Board Report – March 2006

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

We will be talking about the budget later in the agenda, so I will limit my remarks until later. However, I do want to mention that we will be sharing the data we presented to the board in the retreat regarding the gap between our revenues and expenditures with the college community beginning next week. If you remember these data show that our average revenue increase has been 3.7 percent and our expenses, mostly labor costs since that constitutes 82 percent of our budget, have averaged an increase of 5.2 percent. Other presidents in Oregon are using these same data to demonstrate that this model is not sustainable over time. While the Governor intends to carry out his promise to allocate additional funds for education, this alone will not balance our budget. Unless we do something to align increases in revenue with increases in costs we are not going to be able to keep the ship afloat. This may seem very obvious, but I think it is essential that we educate everyone to the realities of our long-term sustainability.

You may have read that the PERS board took a preliminary vote to change their reserves, which will result in a reduction in the PERS rate. This is likely to be finalized next month. We have not adjusted projections at this point until we are given new numbers.

You probably saw in the news that students are concerned about possible reductions in the hours of the Science Resource Center. They presented us with a petition, and I wanted to pass it on to you so that you are aware of the concerns. Obviously there will be more of this in the next few months as we develop budget reduction proposals. It is very clear that we will be making decisions that impact students. We will certainly try to recommend proposals that limit the impact, but it is not possible to reduce over $5 million from the budget, especially when 82 percent of our budget is personnel, without affecting the level of service to students.

The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) recently published a report entitled State Spending for Higher Education in the Coming Decade. I have the executive Summary for you. Basically, this report suggests that even if state and local governments close their current budget gaps with entirely recurring actions, most states will face continuing difficult financing current services with existing revenue structures and will not have resources for real increases in spending. Oregon is one of the 44 states that is expected to have less money than it needs to maintain services.

In spite of the budget challenges, some very good things have been happening.

The first annual Lane Preview Night for high school students was held last week. This is the first time Lane has done this event on campus. We were hoping that we would have at least 300 people; planned pizza for 500, and had over 1,000 students and their families show up. It was wonderful to see so many faculty and classified staff staffing booths and interacting with prospective students. There are many people to thank, but I specifically want to mention Tracy Simms for being the initiator of doing the event in a different way, Karen Edmonds and the team for organizing the event, and all of the students who participated and shared their experiences at Lane. I talked to a mother from John Day whose daughter plans to attend our Music program.

Today we received a $1 million check from the Staton family. They gave us $500,000 last year to create a scholarship endowment and added to the endowment today. One of the Staton family is planning to write us a check for $100,000 so that we can continue to award twenty $5,000 scholarships each year until the endowment reaches $2 million.

Also, I received a call today from a former colleague who is now sitting on a private foundation. The foundation wants to provide a challenge grant to Lane. This is for scholarships for students transferring to the university for the last two years of their education. If we raise $50,000 within two years, they will give us $100,000, with the opportunity to apply for a second round of funding.

Last week, I attended for the first time a meeting of the steering group for a new program – Lane County Teacher Pathways Program. The superintendents of Bethel, Eugene, Springfield, ESD, representatives of UO and Pacific have been meeting to develop a bi-lingual/bi-cultural teacher training program, focusing on providing opportunity for educational assistants to become teachers. Students would begin their programs at Lane and then transfer to one of the universities. This is “grow your own” program. The members of the steering committee are providing funds to hire a coordinator and they want that person to be housed at Lane because students would start here. This is another example of how we can partner with K-12 and the universities.

Two weeks ago we had a very productive meeting with staff from Sacred Heart. We had representatives from Family and Health Careers, Nursing, Continuing Education and Employee Training, as well as Sonya Christian, Patrick Lanning, and Tim Craig. We identified many opportunities where we can work together.

Yesterday, I attended an event at Country Coach with the governor. Lane is part of the RV Consortium which is made up of Monaco, Marathon, Country Coach, Lane Workforce Partnership, and Lane. For the first time, the private sector is collaborating around training needs. We are providing the training. The governor invested $525,000 of his strategic workforce funds into this project. Again, the beginnings of an excellent partnership.

Still on the partnership theme, we are working with Chemeketa Community College to offer a Speech-Language Pathology Assistant Program. You will recall at the K-12 strategic conversation that one of the needs was a program for speech pathologists. We do not have such a program and obviously it is difficult to add programs at this point. However, Chemeketa has a distance education program so we will be recruiting students to Lane to complete their general education requirements, a couple of classes and their practicum at Lane, and complete the rest of the program via distance education at Chemeketa, which means they will not have to leave the community to acquire this degree.

Tomorrow, I will be hosting OSU President Ray as we sign a Degree Partnership Program agreement. So lots of opportunity to work with others for the good of the community and students.

We hosted the Oregon Presidents’ Council here a couple of weeks ago. We shared some of the things we are doing regarding Learning Communities, First Year Experience, Reading Together and Sustainability. They expressed interest in Lane hosting some events on these topics for faculty and staff at their colleges.

Sonya Christian and I attended an NWCCU accreditation meeting last week. There were a couple of people there representing educational interests in D.C. who mentioned the ongoing disinvestment in higher education and the discussion that is going on regarding requiring standardized tests for all college students. This is being discussed in the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Certainly, assessment is a focus of our work here at Lane, but this is just another reminder that if we don’t do the work ourselves, it will be done to us.

Bonnie Simoa, Dance Instructor, was featured in a widely published dance magazine, recognizing her for the work she is doing integrating Continuum Movement into the Dance curriculum. This put Lane and Bonnie on the map for cutting edge integration of Somatics and dance. Also, the Martha Graham Dance Company taught a master class while they were in Eugene for our students.

A national ceramics conference is being held in Portland later this week. Lane faculty organized a pre-conference workshop here at Lane earlier this week. Several renowned ceramicists were at the college sharing their knowledge with artists and our students. We were aiming for an enrollment of 100, and 125 people registered. Thanks particularly to Thomas Rohr, a second-year faculty member and Andy Salzman, also a second year, who put a lot of effort into making this event a success.

Women's basketball head coach Greg Sheley was named the Coach of the Year for the NWAACC southern division. He helped the women Titans win their second straight division championship last week. The team also set a college record. Players Lisa Fernandez and Dominique King were named to the All-Southern Region team for this week's NWAACC tournament. Named to the men's NWAACC Southern Region basketball team were Josh Akwenuke, first team; and Mike Marek and Nick Keith, All Freshman Team. Both the men's and women's teams will head to the NWAACC competition.