How to make our local sorority legitimate?

[mayor13]

I know this thread is kind of old but I do want to know how to make our local sorority "legitimate", not for the reasons of issues with other sororities though.

Our schools & most schools in the NYC area do not recognize Greek life, at all-national or not. We can have "on campus clubs" that do not have any of the Greek letters in them and the clubs have to be open to all students. (Usually these are used for fund raising and to be able to have a table during orientation)

Recently, we had 3 girls decide to drop with no warning. They did not show up for a ceremony and from that point on stopped all communication. 2 of the girls that dropped were our VP/Pledge Mother & our ritualist. They had all of our ceremony stuff in their possession as well as our scrapbook (with some of the girls personal photos(baby/family photos)) and our sorority position books.

We have done everything we can to try to get this stuff back with no results. One of the sisters has a father involved with the police who said that because we are not "legitimate" we cannot do anything.

At this point it seems there is nothing we can do, but I want to stop this from even being an issue in the future.

I do not know what else we can do to become "legitimate" short of trying to become apart of a National sorority, which we do not want. We have by-laws, have been published in the papers for our charity work and have a bank account in the sororities name.

Does anyone know what other routes we can take so we aren't faced with this situation ever again?