, she doesn't show up on MLS to add her name to the position. What do I do?

You first add the secretary to the ward as an Out of Unit member. That will add her automatically to the Beehive class (assuming you enter the right sex and birthdate). Then you can add her to the position of Beehive Class Secretary.

I was in a ward that had a similar issue for young men. They combined the Sunday classes for the Deacons and the Teachers. But that was only for the purposes of teaching most of the Sunday classes - some classes had to be taught separately because of the nature of the topic. They kept the quorum leadership per the CHI. The Teachers quorum had their own president and first counselor. The Deacons had their (his) own president. Since Scouting is the activity arm of the Aaronic Priesthood the activities of the Boy Scout program did not require anything special.

Administratively in MLS there is no way to combine young women of one age group or class with young women of another age group or class. You can move the Behives manually into the Laurel class however. I suppose for the situation for the combined Laurel/Mia Maid group the Laurel president would be entered normally. Then the two Mia-Maids could be entered into the Mia Maid class as the first and second counselors in that class. Since there is such a small number of young women involved it would not be hard to remember that the combined presidency is the two class print-outs from MLS - only combined.

The same could be done for the Beehive class. Each unit would input the class officers in their respective calling position in their unit's MLS. Another thought is to add the Beehive secretary as an out of unit member and then their name would appear on the roles for inclusion in the leadership position for the Beehive class. The birthdate definitely would have to be entered to enable the out of unit young woman to meet the criterion for the class. Since I have never heard of this being done before I do not know if it is really possible or if there are problems that would be created because of this action.

Thanks for the ideas, guys.