Board Report - December, 2006

Report from Lane Community College President Mary Spilde
To the Lane Community College Board of Education
December 8, 2006

We will be discussing the budget later, so I will defer my comments until then. I do want to mention that we conducted some open forums to hear ideas about the budget at the college wide level. The input provided from the budget discussions held earlier is posted on a budget forum web log, or "blog," on the Lane budget development web page. On this blog there is an opportunity to engage in discussion about these ideas and others that people my have. Go to "Info for Staff" on the main web page, then "budget development," and then "budget forum." You may read the responses to the original questions discussed, add additional inputs to those questions, or post a comment to a general category called "other issues." Comments may be anonymous.

Please congratulate Dean Bergen of Advanced Technology and Velda Arnaud of Business for earning the fall 2006 Faculty Recognition Awards. Individuals are nominated on the basis of excellence in their work inside and outside of the classroom by students, staff, faculty and alumni. Faculty members include classroom instructors, cooperative education coordinators, librarians, health clinic practitioners and counselors.

If you haven’t done your Christmas shopping, we have great stocking stuffers in the Art-O-Mat over in the Art Gallery located in Building 11. Art-O-Mats are retired cigarette vending machines that have been converted to vend art. There are over 80 Art-O-Mats around the country, and ours is the only one in Oregon. You can collect original works of art from Art-O-Mat artists, some of which are our own faculty. For just five dollars, it's easy to become an art collector!

The High School & Community Relations and High School Connections Offices are pleased to announce that the annual hands-on career exploration day for high school students will be held on Friday, April 27, 2007. On this day, high school students from all over the county can come on campus to participate in interactive workshops in two different career areas of their choice. From cooking in the kitchen to giving oxygen to a mannequin, the students get a chance to experience what life at Lane is like and what they might do in their future careers.

The Integrative Arts Symposium was held on campus last week. This was funded by Rosaria Haugland. The idea is to see how education in the arts can apply to all disciplines. We had 130 educators from a number of disciplines from all over the state. We brought in a couple of people from Chicago who have been working on integrating arts into high school curriculum in the Chicago schools. It was a very successful symposium and put Lane front and center where we can provide leadership for this.

There is a little bit of controversy going on right now about access to campus. Sandy Ing-Wiese, Director of Public Safety, announced some forums about a proposal to install security gates at the east side parking lot entrance so that we can control access to campus at night and on weekends. The idea of the forums was to put this out there and figure out what the issues would be when we look at implementation. There are some who are saying that what the proposal does is to deny faculty members at the college routine access to their offices when the campus is closed. That is not our intent. We will develop systems where faculty and other college staff will have access to campus when the campus is otherwise closed.

This proposal to install security gates comes as a direct result of budget reductions made in Public Safety. We made pretty deep cuts last year, and the reductions were proposed and accepted with the clear understanding that we would have to make changes that balance access to the campus with safety of all of those who have legitimate business on campus at night or during holidays and weekends. We are planning on having gates, and there will be several ways to access either by having a key card if you need frequent access or a call box where you can call and a public safety officer will come and open the gates. We will try to work through the implementation issues, but I want to be clear that when we cut classified staff as we did, we affect students and we affect the student experience here – computer labs is a good example of that. But the students can’t take all of the adverse impact. We as staff here are going to have to experience some change here in order to allow our public safety people, in this case, to do the work with many fewer hours being spent doing that work. If we can’t make changes like this, then the natural consequence is that we have to reinstate that position and something else has to be cut. So we’ve got to learn to change our behavior to deal with this new environment. Having said that, there is not an intention to cut people off from their offices, and we’ll figure out ways to implement that.

I will be meeting with the governor tomorrow when he announces his workforce investments. I’ll try to have the opportunity to speak with him about the community college budget.

On Saturday, I will be leaving for Cairo, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. This is on connection with the work that Tim Craig has been doing to develop partnerships to offer education and training in Egypt and the Emirates. The organization we are working with is picking up all the expenses so there are no public dollars involved in this. Our goal, of course, is to develop a revenue stream that will help the college. The government of Egypt received 250 million euros to pay for career education. The system in Egypt, in particular, is one where there are a lot of private universities and they are only really available to the elite. What they are trying to do is make education available to those who don’t necessarily have money. The community college influence on this will really help them.

I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season.