Dear H.A.A. Membership,

As some of you are aware, one of our former board members was recently jailed due to allegations of youth safety concerns.  What many of you may not have heard, were the immediate steps, and now ongoing steps, that happened moments after the news, to prevent such an event from repeating in the future.  For many reasons, those involved, and the ongoing investigation, we had paused this statement’s release, but are now ready to release it.  We hope this statement clarifies our steps, and future steps, as we move our industry forward.  Overall, we condemn any type of behavior that puts the safety of our staff, customers or industry in harm's way, and our hearts go out to all those affected by the current situation.  While we know concerns like this can be found in any industry, we are disheartened by how our industry has been affected by recent events.

As you know, safety is our #1 goal, and is a guiding principle that impacts each part of our mission: to promote, educate and protect our industry.  We’ve gone to great measures to ensure members and our overall industry, not just members, have tools needed to create these standards of safety. While we can’t force everyone to adhere to these tools of education and policy, we hope many put them into practice.  

In 2021, we launched a Sexual Harassment Training video, which has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on our industry.  This summer, we released our Youth Protection & Safety training, dedicated to ensuring our industry knows the warning signs, patterns and ways to interrupt the predatory behavior we seek to root out of our industry to ensure safe work environments.

However, with all the preventative tools, we are aware there is ALWAYS more to do.  Minutes after we and the country learned of the news regarding our former board member, the executive board was actively involved.  We later made several decisions which included: an emergency vote of our executive board and later full board of directors to suspend the board member of all duties, which passed unanimously.  We also approved an amendment to a bylaw, allowing us faster time to make such decisions as the current bylaws required several hoops that we felt were not in favor of emergency decisions; this bylaw will be updated during the next bylaw vote.  We also unanimously agreed to conduct background checks on all board members effective immediately, and moving forward, will be updated annually, each spring.  Unanimously, we stand committed to offering more training to not just operators, but overall membership, to better plan for, educate and be aware of safety concerns, to ensure our industry can be a place of safety.

Looking to the future, we’re working on additional actor training, which includes a dedicated safety arm, and we are continuing to evolve our C.H.A.O.S. training program, which has newly added content that we planned to unveil this Spring.  We’ll continue our own vigilance of ensuring we as the board of our industry are proactive and positive examples to our industry.  We should be the ones looked up to, not looked down upon, and our actions should reflect that.  

We look forward to continuing to move our industry forward, into a bright future that brings the joy, magic, thrills and fun of Halloween, and beyond!

Many thanks,

Spencer Terry, HAA President

Jim Werner, Incoming HAA Vice President