CMC President's Board of Trustees recap and news for March 2024

Hi folks, Daren Otten, Superintendent President at Copper Mountain College with your recap of the Thursday March 14, 2024 Board Meeting.

Coming out a closed session, the board did uphold an employee appeal regarding a district’s administrative determination, so that was an action out of the board meeting.

But then coming back into the general session, it was really excited that the board did stop to acknowledge Marissa Salomon and her tenure status. It’s really fun when we get an opportunity to celebrate one of our own, and especially appreciate the journey that it takes to earn tenure. It’s a process that those of you who’ve earned it fully understand that it is not a given, it is always something that takes work, and it’s a very important piece of academic history, lore, and process. So congratulations, Marissa, for earning tenure.

The board then jumped into their normal reports, and those are always available, full reports are always available on Board Docs if you’d like to review them.

But kind of jumping forward to a couple of things, I did want to make sure that folks understood a couple of the items that were discussed. One of them is the Superintendent President Evaluation Tool. The Board of Trustees on an annual basis has to evaluate me, as you would expect, and that process ultimately actually has 52 different areas that they evaluate me on.

Some of those are institutional performance, state and local community relations, faculty and staff, and administrative relations, leadership, budget, and fiscal management, and then ultimately the goals. And this is something that they do on an annual basis.

They do that in the fall of every year, which does seem a little bit strange, but it’s important that the Board does that because the Board, if they were to ever make a change of a Superintendent President, the reason that they do that in the fall is that they have to notice  Superintendent President that they would no longer be welcome, but they have to do that by December 30th. And so that’s kind of the process there.

And this is really kind of as we look towards some of the things that are going to be coming up in April, we’ve got an institutional study session
that will be specifically looking at the Board of Trustees goals and ultimately kind of the progress that’s been made on this year’s goals. And we’ll be used to inform the goals that they will develop in July.

They do this as a study session, and they do this in April, primarily because they want to make sure that folks who are not here in the summer, when they establish those goals, have an opportunity to participate. So keep an eye out for that. That will be in advance of the general board
meeting in April. And will be an open session for folks to come and share their thoughts with the Board of Trustees on what some of their goals
might contain as we look at next year. So that’s always an exciting thing that’s going on.

Also worth noting is that the Board of Trustees acted to support several candidates associated with the CCCT Board election. And as a reminder, what this is is that the Board election for the Triple CT Board represents the trustees across the state in a central organization. Our Board tends to support small rural college representation, primarily so that there are folks in Sacramento or folks in the system who ultimately understand kind of what are the constraints and opportunities that come with being a small school, especially a small rural school. The Board also advanced contracts for several folks who are along the tenure process.

And so I want to congratulate David Charbonneau and Sarah DeLucia-Morning for getting their second year contracts. Chloe Allred and Roy Hernandez for getting their third and fourth year contracts and Dr. Clarissa Swanson for advancing to her fourth year. Again, this is a process that’s really an important one and is always very, very exciting.

Finally, I want to again congratulate Marissa one more time for earning tenure.

And then also acknowledge that we had an amazing event this week associated with the foundation and the president circle. A big thank you and shout out to all the municipalities and public safety agencies that showed up to support our EMT programs, our CJ programs, and our fire programs. So again, thank you to all the folks who showed up for that. It was a great turnout and have an amazing weekend.

We’ll talk to you all next month.