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

Hi folks, Darren Otten, Superintendent/President here at Copper Mountain College. This is the follow-up from the board meeting from last week that included both a special joint meeting between our Board of Trustees and the Morongo Unified Board of Education as well as our general meeting.

We started at one last week with the joint meeting with MUSD and we had several items that we discussed, but before I get into the specifics I just want to comment that, you know, across the state there are roughly 72 Community College districts and there’s something like 400 some K-12 districts and I believe that Morongo Unified and Copper Mountain College is the only District where the boundaries are essentially the same across the entire service area and this is really unique opportunity for our elected board and Morongo Unified’s elected board to get together to just you know engage in what are the things that are not only going on but how are we really working together to support the students and the community.

And so with that there’s always some interesting things to learn that a shared from both sides so Morongo Unified’s own Amy Woods shared several updates from Morongo around Career Technical Education, dual enrollment, the Early College initiative, and the Coding Club, which everybody here knows is near and dear to Jim and the college, our students, and all of our student mentors that support the MUSD Coding Club members. What I really want to highlight associated with Amy’s report is the baseline of the first year of Early College. So, for several years now we have been working on scaling our dual enrolled offerings and those dual enrolled offerings obviously are across the gamut of our various college courses, but starting this year at both 29 High and Yucca High, we started with cohorts of 20 students at each institution that were taking classes together that ultimately over the next four years they will complete the general education requirements specifically towards an Associates Degree. Each subsequent year we will be adding another cohort of students, so this year, like I said, we started with 20 students at each of the high schools, so 40 across the basin. Next year, with the scaling of the next class that will end up with 80, and then obviously you see how the math ultimately works and takes us to 160 students all the way across the basin that are working on Early College efforts at the high school level.

First and foremost, this provides an entry into higher education for students who might not otherwise think about Copper Mountain College.
Second, it helps our enrollment, but most importantly it really builds a college-going culture and a connection to Copper Mountain College for the Morongo Unified students and their families, so I’m excited about what we’ve got going on in furthering that partnership over the next several years.

After Amy concluded, there was an update on the Morongo Unified Measure C bond that currently is on the ballot for the November 2024 election and then we moved into the presentations from Copper Mountain College. So first off, Sarah Rodriguez shared the MESA program which specifically stands for Math Engineering Science Achievement. It’s designed specifically for those STEM students who are ultimately most likely going to be looking to transfer to a partner institution for their bachelor’s degree and perhaps further. It is a program I’m familiar with from my days at California State University Chico and it’s one that I’ve seen have extreme – extreme – levels of success over the general population of students who are not part of the MESA program. So I’m really excited to see where that program grows and Sarah did an amazing job associated with sharing what we’re doing in that space.

We followed that up with a presentation by Jane Kwon and Jayo Meads specifically on our new Basic Needs Center. We are obviously really excited about centralizing the support services that include mental health counseling, food supplies – all of the things that essentially aligned with Maslow’s pyramid as we talk about what is it that our students need to grow to learn and really to make sure that they can focus on that effort that they have in front of them, you know, whether that’s in the classroom or in the laboratory, if you’re hungry none of that’s going to work well. So I’m really excited about where that’s at and I am looking forward to a true groundbreaking with our partnership with Find Food Bank once we get the refrigerators and everything in there that will provide all of those supplies and needed support to our students.

So that meeting finished up and we moved immediately into closed session associated with the general meeting. There was no action ultimately taken. With the board coming out of closed session however, the primary discussion topics was really around confirming the evaluation process – the annual evaluation process for me, and then just the normal kind of updates and so the board once again has approved the evaluation instrument with the few changes that ultimately reflects this year’s latest goals, etc., and so that process will happen over the next really eight weeks. What ultimately happens is that I do a self-evaluation, I share that with the board, the board does their evaluation, and ultimately the board compiles that feedback, provides it to me prior to the end of the calendar year.

Moving from that closed session we ultimately moved into the regular session and had all of the normal reports, but one of the things that I really wanted to highlight was this month’s Student Showcase of Jeremy Quinones, and Jeremy has an amazing story of really not college bound and ultimately making a place and a name and a space and really a passion and excitement that he has for education. If you haven’t had a chance to chat with Jeremy about his story I really encourage you to reach out to him because I know he would absolutely share and it’s really an inspiration that he is here and I know it’s going to inspire all of us for what we do every day and supporting our students to get them to wherever and whatever it is that they want to do.

We moved into some recognitions, specifically the Board of Trustees acknowledged the service of Kathy Barger, who ultimately served the college as a Follette employee for almost 22 years, I believe, and in that time has seen many changes over the Copper Mountain College history and really was there through many of the transitions and this is once again, unfortunately, one of the transitions that the bookstore industry is dealing with, that we are not seeing these physical bookstores at college campuses. And so the board really wanted to acknowledge Kathy’s service and recognized her time here, and I know that Kathy will still be around she’s still serving on the foundation board and it’s always exciting to see her.

We moved then from that into our marketing update and Steve Brown did an amazing job of sharing really all of the stuff and whether that’s music events that are hosted here on campus, the Cacti Chronicles, to the various media strategies that we’ve deployed and employed across the basin, both in traditional form and non-traditional form. I know that if you’re interested Steve would absolutely put that presentation back in front of any group here on campus if they want to learn more about, really, the lengths that things are being done to outreach to potential students and really keep the community informed about the things that we’re doing.

As we wrapped up that meeting there were several other board policies and just general consent items and several kind of, you know, new action items around new employees, the kind of normal stuff. With those new employees we’ll be introducing them at a future meeting, but I did want to acknowledge one of the consent item resignations, and many of you know Ed Will and Ed has been our History of Rock and Roll Music instructor and just overall great guy for many years here at Copper Mountain College and also served Barstow College, I know he also serves COD at a time, and just really is an amazing person and we’re going to be missing Ed in his role even though you know he we don’t see him a whole lot because he’s taught online for us forever, it’s still a kind of a loss to the institution.

Other than that we’ll be looking forward for the November meeting and the December meeting. November we should have an idea of where the elections stand at that point, and then as we look towards the December meeting I do know that we will be working towards the annual organizational meeting where the board will select who’s board president, vice president, clerk, etc., as we look at planning for the next coming years. So with that, I hope you all have an amazing week and I appreciate you listening to the latest update from the Board of Trustees.