Any Update on Single Young Adults Records Transfers?

We’re all excited about the re-structuring of YSA wards and stakes (which began a year ago in southern Utah, then to Cache Valley, now announced to be hitting SL & Davis counties). The Conference Center meeting on the 28th of this month was announced today in this regard. It sounds like several new wards and stakes will be created with the re-structuring.

[font=&quot]I would assume and hope that the MLS system won’t just grab all records of the YSA members of our wards- rather each bishop will be given the chance to review his YSA list and determine which are to go, and which are to stay within the home wards. Any feedback on guidelines of which young singles can stay in their home wards? I could speculate, but I’d like to hear something more definitive. I want to give the other ward membership clerks in our Stake some kind of heads up to motivate them to put more emphasis on updating their YSA membership records.[/font]

I'd read Handbook 2:16 and any similar sections in Handbook 1.

If there is a change in this (which I personaly think is unlikely), you'll be notified by official channels.

I didn’t see anything there in 16.2 that was really related to which YSA’s should have their records transferred to singles wards; and it seems to me that 16.3 will likely need some revisions with this re-structuring (like possibly excluding callings as YSA representatives and advisors in home wards and stakes). I would expect we’ll be seeing something on this come down thru the Brethren shortly.

jhigbee wrote:I didn’t see anything there in 16.2 that was really related to which YSA’s should have their records transferred to singles wards;

16.4: "Eligible members may, in consultation with their parents, choose to be members of the young single adult ward or to remain in their conventional ward. The stake president may authorize the young single adult ward to find and fellowship other young single adult members of the stake who are less active. Those who become active may then choose to belong to the young single adult ward or to their conventional ward."

Bottom line: YSA who choose to go to the YSA ward have their membership transferred. There is no automatic "let's move all the singles to the YSA ward". Keep in mind that a fair number of those "singles" are actually less-active marrieds that haven't had their records updated because they're less active.

jhigbee wrote:and it seems to me that 16.3 will likely need some revisions with this re-structuring (like possibly excluding callings as YSA representatives and advisors in home wards and stakes). I would expect we’ll be seeing something on this come down thru the Brethren shortly.

"In a ward with a sufficient number of young single adults, the bishopric may call a young single adult brother and a young single adult sister to serve as young single adult leaders."

Why would it need to be changed?

jhigbee wrote:I didn’t see anything there in 16.2 that was really related to which YSA’s should have their records transferred to singles wards; and it seems to me that 16.3 will likely need some revisions with this re-structuring (like possibly excluding callings as YSA representatives and advisors in home wards and stakes). I would expect we’ll be seeing something on this come down thru the Brethren shortly.

16.4, 16.5, and 16.6 provide information on the setting up YSA wards and stakes. In paragraph two of 16.4 you will note that it is a decision by the eligible YSA in consultation with their parents as to which ward they will be a member of -their conventional ward or the YSA ward. More detailed guidance on YSA eligibility is found in Handbook 1. Handbook 2, 16.6.6 addresses the membership records of the young single adults. To me that means that if a YSA decides to be a member of a YSA ward then their records will reside in that YSA ward.

In theLDS Newsroom the featured articledescribes the reorganization as a simplification to reduce the confusion for YSA as to where they should attend worship services. This does not create a new situation that requires revision of the Handbook but rather creates location based wards and eliminating overlapping YSA organizations. This reorganization is in alignment with the structure outlined in the Handbook.

jhigbee wrote:It sounds like several new wards and stakes will be created with the re-structuring.

I know Davis County and Salt Lake County currently are covered by 6 Student Single Stakes as well as numerous YSA wards. In total, i think there are around 140 single wards between the two. The restructuring is supposed to reduce the total number of wards to about 100, but increase the number of single stakes to 10 (plus 2 in Northern Utah County).

jhigbee wrote:I would assume and hope that the MLS system won’t just grab all records of the YSA members of our wards- rather each bishop will be given the chance to review his YSA list and determine which are to go, and which are to stay within the home wards. Any feedback on guidelines of which young singles can stay in their home wards? I could speculate, but I’d like to hear something more definitive. I want to give the other ward membership clerks in our Stake some kind of heads up to motivate them to put more emphasis on updating their YSA membership records.

I can't say for sure because I did not attend, but tonight there was a meeting for all Bishops and Stake Presidencies. Hopefully your stake president and/or bishops attended. Among to items mentioned was that all membership records would be redistributed automatically by CHQ - clerks do not have to move the records. I am part of a student stake, and this is the info that was passed on to me by the stake president. It was of note to us because the task would have been monumental otherwise. I can't say if there was an exception made for home stakes, but I'd probably recommend the bishop make a list of those he'd like to keep at home, and then either request them back if they get pulled, or pass the names on to the stake president so he can discuss them in his meetings with the coordinating councils.

I have no official guidelines, however. I've "heard" that 18-30 year olds are by default in the YSA ward unless an exception is granted to attend the home ward. As for updating, the best thing I would suggest is to get addresses and contact info correct ASAP. If the new ward can't find them and can't contact them, they will truly be lost.

crislapi wrote:Among to items mentioned was that all membership records would be redistributed automatically by CHQ - clerks do not have to move the records.

I could see the records of the members of the discontinued wards being redistributed automatically, but it seem to me that it would cause more problems if they redistributed ALL the ysa. Time will tell.

jdlessley wrote:In theLDS Newsroom the featured articledescribes the reorganization as a simplification to reduce the confusion for YSA as to where they should attend worship services.

That explains a lot. Between the Conventional wards, Singles wards and Student wards; there were three different places one might attend. (And if you didn't want to play strictly by the rules, probably more.) The singles could "ward-hop". I can also see it as causing a problem if a ward became aware of a less-active single moving into their area. Which ward should handle them? Now it's just down one Conventional and one Singles ward for given location. Much easier to coordinate.

crislapi wrote: I can't say for sure because I did not attend, but tonight there was a meeting for all Bishops and Stake Presidencies. Hopefully your stake president and/or bishops attended. Among to items mentioned was that all membership records would be redistributed automatically by CHQ - clerks do not have to move the records. I am part of a student stake, and this is the info that was passed on to me by the stake president. It was of note to us because the task would have been monumental otherwise.

I would think that the best action would be to make certain that the current address shown on the membership record is correct. I would follow the instructions received at the meeting.

And I would think that, for the discontinued student wards, the Church would automatically reassign those records, based on the address on the record, to the new YSA ward that covers the address. This makes sense, and would be based on the assumption that anyone attending a student single ward had already decided to attend the single ward rather than the conventional ward.

If a student attending a student single ward wanted to return to a home ward, rather than the new YSA ward, that would require a separate membership request action to get the record into the correct unit. But that would have to happen anyway, without the additional excitement of the stake/ward young single ward alignments also taking place.

crislapi wrote: Among to items mentioned was that all membership records would be redistributed automatically by CHQ - clerks do not have to move the records.

This is what we were told last fall when the Boise YSA Stake was created. Turned out not to be the case. I had to move the records to the new ward myself using the Boundary Realignment function. It was pretty easy but I had a branch of only YSAs and they were all going to the same YSA Ward. I think it took all of about 2 minutes. The Church may have changed the way to do things since then, but I think in many cases it is far easier for the local unit to move the records than it is for CHQ to do it.

Your suggestion to get the records updated is spot-on. It's really unfair to saddle the new unit with all of one's undone housekeeping. One other suggestion I have is to make a backup of MLS prior to the move and one after. The former stake may have a need to recreate the old unit to handle leftover finance issues, etc. I know we left our computer functional for several months (it may still be) with only myself, the Stake Clerk, and the Stake Tech guy having logon capability.

idjeeper2 wrote:Your suggestion to get the records updated is spot-on. It's really unfair to saddle the new unit with all of one's undone housekeeping. One other suggestion I have is to make a backup of MLS prior to the move and one after. The former stake may have a need to recreate the old unit to handle leftover finance issues, etc. I know we left our computer functional for several months (it may still be) with only myself, the Stake Clerk, and the Stake Tech guy having logon capability.

About a year ago, my stake reshuffled four wards and a branch into six wards. My biggest headaches in overseeing the records transfers were missing addresses, and out-of-date addresses. (Relief Society secretaries were most helpful on providing current information - why couldn't they have kept the ward clerks current?) Make sure you have a complete street address, with apartment number, and with apartment complex or dormitory information if applicable.

jwtaber wrote:(Relief Society secretaries were most helpful on providing current information - why couldn't they have kept the ward clerks current?)

They probably did. [grin]

Coming back to my original post a little late in the game. Thanks all for your input here. I still hope that CHQ will NOT make an automatic transfer of our YSA people in mass. It makes no sense to do so for several cases- missionaries in the field, those serving in the military, those inactive young people whose marriages haven’t been recorded yet (although only one out of our ward’s 40 YSAs), 18-yr-old kids who MLS can’t recognize are still in high school (which will be pretty much a mute point after June), etc. etc. But IF it’s decided that by some date, CHQ will automatically move all 18 to 30 single members’ records into their geographic YSA wards, then we’ll just have to "pull back" those who the bishops want retained in our home wards. But one of the main things I was looking for is what kind of guidelines bishops will be given to encourage their YSA people to support having their records moved into the YSA wards. My hunch is that the vast majority of inactive YSA people will be moved to their geographic YSA ward (one way or another), since those wards will generally be more effective at reactivating them.

Much speculation until we get more specific direction. But I agree the focus of us ward and stake membership clerks at this point to is to get the records of our YSA people as up-to-date as possible, including getting those moved to the wards where they’re actually living wherever possible.

I think you've hit on most of the reasons it works better to leave the transfers at the local level. My experience was that the YSA units sell themselves to a large extent. Each year, our RS and EQ presidencies visited the Laurels and Priests in the home wards. They built excitement for the seniors so they really wanted to come to the branch. Now that they are a ward, it's a little more complicated as they combined the YSAs from three stakes. Still very doable though.

When Elders Christensen and Ringwold came to organize the stake, they told the YSAs they had two choices - stay in their home ward or go to the YSA Ward serving their geographic area. The student YSA wards were discontinued. There was no pressure to choose one or the other, just that they had to choose. We had a lot of previously inactive people that came to the meeting and started attending the ward just to see what it was like. This experience is apparently common where ever this format has been done, so it is a good missionary tool. We were also told that it would be implemented in Pocatello (happened a couple of weeks ago), Rexburg, Moscow, and Hawaii. The way they talked, I didn't expect they would implement in Salt Lake this soon, but I'm not surprised.

jhigbee wrote:I still hope that CHQ will NOT make an automatic transfer of our YSA people in mass. . . .

IF it’s decided that by some date, CHQ will automatically move all 18 to 30 single members’ records into their geographic YSA wards, then we’ll just have to "pull back" those who the bishops want retained in our home wards.

I do not believe there is any intention to automatically transfer any records from a conventional ward to one of the new YSA wards. As you have said, that transfer should happen manually when a single member makes the decision to start attending a YSA ward.

I think the only automatic transfer being considered is that records currently in a discontinued YSA or single student ward will be transferred to the newly assigned geographic YSA ward. I do not think there is any intention to automatically transfer any other records of single members to the new YSA wards.

Records of single members in a discontinued ward are already there because the member opted to attend a singles ward. It makes sense to move them to the new singles ward, rather than back to a traditional ward where they would most likely just be transferred back out to the new YSA ward.

It’s a little surprising there hasn’t been more discussion here about this significant YSA records transfer along the Wasatch Front. Our Bishop had spoken with 3 YSA members from our ward last week who were ready to have their records transferred to our new YSA ward in Centerville. So I sent them off Saturday evening, and received word from our neighbor & YSA bishopric counselor that he received them Sunday morning ready to put them to work. Then we met together Sunday morning with the bishopric and went over the remaining 35 YSA members on our list to develop an action plan on discussing their wishes. This process seems to be that it will probably NOT be most effective to identify and transfer all the YSA records from a home ward in one fell-swoop; rather to give the bishoprics time to meet with the YSA members (and their parents when possible) to discuss them.
In talking with our YSA counselor and with our Quorum of the Seventy ward member, there is concern that some wards might be using this as an opportunity for getting rid of the records of inactive YSA people on their roles (the counsler said a couple of wards have sent about a dozen such records at once, some w/o valid addresses). But our Seventy indicated that the “default” for YSA members records (which shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning the transfers should be automatic by any means) is that the records of inactive YSA members should remain in the home ward unless and until the Bishop has talked with the young members and they are OK with making the transfer. Otherwise, they should remain in the home ward.

jhigbee wrote:It’s a little surprising there hasn’t been more discussion here about this significant YSA records transfer along the Wasatch Front.

Just a thought, but I thinks it's mostly because no one still knows exactly what's going on. There are a lot of opinions, but very little official instruction or communication.

In my ward (which got discontinued), the only records that still remain are those belonging to single adults over 30. All YSA records were transferred out (we were a student single ward). I can't speak for conventional units, however.

Another problem that’s come up with this YSA records transfer, is how apparently someone in the Memb Dept has set some sort of protocol for automatically transferring YSA records from home wards to the new YSA wards without their being initiated on the ward level. This has happened in the past week for three cases in separate Davis County wards. In all three cases, the particular records transferred were some of the most inappropriate ones to send to the YSA wards. I’ve reported this to the Memb Dept thru MLS messaging, including my guess that the inappropriate protocol that has been set up is to transfer the YSA records from home wards that are shown as head-of-household.
So a note of warning to watch your YSA records, and be ready to pull any back that get pulled out inappropriately.