Learn To Love The Star Tracker

The Star Tracker is published twice a month to provide a report of how councils are progressing towards the Supreme award, the Star Council Award, and the State Council awards, the Lone Star Awards for Excellence.

The Tracker is simply a tool that pulls together all the various reports from their myriad sources and presents them in one place. As such, the Tracker just “reports the news” and saves you the time and effort of looking everything up yourself. We do not keep track of Forms 185 submitted – we report what Supreme has approved. We don’t keep track of who is Safe Environment compliant – Supreme does (or should, as this year has progressed).

So when the Tracker comes out and shows a certain form has not been submitted, telling me your council is complaint and saying “fix your Tracker” doesn’t get us anywhere. The official report from Supreme, who is the official source of data, is saying it has not been received. If I “fixed” the Tracker, your form would still be missing at Supreme. Instead, we need to help look into why the form is showing as missing.

For the State awards, I have latitude in giving credit to councils if mistakes are made at Supreme. For instance, I know the office that reviews and approves audits is woefully behind because of new software they are using. It also appears some submitted audits are straight up lost.

But once again, if an audit is showing as not received 2 months after submittal, sending me an e-mail telling me to “fix my Tracker” does us no good. The audit likely needs to be resubmitted to Supreme at this point. And I will give credit towards the Lone Star Award since I control that.

Please open the Tracker each month and check your councils. When I send out a report in late October on status of Forms 365 and a DD contacts me and says “what do you mean they’re missing?” – well, he’s basically telling me he hasn’t opened the Star Tracker all year since it’s shown that form missing since July.

We have made the Tracker easy to use and you can check your council’s status in about 30 seconds. Simply open the Excel file – it will open to the Council Report Tab. Click on the yellow field, type in the council number, hit <enter> and a complete report pops up for that council. That report can be printed and carried to a meeting – it can be saved as a PDF and e-mailed.

There is also a PDF of the full Tracker sent each month, but it’s more laborious to use and hard to read if printed. Even if you have never opened Excel before, it will make your life much easier to use it. If need be, get one of your grandkids to show you how to use Excel. Nothing youngsters like better than teaching Granpa how to do something.

As always, me and my team are ready to aid you in whatever way we can. We want every council in Texas to be strong and vibrant examples of Fr. McGivney’s vision.

Keep up the good work and VIVAT JESUS!