Board Report – September 2006

Report from Lane Community College President Mary Spilde
To the Lane Community College Board of Education
September 13, 2006

Here we are again, the beginning of another exciting academic year at Lane Community College. I hope that everyone had an enjoyable summer and is ready to tackle the challenges that face us this year. Since we will be having a work session next week to discuss, among other things, budget development, I will not go into that at this time. Suffice it to say that we will continue to face serious budget difficulties that will call for very difficult decisions. I am happy to say that College Council is making good progress on developing the recommendations for your review regarding budget development. We have finalized principles, criteria, the budget development process and timeline and priorities. Today we had a strategy discussion beginning with looking at strategies used in the past and our analysis of their success. Tomorrow, we will continue the discussion and be ready to recommend a strategy to you next week. We have filed the local option ballot measure and associated explanatory statements.

I am pleased to announce that the HIV Alliance was recently awarded a $2 million ($400,000/year for 5 years) federal grant to create a pilot model for the delivery of dental services for people living with HIV. Lane is the main partner in this endeavor, building on our existing dental clinic. This was definitely a group effort. We were greatly helped with the vision and writing of the grant by Lane dentist Lohring Miller and our grant writer Aaron Shonk. The grant will provide $740,000 in direct support for equipment and staffing in our dental clinic.

Lane saw additional increases in our reuse and recycling rate for last year. The College reused or recycled 60.67% of its outbound material and created $60,374.27 in savings and revenue.

Governor Kulongoski has requested that the 17 Oregon community colleges offer tuition waivers to dependents of Oregon military personnel killed in the current conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several Oregon colleges have already adopted a policy on this. I will be working with the chair to place this is on the agenda at a future time.

A draft of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, also known as the Spellings Commission, has been released. It will be finalized later this month. There are a number of recommendations that, if implemented, would impact the college. We will prepare an executive summary for your review.

Last month, I mentioned that we had paid a visit to Ophir to select sculptures that will be donated to the college. Here are the pictures of the sculptures we will receive. We are indebted to the sculptor, Doug Purdy, and the donor, Mr. Don Pollack.

In early August, I attended my first AACC board meeting. The focus for this year is improving the image of the community college. I think my participation will be helpful to the college. I was given advance notice about some grant opportunities that we are pursuing.

The Foundation is moving forward with planning for the capital campaign. The board has finalized the projects that will be included in the campaign. They are: Health and Wellness Building - $7.5 million; Endowed Chairs - $3 million; Scholarships $2.5 million; and Fund for Innovation $1.5 million. We are now meeting with potential donors and opinion leaders in the community to test these priorities. Over the last several months, the Foundation has also gone through a process to appoint a number of new board members. That process has resulted in the addition of several people that are really committed to the success of this campaign. Our campaign advancement committee is headed up by Tony Baker. I expect that, among my other duties, I will be spending a certain amount of time meeting with donors but that certainly falls into one of my major goals for this year – to generate additional revenue for the college.

We’ve been doing some good work in Marketing. It all began with Lane Preview Night and then moved into Early Orientation and Registration, coordinated by the Student Services area, where we had the most participation ever with over 1,700 students. Hopefully you will have noticed that we updated the format of our schedule and changed it into a magazine format. “Aspire” was a major shift. We are hoping that over time as we work with Aspire and improve it, it will be more helpful to our community in terms of sharing our story with them. We have made several improvements to the website. If you haven’t seen them, I invite you to visit the site. We’ve made several improvements to ExpressLane where students register. We are doing a number of television and radio spots, and all of these are public service announcements which were produced free of charge from the respective stations. We are doing some print advertising in the Register-Guard, the Daily Emerald, and the Eugene Weekly. Lane Transit District buses have signs on the front of each bus and information inside as well. There are advertisements in movie theaters. Myspace.com (where kids live on the web these days) has a link to the Lane website. There is a professional technical program DVD with brochures. We printed 7500 Lane Viewbooks, the primary college brochure developed last year, in the spring, and we already need to reorder, which is a good sign that people are picking them up and using them.

Fall inservice has begun. On Monday, several faculty and Instructional and Student Services managers joined us to broaden the conversation on fundamental redesign of instruction. The intent was to bring faculty up to date and hear feedback on how we will move this initiative forward. It was a lively conversation and portends well for future work. We will be inviting the faculty at large to join us for a conversation next week. On Friday, the Classified Professional Development Team will be offering some sessions. Today, we had division meetings. On Monday, we will be hosting Vincent Tinto, a recognized expert in student success. On Wednesday, we will have Strategic Learning Initiative activities, and on Tuesday we will have the all-college gathering in the morning in the Center for Meeting and Learning. I invite you to attend if you can make it.