Quick Jump to Sections: Committee Reports, College Council Charge/Purpose, Budget, Student Success, Integrated Collegewide Planning, Other Things, Next Meetings.
Each of the participatory governance committees plus some others will be creating brief reports to the College Council and Academic Senate outlining each committee's progress toward accomplishing the college goals and fulfilling the committee's charge. There are three reports in the academic year: end of September (accomplishments of the previous year and plans for the coming year), first of December (what went on during the fall semester and status toward meeting goals), and first of April (what goals were met and suggested goals for coming year that will feed into process of making new college goals).
With the hope of making it easier for any interested person to find out what's been happening, a new section of the College Council has been created to hold those reports as well as a summary spreadsheet that links each committee's goals with the college goals. Each of the reports is brief enough to be digested in a few minutes of reading (instead of wading through pages of committee minutes). Link to collegewide committee reports section.
The charge of College Council was tweaked to make it clearer. There were some tweaks also made to the duties and procedures of College Council. No substantive changes were made that I recall so there is no need to have it go through a formal Senate approval process but apparently there is still some wordsmithing that will happen so the revised duties/procedures part posted on the web won't be updated until after a final okay at the next College Council meeting. Here's the tweaked charge of College Council:
College Council is a collegial consultative body designed to serve the good of the College. The group facilitates timely, factual, and clear communication between constituents and the President as a means to develop recommendations to the President for decisions on collegewide issues, particularly on college goals, strategic planning, budget matters, facilities, planning, accreditation, the Decision-Making Document, and other collegewide matters.
No changes in the state budget. ABX1 32 has been signed by the governor so the possible $10/unit increase would happen for the summer 2012 session if certain budget triggers happen. We are figuring that the tuition fee increase will indeed happen so the cost for summer 2012/fall 2012 classes will be $46/unit.
The California Community College Board of Governor’s Student Success Task Force has released the draft of its recommendations to improve student success in the California community colleges. These recommendations will have far-reaching effects across the state and will significantly affect future state funding priorities so make sure you look them over and give feedback either online or in person to the statewide task force members. A new Student Success section of the College Council website has a copy of the draft of the recommendations, a link to the online feedback, and a schedule of the face-to-face meetings happening across the state. Any feedback needs to be given by November 1st.
Also in there is information about the BC Think Tanks on student success locally as well as an executive summary about the results from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) that we did last spring and the detailed reports of responses to each of the questions. Link to student success section.
We discussed the concerns of the English and Math faculty on the exclusive focus on their departments to improve student success as given in the proposed KCCD Stragetic Plan. Objective 1.2 says "Increase the percentage of students who, within a one-year period, successfully complete English or Math courses both one level below transfer and at the transfer level." Concerns include:
[Full English-Math document link] Hopefully, the college & district will use the objective 1.2 to devote sufficient resources from multiple areas to increase student success in the Math and English courses, i.e., that the district does take to heart that it does take a village to raise the student success rates.
Planning is supposed to be "integrated" but what does that mean? What would it look like? Questions from the Accreditation Steering Committee (ASC) to the Academic Senate, College Council, and the Budget Committee that should be asked of all groups:
The Senate, College Council, and ASC could not come up with a clearly articulated definition of integrated planning that takes into account all that goes on at BC. We do have an idea of what some parts of integrated planning include but not all nor how it all fits together. We don't have an integrated idea of what integrated planning looks like. What are your thoughts? How would you answer those six questions?
First and third Fridays of the month at 8:30 to 10:30 AM.
Last updated: October 7, 2011
Document author: Nick Strobel