I was a sunbeam teacher, then a nursery leader, now Primary Secretary. I can't tell if it's a promotion or a demotion. :thumbs_up: Problem is, I've always been a president or counselor.... what do secretaries do??

I find myself not doing much and I feel bad, but don't know what else to be doing. I take role, make assignments for prayers/talk/scripture... that's pretty much it!

Our presidency is kind of disorganized, so I guess I'm looking for good ideas to keep us on track and have a really great primary.

Anyone else work in Primary?

I work in Primary. I'm actually the president and I have amazing counselors. We have a secretary, but she's totally inactive, so the second counselor fills in. She was the secretary in the last presidency, so she really knows her stuff. Here's some of what our secretary role includes:

• take roll, including submitting it to the clerk quarterly
  
• check if we have any birthdays
  
• take minutes during our presidency meetings and write them up afterwards, email them to the presidency
  
• take a turn in the sharing time and conducting rotation
  
• keep track of who has prayed and given talks
  
• helps us photo copy children's talks so we have something to go from to write the program this summer.
  
• each month puts up the new theme, gospel standard, scripture of the month, and article of faith on our bulletin board. She also keeps track of which one to do next.
  
• subs in nursery when needed.
  

Some other things you could do:

• Write and mail notes to the kids who are missing
  
• My sister's Primary Secretary makes a monthly newsletter for the kids' families. It includes the words for the song they are working on that month, assignments for the kids, etc.
  

Really, you can just look for what stresses the president/counselors out and try to help alleviate that any way you can. When I became RS secretary the Stake people told us (a group with the same calling being trained) that we could make or break our presidencies by how we helped or not. So I've always taken the secretary role very seriously.

That sounds like way more than I do! I'm an incredibly organized person, which is seems like my President lacks, so it seems like in that way I can definately compliment the team so to speak. The monthly newsletter sounds like an awesome idea!

I'm going to suggest the notes to the missing kids too... our ward has traditionally struggled with attendance, that seems like a great thing.

I'm the primary Secretary in our ward. I do everything mentioned above but I don't conduct opening exercises or sharing times. One thing I do that wasn't on the list is I help the President keep track of the budget and make sure we don't overspend.