Week of December 8, 2023

Hi Clovis Fam,

This has been a full week as we wrap up with finals for the end of Fall 2023 and the end of the 2023 calendar year.

Guess what???? I had no work-related activities this past weekend. Surprise! I had dinner with a friend Friday evening then went to a Christmas musical with some of my Morman friends. I decorated my house with Christmas candles and put my wreath on the door. I have gingerbread wax in my wax warmer so my house smells like baked gingerbread cookies and I am playing old Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston, and Winton Marsallis Christmas music. I’m in Christmas mode. I hope everyone is feeling the holiday spirit and are looking forward to spending time with family and friends. In the meantime, let us all enjoy the holiday cheer here on campus.

On Monday, I had the pleasure of helping to serve breakfast to our students as they need to feed their bellies and their minds on their way to take finals. I cancelled President’s Council to be able to spend time with many of you taking care of our students. I saw deans, grounds keepers, faculty, and classified professionals from student services serving our students. Fabulous out pour of care and compassion for our students. This event was well organized and executed. Way to go Maricarmen and team!

I then attended Chancellors Cabinet where we continued to talk about the great strides being made with enrollment. Way to go Outreach! We jumped in and talked about the proposed improvement to Self Service effective for Spring 2024. And we talked about plans to make sure that applications are being audited for duplication and fraud due to a resignation of a key person at the District Office responsible for making sure this audit is done. The plan is that two people have been identified and will be trained to be responsible for auditing applications for duplications and fraud; they will be available to work over the holiday break, so hopefully this will reduce the impact the resignation would have had on Reg to Go. We reviewed the Board agenda. Clovis is providing the College and President’s Reports as well as both our Academic Senate and Classified Seante Presidents will be providing verbal reports.

We talked more about CSEA Telework Implementation. The question was asked if any of the colleges were implementing “ Static onsite Work Days’; i.e. days where no employee would be allowed to telework. FCC stated that Mondays would be their static days; Madera stated that Thursday would be their static day. Reedley did not provide their static day information since Dr. Buckly was on vacation. Clovis did not put a static day stipulation. In consultation with VPs, we determined that there was no need to mandate a day where no one could telework and would be required to be on campus. We thought that mangers could work on an individual basis with each classified professional to determine the telework schedule without additional limits. However, we did state that all colleges would start with one day of teleworking (if approved by managers) during this pilot period. We also talked about implementing blackout dates where no one could telework; for example, during key enrollment and final exam dates. We will continue this conversation. My preference will be for each area to determine their own blackout dates as it cannot be a one size fits all schedule. IT may have a blackout date to do system upgrades which will be a different set of dates than the business office preparing for an audit for example.

We talked about the backlog of past due evaluations and the need to determine archival standards. I am pleased to say that I only saw two CCC names on the list. We are well above the norm for getting all past due evals brought to date. Recall this is important for accreditation. Great job everyone for pushing to get that these evals brought up to date. We were given a budget update from Interim VC Andy Dunn who informed Cabinet that there was a $28B deficit in the state budget. The deficit itself is no surprise due to the late collection of taxes this year. We will continue to monitor budgets in the spring. After Chancellors’ Cabinet, I attended the F3 Ag Tech leaders meeting. Where they publicly acknowledged Matthew and Derk for their outstanding work on moving this grant forward at Clovis. This is a regional grant that includes 8 community colleges. So it is nice to hear a very public recognition of both Mathew and Derek because they have done a fabulous job working on this project as it pertains to the Clovis part.

The Ag Tech Leaders meeting did not last the entire hour, so I was able to join everyone is serving the student hamburgers. I must say again that it was refreshing to see so many people volunteering from different areas of the college, not just student activities. In addition, they didn’t t have wimpy burgers and they even had impossible burgers (thank you for respecting various dietary and religious eating needs. And ya’ll, they even had grilled onions and three different types of cheese to put on the toasted buns! That how you treat students!!!!! After I left the hamburger event, I went to the Clovis City Council meeting where I had the opportunity to talk to the reigning Miss Clovis Teen. She will graduate in the spring and is coming to us to major in criminology and business. She is also interested in education. I ended the evening by attending the lighting of the tree in downtown Clovis and even told Santa what I wanted for Christmas. I promised the Mayor a Clovis sweatshirt.

Tuesday, I started my day in my ACCJC Team Chair workshop and training I will be serving as co-chair for the Redwood Community College visit next spring. This will be an excellent opportunity in prep for our accreditation visit the following year, and it’s always fun to serve on a visiting team as you get to see what great practices you want to bring back home. I them spent the reminder of the day at the First Annual F3 Ag Conference at Fresno State. We had the Assistant Secretary for the Department of Commerce come to talk to us about the importance of agriculture and the great work the central valley is doing to promote ag business. We then broke into our F3 AG Tech group to talk about concerns with implementation of the grant and the issues with CBE.

Wednesday morning I had an interview with ABC30 to talk about the College’s recent recognition as a Champion of Higher Education for exemplary work in implementing the ADT for the 2021-2022 academic year, and what it means to receive this recognition for 6 consecutive years. I had my standing Academic Senate meeting with Teresa and Galin. We talked about the recent election of new officers. We talked about AI and how to communicate how we can communicate the usage of AI in individual classes; we talked about how do we now define dishonesty and cheating. Looking forward to seeing how faculty decide to move forward with this concern.

I had a special treat. Kirt showed me the art final projects from his class since I missed the art show last week. The students did an amazing job expressing their feeling, emotions, and thoughts. I was most impacted by the student who used his creative voice and skills to express his feeling about the loss of his cousin due to the hands of a police officer. Kirt then showed me how a student used AI to insert a clock into his photos. This led to a very enlightening conversation about the possible uses of AI.

I had a robust meeting with Von and Ryan regarding implementation of focus groups for our students this coming spring. They provided an excellent data driven plan to not only assess the college experience and the sense of belonging among our affinity groups, but also among all of our students. This will help us to further understand or counter the data provide in the Integrated 2035 Plan. I then had several meetings to discuss the Interim VPSS pool and am pleased to say that several exceptionally qualified people have been recommended.

I then ended my day with my Asian American Advisory where we talked about the Integrated 2035 data sets 3and 4, Workforce and Social Mobility and Enrollment Growth. We then used the data to look at the facilities projected plans and observations.

Thursday, I started my day with an excellent graduation planning meeting. Emilee and Maricarmen did a great job presenting the plan, proposed timeline, as well as discussing proposed changes to format to reduce the amount of time that graduation currently takes with the consideration that he number of graduates will grow. They brought forth best practice information for consideration of the group. A preliminary budget was also brough forth to the group. We finished The Commencement Advisory Meeting and went directly into Full Council. Kimberly provided a brief training and update on the new time clock system which will go into effect on Monday for all student workers. There will be a training on December 14th and several more in January. She proposes as many managers as possible try to take the training in December knowing that we are extremely busy in January. We then reviewed the Integrated 2035 data as presented and positioned ourselves to challenge the source and validity of some of the data point as we also talked about future opportunities for the college.
We had a full College Council meeting where we spent the majority of the time reviewing ARs and BPS to determine if College Council would be approving, approving with comments, not approving, or not approving with comments. It was an excellent conversation and consensus was agreed upon for all reviewed.

On Friday, I attended the Classified Professionals State Center Community College District Leadership State Center Class XXII Graduation. I was proud to attend the graduation ceremony along with Kira and Ruben as we celebrated and supported our very own Renee Garcia. Congratulations to Renee for completing the leadership training along with the other 17 graduates. A special congratulations to Bonnie and Katrina for serving as this year’s leadership coordinators and for all their work in designing the leadership class topics and opportunities for this year’s class.

When I returned to campus, I joined a zoom conversation with other college presidents as we talk about the grant writing of STEM National Science Foundation (NSF) grants at Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) community colleges. We discussed pedagogy as we seek to increase the success rates of marginalized students in STEM majors. We discussed the collaboration of NSF with AtD in terms of providing funding as resources to community colleges. We also discussed the importance of opportunities for agriculture and the Department of Commerce. This ties back to our Ag Tech involvement. I hope you can see that we are absolutely well-positioned in all these areas. We had a holiday potluck where there was great food and gift exchange. I brought some creole style red beans and rice. Held back a little on the spice and heat lol. I then went to Herndon where a member of the SCCCD Foundation made a donation to the Clothing Closet.

What a great way to end the week, great food and great company. I hope all of you have a restful and relaxing weekend. As always, I hope that you have a great time enjoying friends and family and I look forward to seeing you next week.

In service,

Kim E. Armstrong, Ph.D.