President's Report – June 2015

I want to thank everyone for all of the work done this year to serve our students and help them prepare for our 50th Anniversary Commencement this Saturday, June 13, starting at 3 p.m. at the Lane County Fairgrounds. It will be fun to see, once again, our students walk across the stage.
A case in point: LCC student and jazz vocalist Sarah Burkhart, who is completing two years of study at Lane with instructor Siri Vik, has won a $50,000 scholarship to continue her jazz vocal studies at the prestigious Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington. She will hold a concert in our Blue Door Theater on Sunday, July 26 at 4:00 p.m. She will be joined by Siri Vik and others who have influenced her accomplishments at Lane. Congratulations to Sarah and to the entire Lane Community College Class of 2015!

We also have other achievements to celebrate this month, including a few I'd like to mention:

• • Our ECE-VESL program has received the National Counsel for Workforce Education Exemplary Program Award. This is our Early Childhood Education for English Language Learners. Many people made this happen. One of them, Rosa Lopez, said Lane won this recognition "because so many people had the excitement and the desire to collaborate and contribute across the silos."
• • Art student Joslyn Jones won first place in the national Student Art Competition sponsored annually by the League for Innovation in the Community College. She won for her sculpture called "Broken Bones" which she created in a foundry class taught by Andreas Salzman and later assembled in an independent study class with Lee Imonen. The competition included 85 works of art. The competition was coordinated by Lane art instructor Jennifer Salzman.
• • Two of our Continuing Education employees were honored at the recent Oregon Association of Community and Continuing Education conference: Kathy Calise was recognized for her outstanding contributions to the field. Kathy spearheaded a workgroup representing 10 of the 17 noncredit divisions of the Oregon community colleges to allow them to give noncredit training certificates. Kathy has worked tenaciously on this effort for the last two years and HB 2410 is now working its way through the current legislative session and has passed both the House and Senate Committees. Nick Chrones, Licensed Massage Therapist and instructor, was honored as Educator of the Year in Professional and Career Training. Nick has taught at Lane since 1990. He has also volunteered many hours to participate on the Oregon Board of Massage Therapists Education Committee and Chaired the Scope of Practice Committee and the multi-discipline task force.
• • The President's Circle Awards for Philanthropy were announced by the Foundation. The Individual Award went to Doug McKay of McKay Commercial Properties. Doug has made significant contributions to capital improvements at Lane, and has donated generously to scholarships. The Corporate Award was presented to The Papé Group. They sponsor our annual Harvest Dinner, contribute to scholarships at LCC, and have provided equipment to our Flight Technology, Construction Technology, and Diesel Technology programs. Finally, the Foundation Award was awarded to the Coeta & Donald Barker Foundation which has supported LCC students and programs for more than 30 years. They endowed a scholarship for nursing students in 2010 and recently awarded a grant to create a veteran-specific student handbook and orientation.
• • Congratulations to our Faculty Recognition Award winners for spring 2015. They are nursing instructor Doug Iley McCready, and Electronic Technology instructor Terry Dale.
• • I also have three Classified Employee of the Month Award winners to announce. Congratulations to Karen Wygle, administrative coordinator for Enrollment & Student Financial Services, Employee of the Month for April; Lori Kramer, degree evaluator for Enrollment & Student Financial Services, Employee of the Month for May; and Leilani Perez-Mayo, lead department coordinator for English as a Second Language, Employee of the Month for June.

I wanted to note that at your place you have the latest version of Denali. They did a different Denali this year, really focusing on the written word. Many of the Denalis in the past have been on visual images, but it is really focused on writing this time.

Finally, hats off to the many deserving employees we celebrated at our annual Employee Recognition Gala on May 19. These included 52 retirees, one 40-year, five 30-year, thirty 20-year, and forty-six 10-year employees. We really are a "Baby Boomer" college.

The Foundation recently produced a video about the transformation of the Center Building into the Center for Learning and Student Success. The video will help inform the community and donors how this resource will help transform the student learning experience. You can view it online at lanecc.edu/foundation/class-project

Lane has received a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities grant to host an Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute July 13-17. Twenty-nine participants, including three from Lane, were chosen from a pool of more than 70 national applicants. Lane English faculty members Lynn Tullis, Drew Viles and Jennifer Von Ammon will join four other Oregon community college faculty at the institute. It is hoped that we can help build a statewide community of practice for digital humanities at community colleges nationwide. Kudos to Anne McGrail who will direct the institute.

Our Culinary and Hospitality Management Program is hosting the Iron Chef Eugene competition this year. The first heat was May 31. The next two heats are June 16 and July 6. Proceeds will help fund our Culinary and Hospitality Management program. I was there to judge the first heat. Our students and staff prepared a great meal. The final meal will be prepared by the chef from Koho Bistro.

We're all looking forward to our summer plans, and I hope you can include the Second Annual Al Fresco dinner in the Learning Garden. It's a fundraiser for the Center for Meeting and Learning. The dinner will be Wednesday, July 29, including cider and food pairings, music, and a silent auction and a family style meal designed by culinary students paired with selections from event sponsor WildCraft Cider.

Registrations for summer term two weeks before classes begin, is down 18.7% compared to the same time last year.

I'd like to ask Brett to come to the podium and provide you with an update on what's happening in Salem.

Brett Rowlett, Director of Governmental and Community Relations:
HECC announced on Monday that they hired a new executive director for Community Colleges and Workforce Development. They chose Dr. Daniel Finley who is a Division Dean at PCC. He understands community colleges well. He has his PhD from Oregon State, a Master's from Portland State, and a Bachelor's from Willamette. He has attended all three sectors and he understands education well.

We are hearing good news regarding the budget – good news if you think 550 is a good number – we are fairly confident that we will land at $550 million. There's talk of a budget note that would require the $15 million additional will be used for Career Technical, but that won't be difficult for us to do.

Free community college tuition has been in the news quite a bit lately. About half the legislators would like to see this go through. The Oregon Community College Association has done a great job of getting the proponents of this to understand that it wasn't really helping low income students. What they are proposing if this moves forward was a $1,000 dollar additional waiver for low income students so they would benefit from this program. The talk right now is there are a couple of different possibilities. It looks like if something moves forward it will be in the $10 million range. The Senate will call this a pilot program. They are very aware that this is not enough money to give free community college tuition to everyone.

You have heard a lot of news regarding a kicker reform effort led by Representative Tobias Reed from the Portland area. He is trying to get the kicker revenue, $472 million, invested in education and put into the Rainy Day fund. There is a lot of support, but I don't think he will have the super majority vote that is necessary to move something like that forward. It could show up on the ballot next year.

The paid sick leave policy bill advanced today. It passed the Senate and now moves to the House.

The big issue in the Accelerated Learning Bill has been around fifth-year programs for high schools. We have a 4J fifth-year program on the Lane campus, so we are impacted by this conversation. The concern is that as these programs are adopted by more districts, the cost will continue to grow. Right now it is in the tens of millions of dollars as part of the state school fund, but if every district in Portland is considering it, the program would need a lot more money. That puts us in a tough position to decide whether to support it or not. We would get some of the revenue, but it will come at the expense of the community college support fund in the future if they need to come up with $200 million to pay for this program.

It was announced on Monday that interest rates for student loans would be lowered next year. Not a lot, but .37 percent, so that does add up for our students. It's based on the value of ten-year treasury notes.

The Department of Education proposed some rule changes for how cash management will be handled on campuses. It's something that we will follow closely. It will mean that it will be more expensive in the future to disperse financial aid to students. Students will have to go through some more steps, but many of the proposed changes that are moving forward benefit students. It's more protection and privacy, but at the same time if students don't ask for their debit card in a timely manner, that can delay how long it takes for them to get their student aid payments at the beginning of the term. We will watch those rules. They should be finalized over the summer and put into place for the following school year. As our contract with our current provider concludes in 2017, Higher One may want to redo our contract once these rules are put in place.