COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT 9

HIGHLINE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

MINUTES OF BOARD OF TRUSTEES’ MEETING

April 12, 2007

STUDY SESSION

Closed Session

Legislative Update

Enrollment

MaST

Strategic Initiative Report - Winter Quarter Highlights

Re-Hosting and Legacy Information Systems

MEETING

Call to Order

Elizabeth Chen, Chair, called the meeting to order at 10:20 a.m.

Roll Call

Members Present: Elizabeth Chen

Rita Creighton

Ed Davila

Mike Regeimbal

Karen Vander Ark

Attorney General Representative: Derek Edwards

Approval of Minutes

The minutes of the Regular Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting on March 20, 2007 and minutes of the Special Meeting on March 24, 2007 were approved.

Correspondence

Birthday congratulations were extended to Toni Castro.

STANDING REPORTS

Associated Students of Highline Community College

Daniel Nordstrom reported.

• The first Council meeting of the quarter was well attended yesterday.
• Student Leader of the Month is Adriana Saenz who works on the Union Crew and is involved in several committees on campus.
• S&A Budget Committee Chair Renee Reiche has led the committee into deliberations and is on schedule for the budget process.
• Preparations are under way for the quarter including Awards Ceremony on May 23, elections, selection for this year’s Commencement Speaker, and the annual Spring Festival on May 4. Clubs Staff hosted a well attended Spring Club Fair.

Washington Public Employees Association

Lydia Bracco reported.

• WPEA District Meetings have been changed to meet on a quarterly basis starting May 15.
• Highline WPEA Chapter will continue with monthly Brown Bag Meetings.
• Job Representatives met last Tuesday.
• After the Brown Bag Meeting on March 21 the Job Reps met with Highline’s new Human Resources Executive Director, Cesar Portillo, to discuss the concerns of the Job Representatives.

Highline College Education Association

Ruth Windhover reported.

· She explained the importance of technology on campus and statewide relative to teaching and learning and extended appreciation to the administration, Jack Bermingham and Marie Zimmermann, in providing assistance to the faculty so they have technology available and that they know how to use it.

· The State Board has set up a task force headed by State Board Trustee, Reuven Carlyle, to look into the use of technology system-wide. There are only two faculty who are the deliverers of education technology of approximately 17 members on the task force. As State Director of the Washington Education Association Higher Ed, Ruth can appoint one faculty member to that task force from the 13 community and technical colleges that WEA represents and two of those colleges along with Highline are Spokane and Bellevue that use technology in a very significant way in distance education. She appointed a faculty member from Bellevue because Highline’s Marc Lentini, Senior Instructional Designer, is already on that committee. Marc is not a faculty member but he interacts greatly with faculty on his job. Highline is unique because learning is not just the job of the faculty it is the job of the institution and faculty are well supported in their technology and the people who work in instructional technology interact in a very important way with faculty. There is a tendency in institutions to have silos where people don’t talk to other people and at Highline instructional technology people talk to faculty all the time and faculty really appreciate the hardware and software and the human element help they get in selecting, using, evaluating, and updating technology.

Faculty Senate

Phil Droke reported.

• The Faculty Senate voted on approved language for Associate of Applied Science Degree which will be forwarded to the other campus committees to get further approval before being added to the on-line catalog.
• The Instructor Withdrawal grading symbol will be eliminated by fall quarter due to the miss-application and confusion involved with using it. Another way will have to be found to deal with students that never show up to class.
• Junior Achievement is a private non-profit organization that is established by large organizations like Boeing and KeyBank to promote free market and economics. There are K-12 programs and Highline got involved about 20 years ago with the grade school program. Phil encourages his students to volunteer to do some economics with K-6 grade school classes. The students go through an orientation before going into the grade school classes and are required to do five grade appropriate lessons arranged with the instructors in those grade schools that have indicated they want to participate. There has been a lot of positive feedback from the grade schools and the students. There are 25-30 students this quarter participating in the program.

ACTION ITEM

No Action Items.

REPORTS

Opportunity Grant

Danette Randolph, Program Manager for Workforce Education Special Projects, gave a presentation on the Highline Community College Opportunity Grant Pilot Program. She explained that during 2006 the Legislature appropriated $4,000,000 to the State Board to create Opportunity Grants. This project addresses two challenges: deliver aid in innovative ways that suit the needs of populations that typically cannot access or that do not benefit sufficiently from traditional financial aid; and to package the aid with delivery of educational pathways that reach the tipping point (one year of college level credits and a credential) and beyond. Ten proposals were accepted and Highline received one of these grants for $432,000 per year for four years to fund 45 students in the Allied Health, Business, and Education pathways. Ten percent is used for administration of the grant so $388,800 goes into student hands every year.

The target population is students living under 200% of the poverty level and to transition them from adult basic skills, English language learning, and former foster youth. The Opportunity Grant has been able to assist students where traditional aid cannot due to federal and/or state regulations. Recruitment is done through classroom visits to current Adult Basic Education students and current English as Second Language students on campus, cross department education, and off campus communications with Tree House and King County Housing Authority to identify eligible foster youth.

The grant allows for a single point of contact that is a safe environment for assistance, one-on-one advising and mentoring, and financial assistance for tuition, books, supplies, housing, transportation, childcare, personal expenses or any emergency. Baseline funding ranges from $1,800 for dependent student living at home with no dependent children to a maximum of $4,523 per quarter with documentation of extraordinary need. Students with dependent children are also allowed up to $2,000 per quarter per eligible child for child care.

Originally the grant funded 45 students but Highline is providing service for 50 more.

AREA REPORTS

Institutional Advancement

Rod Stephenson reported.

• The Outreach Department brought 450 six graders and their parents to campus for the Seattle SCORES program on March 30. SCORES is a non-profit organization that provides an after school soccer program to inspire literacy in elementary school children. This was a campus wide coordinated effort that complies with the Strategic initiative to strengthen our ties with the community.

Student Services

Toni Castro reported.

• The Women’s Softball season has begun. The Lady T-Birds games are 5-3.
• At the Clubs Fair there are 40 active clubs, one of the largest clubs programs in the state system.
• Tenth Annual Unity through Diversity Week: Empowering Communities: Moving beyond Individualism will be April 23-27. This is a great Highline celebration with co-sponsorship among many of the divisions on campus. Thanks were extended to the committee members: Chair Yoshiko Harden-Abe, Natasha Burrowes, Erin Reader, Jean Munro, Shawn McDougal, Patricia McDonald, and Laura Manning. The schedule was distributed to the Board. Keynote speaker will be Dr. Tricia Rose, Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.
• Student success story – Renee Reiche came to Highline in 2004 to pursue a paralegal degree after being a home-maker. She served as president of paralegal organization; is on the Students Rights and Responsibilities Review Team; is a member of United Latino Association and is recognized as the unofficial “Mom” to the younger members of the ULA; is a member of Phi Theta Kappa and serves as a peer leader; and served as the chair of the S&A Budget Committee. She will be receiving her AAS degree in paralegal and her AA transfer degree and is planning to transfer to CWU.
• This morning 36 students with five advisors and faculty are going to the Seventeenth Students of Color Conference in Yakima.

General Administration

Larry Yok reported.

• This is the start of the budget season and Executive Staff will begin the process April 24.
• Achieving the Dream Program had a very heavy data analysis requirement. The intention was that the Institutional Research Director would chair the Data Team and when Patty James left the College a number of people stepped in to fill that role. Emily Coates, the Interim Institutional Research Program Manager, began the data analysis along with James Peyton, Scott Hardin, Sue Frantz, and Arline Garcia. The Achieving the Dream coaches were so impressed with what Highline has done with the program on campus including writing the proposal that Highline has been invited to present that process in Austin, Texas which Jeff Wagnitz will be doing.

Instruction

Marie Zimmermann reported.

• The Junior Achievement Program that Phil Droke mentioned in his report is one example of an approach many faculty at Highline use called “service learning” where they send their students out into the community to do some type of community activity. It involves the students in terms of learning more about their community in some way or other and the faculty member figures out how to make that part of the curriculum and the grading process.
• The first meeting was held about the Center of Excellence with representatives from the State Board to do some initial orientation. Highline has been officially designated as a Center of Excellence and next week several people will be going to a two-day session event for people from the ten different centers in the state for more information. Highline is moving from a planning stage to an implementation stage and what the Center will be like and the staffing of it. Work is being done on how to integrate the International Council that was formed last quarter on campus to bring together people on campus that work in the international area to coordinate some of the efforts being done.
• The Nursing Department has succeeded in competing for a grant from Washington Center for Nursing and received $25,000 for a simulation and community based learning project.

Discussion

Dr. Bermingham extended thanks to Rod Stephenson for the tremendous amount of work he has put into coordinating and organizing the Gala on May 5, 2007. His efforts are very much appreciated.

He also extended thanks and appreciation to Elizabeth Chen. Elizabeth and Jack Bermingham along with another colleague will be traveling to China next month to continue work on partnerships in Yangzhou. It is hoped that a finalized agreement on a two plus one program will be accomplished at two of the institutions there. This would not have been possible without Elizabeth’s assistance.

Unscheduled Business

None.

New Business

None.

Adjournment

The meeting was adjourned at 11:45 a.m.

Next Regularly Scheduled Meeting of the Board of Trustees

The next regularly scheduled meeting of the Board of Trustees will be Thursday, May 10, 2007.

8:00 a.m. Study Session Building 25, Room 411

10:00 a.m. Meeting Building 25, Board Room

 ORIGINAL SIGNED MAY 10, 2007

______________________________ _________________________________

Elizabeth Chen, Chair Jack Bermingham, Interim Secretary