College Update

From: Sanford Shugart
To: All Faculty and Staff
Date: 1/13/2006 10:21:32 AM
Subject: College Update, 1-13-06

Hope you'll forgive a bit of a lengthy email, but there is much to report by way of important work underway this Spring. Hree are some highlights:

1. Achieving the Dream - This semester marks the first phase of implementation of important new work to improve student learning. An extension of our Strategic Learning Plan, this grant has helped us focus on closing gaps in acheivement among students from different neighborhoods, ethnicities, socio-economic status, language groups, etc. And it does this by concentrating efforts at the "front door" and in mathematics. This term, more than 1,000 students will be in mathematics sections employing a Supplemental Learning model to improve their persistence and learning. We are also scaling up other models of learning communities and beginning to expand participation in the Student Success (SLS) courses. These three core stategies, developed by more than 100 faculty and staff last year, represent some of our most important work this year and next. Rigorous measurement of the results will reveal the effectiveness of these promising strategies.

2. UCF-VCC Partnership Plan - You may have read about a joint resolution by our Boards of Trustees to expand our partnership to provide much increased access to bachelors degrees for our community college studnets. Planning is already underway to identify many new bachelors degree programs to be offered on our campuses in the coming several years, including the building of a joint-use univesity center on West campus and expansion on Osceola. In early April, another, larger public announcement of this will be made with details.

3. Good News from the State - We recently heard of expanded state support for our capital needs. In addition to more funds for the partially funded Building Ten West, the college should receive full funding for the property purchase in Horizon West that will lead to the Southwest Campus. Also, more renovation funds and funding for an expansion of our culinary facilities should be forthcoming this spring. Most of my efforts with the Governor and legislature are focused now on increasing basic formula funding to the system. These past three years have seen great imrpovements over the past decade for us, but we have asked them to redouble their efforts to restore equity in funding and bring our funding to the southeastern U.S. average over the next four years.

4. Program Development - You may already know that Florida suffers from a deep shortage of qualified school teachers. The state hires 27,000 new teachers per eyar; fewer than 1,500 come from our state universities. Valencia has been asked to expand our efforts to provide qualified teachers to our local school districts. We have two ways to do this. One will be a new Institute to equip persons with bachelors degrees to teach. This will begin in the fall semester. The other will be to expand on our transfer relationships with UCF to grow more teachers locally. Other areas of program growth to watch are in on-line learning, a refocused dual enrollment program with more emphasis on students coming to Valencia's campuses, including some summer programs, and efforts to expand in several technical and transfer areas. In addition, a group is working on ways to accommodate some students on a flexible schedule of admission and starting certain classes more frequently than on a semester system. We call this College on Demand, and at this stage are looking at some limited ways to experiment with options.

5. I mentioned above the final purchase of property fo the Southwest Campus. Negotiations continue for a Southeast Campus to be acquired through a limited land swap of outlying corners (perhaps just one) of the Kirkman Road property for acreage in the southeast. Discussions for a seperate health campus were discontinued two years ago with the decision to renovate the West Campus gym into a Health Sciences building.

6. Enrollment and Finance Matters - Although all the numbers aren't in yet, it appears the college has grown and may grow a bit more this spring. Something in the range of 1-2% is likely. This is good news given the continuing softness in enrollment at nearly every other community college in Florida. Even better is the fact that we are collecting mnore tuition revenue than we budgeted. On the whole, while we still need to be careful stewards of our budgets, we should be well positioned for next year's budget to accomplish our major goals for compensation, technology renewal, new programs, and professional development.

I hope to write a bit more often this spring with lengthier thoughts about the real work oif the college - student learning. And as always, I welcome your replies, thoughts, and questions.

Sandy

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