President's Report – September 2014

Welcome back everyone. I hope you've had a good summer and are ready to make our 50th anniversary year one of Lane's best. I am grateful for the time I had back home in Scotland and for a brief vacation, and I'm glad to be back on campus.

First I would like to say how pleased I am that Dawn DeWolf accepted an appointment as our interim VP of Academic and Student Affairs. After a failed search and with our full scale accreditation visit coming up, it was essential that we have a chief academic officer in place. In addition, we will be launching a process for development of a new strategic plan, aligning staffing to enrollment demand and developing a program review process in the coming year. I am delighted that Dawn accepted this challenge. Her knowledge of accreditation, her leadership work at the state level and her deep knowledge of the college, among many other strengths, will be an asset to the college.

It is with great sadness that I share that our dear friend and colleague, Nancy Hart, passed away yesterday. She recently retired as director of Center for Accessible Resources, and Child and Family Education. Nancy demonstrated amazing grace and courage in dealing with cancer over the last two years. She was an incredible advocate for students with disabilities and she will be missed.

I also want to acknowledge the passing of John Paxin. He was on the ASLCC senate last year until he had to resign for health reasons. He died on July 27.

I was impressed to see how much progress has been made on the CLASS project. It's phenomenal. I'm really looking forward to our renewed facilities and services for students.

Congratulations to Academic Learning Services instructor Steve McQuiddy. His book, "Here on the Edge," about a World War II conscientious objectors camp and its members' impact on the cultural revolution of the 1960s, has been named a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. This is a prestigious international award given annually to one book each in fiction and nonfiction. The winners will be announced later this month.

Writing instructor Sandy Brown Jensen has published a review of digital storytelling in education in the September issue of Learning Abstracts published by the League for Innovation. Sandy notes that "digital storytelling is being used at every educational level, from kindergarten to postdoc."

I'd like to applaud the Senior Companion Program for 40 years of helping frail elders and adults with disabilities live independently. Congressman Peter DeFazio, a long time supporter of the program, attended their celebration.

Lane's inaugural dinner in the garden, Al Fresco, was a hit and brought tangible benefits to Lane. Our title sponsor, Ninkasi, wants to do it again next year, and our other two sponsors also will return. The student experience was unique and exceptional: it was their first large-scale event at a remote site. Center staff was thrilled to work one-on-one with the students. And now we have wonderful outdoor tables for future events.

Thank you to everyone who participated and helped with the Eugene Celebration parade and the evening concert at the Cuthbert. I hear the weather was beautiful, and the sea of Lane blue looked amazing! Our entry won second place in the "Judges Know Best" category. It was a terrific way to kick off the college's 50th anniversary year! Special thanks go out to Pat O'Connor, Steve Webb, and Marleena Pearson, who helped coordinate drivers for the Lane bus and ambulance. I'd also like to thank all of our volunteer judges and especially Ty, who proved it's never too hot to march in a parade, and to Pat and Matt for carrying our 50th Anniversary banner.

You'll hear more tonight about our 50th anniversary plans, including the celebration on Wednesday, October 15. We learned just yesterday that Governor Kitzhaber will be there to kick off the ceremonies at 4 p.m.

As of last week, Titan Court was leased at 93 percent, and we expect to be at 95 percent by next week. Congratulations to Jenette Kane and to the Campus Advantage management team.

Enrollment continues to decline as the economy continues to improve. It's great that more people are back to work, but of course, this impacts our budget and is a key issue this year. As of yesterday, two weeks before fall classes, registrations were down 22.2% compared to a year ago. Remember, this will continue to fluctuate.

Last month, the Downtown Center hosted two community town hall meetings. On August 5, Oregon State Treasurer Ted Wheeler discussed retirement security at an event sponsored by LCC, the SBDC, and AARP. On August 19, a panel of experts discussed global warming and options for reducing carbon output while increasing prosperity in Oregon. Panel members included State Rep Phil Barnhart, State Treasurer Ted Wheeler, Oregon Global Warming Commission Chair Angus Duncan, Former State Economist Dr. Tom Potiowsky, and more. Thank you to everyone who attended.

In a first-ever letter signed by the presidents of all 24 universities and community colleges, we urged the HECC to fund institutions at a level that would enable them to make progress toward increasing graduation rates, reaching under-represented student populations, and making progress toward the state's 40-40-20 goal.

On August 14th the Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) approved a $519 million "agency request budget" for the 2015-17 biennium for the Community College Support Fund. This figure was much lower than the $650 million community colleges requested to help keep us on track to meet the state's 40-40-20 goals. We'll discuss the budget in more detail later in the meeting. The recommendation now goes to the governor, and the Governor's Recommended Budget is released at the beginning of December.

The State Office of Economic Analysis released its quarterly revenue forecast late last month. Revenues are continuing to improve over what was last forecasted in the May. While the continued economic growth is good news for the state, we are now $27.4 million away from the "kicker kicking" and about $300 million being returned to the taxpayers, so this is obviously something we will be watching closely over the last few months of the biennium.

The deadline to register to vote for the General Elections coming up in November is October 14. We will be in Florence for a board meeting that evening, so if you need to update your voter information, make sure to do it today.

On July 29, I presented at a congressional briefing in Washington DC about student loan default rates.

The national study that Lane participated in around default rates gives our figures on defaults along with strategies and recommendations for trying to impact that default rate. We don't have a lot of control over this. We can't control much on the front end, and yet we're responsible on the back end if people don't pay, long after they have left the college. In preparation for an agenda item that was requested on this issue which we will have more detail about at the October meeting, I want to share our default prevention plan. Once you get to 30%, we are required to put a default protection committee together and develop a plan. Please take a look at our plan before our meeting in October. I'm also sharing some of the default management strategies that are both in this full report as well as part of our default plan and come back to you in October with specific recommendations. The maximum proposed cost is $447,000. It's a big number, and we can back off from that number depending on what we want to do. We'll get our final number next week some time. Right now we are tracking under 30%, so that means the clock restarts, and we don't have to worry about hitting a third year over 30%. Nevertheless, we will soon get our 2012 number (we're currently dealing with 2010 and 2011) and it wouldn't be surprising if that continues to track over 30%. So we will have to spend some money to try to impact this. One of the strategies is to have the college select a more intensive default management program. This is where we would contract with companies that do this work. Klamath and Umpqua Community Colleges have done this. These are debt collectors, so they are going to go after students who are in default until they get some resolution. There is some impact for the college from a public relations perspective and how we try to work with and treat out students, so it's an importance decision. But we have to balance that with putting the college and other students at risk.

I attended the Oregon President's Council retreat in Coos Bay in early August. I also attended the Governance Institute for Student Success (GISS) at the end of August.

I did a telephone interview with Open For Business magazine to talk about our role in economic development and related topics. Vice President Dawn DeWolf also interviewed for that issue.

I am pleased that I will be visiting Florence on October 9 for a PEO meeting, and returning on October 14 for your next meeting. We will kick off the October board meeting with a 50th anniversary celebration for the Florence community.

The very next day is our main campus 50TH anniversary celebration, on Wednesday, October 15, with ceremonies beginning at 4 p.m. in the Center for Meeting and Learning. You'll be hearing more about that tonight.

Before we start partying, however, we will get our year in gear at fall in-service on Thursday, Sept. 25, and don't forget that classes begin September 29. We will have our Fall Welcome booth up for the start of classes. If you want to volunteer to meet and greet and help students find their way around campus, contact Donna Zmolek, Tina Lymath or Barb Delansky.