Board Report - June 2008

It is hard to believe that this is the last regular board meeting of the academic year. The year has simply flown by. I will be glad to finalize the budget for next year even though it doesn’t allow us to do all the things we need to do for our students, our employees and our community. I think everyone is looking forward to a slightly slower pace, time to regroup and get ready for the new year.

Since the last meeting we have held three Community Conversations in Elmira, here on campus, and in Junction City. Thanks to Pat A., Susie and Tony for hosting and to Bob for attending. This concludes the conversations for this year. We will be compiling all the raw data and organizing them into themes for further review by the board. We might want to think about what other avenues for community engagement we want to consider, such as having some strategic conversations with representative groups, such as the social service sector, small business, and the like.

The National Institute for Leadership Development held one of their programs here in Eugene, and we had women from all over the country participate. Several came to our Culinary and Hospitality program Classical Cuisine dinner and were very impressed. Speaking of Classical Cuisine, our students did a great job serving 400 people a wonderful meal and sending off into retirement one of our Hospitality instructors, Duane Partain.

We held an Employee Gala where we honored a number of 10, 20 and 30 year employees and wished our retirees bon voyage.

We hosted over 950 elementary school children here for the Gift of Literacy organized by Springfield schools. Each child received their own book and guest readers read to the kids. Pat A., Susie and I all read. It was really fun and exciting.

If you haven’t directed your attention to the southwest corner of campus, please do so. You will see that the logs, donated and blessed by the Coquille tribe, are put in place. You can already begin to see the Longhouse take shape.

John Wykoff from the Oregon Community College Association (OCCA) came to the college last week to start development of legislative action. Thanks to Bob Ackerman, Pat Albright and Susie Johnston for being there, as well as Bob Baldwin, Josh Canaday and Trillium Starchild. It was a productive meeting with some follow up to be done.

I hope you saw the two articles regarding the nursing shortage in the Register-Guard. Also, my op-ed piece yesterday to let people know we are not just sitting on our hands but are aggressively working to address the problem.

I do want to mention that I am very grateful to the classified staff and their union leadership and the management group for settling the classified contract and the management agreement. It will be good for the college to have that behind us so that we can focus on the work of serving students.

There are a number of end of year activities and celebrations – GED and graphic design this afternoon; Women in Transition tomorrow night; Media arts and Multimedia tomorrow night; Dental Hygiene on Saturday; Nursing pinning on Sunday and, of course, graduation on Saturday.

Finally, it is with great pride that I introduce two of our students who received awards in the League for Innovation National Student Art Competition. The First Place Best of Show was awarded to Deborah Taube for an untitled wood sculpture. Honorable Mentions were given to 8 student artists including Linda D'Agosto Yaeger for an oil piece titled "It's Not Simple." Under the leadership of San Diego City College, the competition included more than 90 works of art from League colleges. We are so very proud of our students’ work, and our thanks go to Arts Instructor Adam Grosowsky for organizing the Lane student submissions to the League for Innovation.