President’s Board of Trustees recap and news for October 12, 2023

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Transcript:

Hi, CMC Family, this is Daren Otten, superintendent, president of Copper Mountain College, here today to provide an update from the regular board meeting of October 12th, 2023, along with the joint board meeting that was held later that evening.

There was a closed session associated with the general or regular board meeting where the board of trustees has chosen to create a subcommittee in which to update the superintendent president evaluation tool.  Historically, that tool has been the same, at least since I’ve been here, and they are looking to update that tool to reflect many of the priorities that you all have shared with them and that are reflective in our goals.

Starting the general meeting, we had several new employee introductions, including Kathleen Jayo-Meads, Alyssa Zarate, David Aleshire, Brian Harvey and Dr. Elle Weatherup.

Moving from there, I wanted to address two other items that you might be interested in. First and foremost, the institutional effectiveness report was shared with the college community as well as the trustees. And many people have asked, what does the administration use and what do we collectively use the institutional effectiveness report for?

While many programs in their program review utilize that institutional effectiveness report to help them fill out their annual program review, for the administration in particular, we utilize the feedback that is captured within that report to update our planning documents, our communication documents and address any areas that become, you know, areas of opportunity where we can focus to better serve the campus community.

Moving from that particular item, one of the other things that the board approved this last week was our campus code of conduct for community members.

Historically, we’ve had a student code of conduct, but I’m very happy with the work that was put together by many people across the campus to specifically talk about what do we do and what do we expect for our members of the public who ultimately show up on our campus, use our facilities, whether that’s at sporting events, the library, free speech area. And what are all those rules, expectations? And what kind of things are we allowed to either allow or prohibit?

So I encourage you to take a look at those particular documents that are attached to the board agenda from this last week on board docs, along with information around all of the other items that the board discussed as we moved into the biannual joint board meeting with Copper Mountain College and with Morongo Unified, there were several presentations that were pretty exciting around what we wanted to share with the Morongo Unified Trustees and what Morongo Unified wanted to share with our trustees.

First and foremost, Jane Kwan presented the RISE program. JJ Santa Cruz presented CMC Athletics, Dr. David Charbonneau and Ramon Abrego III presented tutoring. Amy Woods from MUSD, shared information about dual enrollment and career technical education. And myself and Dr. Patricio Vargas, the superintendent of Morongo Unified, presented a vision for early college.

As many of you know, we’ve had a dual enrolled program that was primarily geared and has been limited to juniors and seniors in MUSD programs. And now we are looking at a way to scale this, starting with cohorts a freshman year and growing each subsequent year, freshman to sophomore or sophomore to junior, junior to senior, in a way that we will ultimately support students through a general education completion path and long term through an Associate’s degree completion path that will align with their high school graduation.

A lot of it is details that still need to be worked out. There’s a lot of moving parts to make this happen, but for our community, it is one of the ways that we can continue to work to make education accessible and to ensure that those community members who want education can do so in the most affordable and most efficient way that they possibly can.

So I encourage you to take a look at BoardDocs for more information about all of the items that were discussed at both the general board meeting, along with the joint board meeting. And I look forward to sharing more information with you all next month.
http://go.boarddocs.com/ca/cmccd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CVPMP45C26B7