President Stefani Hicswa offers ‘state of the college’ address

Posted 8/26/14

Hicswa delivered her speech Wednesday morning in the meeting room of the new Yellowstone Building, the first function to take place in the building.

“Take a look around you,” she said. “As people walked in, I heard them say, ‘Wow!’ ... …

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President Stefani Hicswa offers ‘state of the college’ address

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During a presentation laced with humor last week, Northwest College President Stefani Hicswa presented her “state of the college” address.

NWC classes opened Monday.

Among the highlights in Hicswa’s speech was the announcement of a new, $2 million endowment fund, the Forest Allen Family Ag Scholarship Endowment, recently established through the Northwest College Foundation. The fund will benefit students in the NWC agriculture program.

Hicswa delivered her speech Wednesday morning in the meeting room of the new Yellowstone Building, the first function to take place in the building.

“Take a look around you,” she said. “As people walked in, I heard them say, ‘Wow!’ ... To have a facility of this caliber on our campus took a lot of cooperation” between the college, the state of Wyoming, the NWC Foundation and all the people who worked to make it a reality.

While the building is substantially finished, a few last-minute details remain to be accomplished, she said.

“We didn’t have electricity in this room as of 8:30 a.m.,” she added, but that had been accomplished by the 9 a.m. meeting start time.

While nursing students began classes in the Yellowstone Building on Monday, other programs won’t begin holding classes in the new building until Sept. 22. Until then, they will continue meeting in their former classrooms.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled for Oct. 7.

The building that formerly housed the nursing program now will be called the Fagerberg Annex Building “instead of calling it the old nursing building, as if only old nurses study there,” Hicswa said.

Hicswa showed those gathered for her presentation — more than 300 NWC faculty, staff and administrators — a large jar previously filled with rocks, sand and water, in that order.

She said the rocks represent the big, important things, the priorities, when planning for the college’s future. If they aren’t placed in the jar first, smaller, everyday details (sand and water) prevent them from fitting at all.

Those priorities are divided into four major categories:

• Student experience

• Campus community

• Place

• Fiscal integrity

Campus community

“When I asked what tied these four categories together, you told me it was all about pride,” Hicswa said.

She asked each person to write down one thing he or she will do to be a point of pride on campus.

“We will use these points of pride to begin formulating a shared vision and cultural shift for the future of Northwest College,” she said. “Think about where we were a year ago, where we are now, and the potential we have for the future. Imagine, if we keep going on this trajectory, where we will be 10 years from now.”

Hicswa said a recent campus survey showed a 23 percent increase in satisfaction with shared governance from 2012 to 2014 and a 25 percent improvement in satisfaction with senior leadership.

Hicswa said one goal this year is to look at workload distribution at the college “to ensure we have enough people in place in the right positions to meet future needs of the college and respond to incessant external accountability demands.”

One of those demands, she said, “is how we respond to safety issues on campus. ... This year we wil be focusing time and energy on implementing policies and education to comply with new federal regulations for sexual assault prevention.”

A search for a new vice president of administrative services failed this spring when an offer was not accepted. The search will remain open until the position is filled, and Sheldon Flom will continue to serve as interim vice president until that time, Hicswa said.

Pride in Place

Hicswa noted that the college’s master facilities plan update was completed this spring.

To begin implementing that plan, she said NWC Board of Trustees on Aug. 12 gave permission for the college to proceed with engineering and architectural studies for remodeling projects in Orendorff, Moyer and the Johnson Fitness Center.

“We are discussing refinancing Simpson Hall, which has the potential to free up funds to help finance a new student center,” she said.

College leaders also need to consider funding sources for a substantial visual arts addition to the Nelson Performing Arts Center and expansion of the Oliver Building, which houses the welding program, she said.

Pride in fiscal integrity

Hicswa cited several changes that demonstrate pride in fiscal integrity at the college.

• Fleet decentralization, with proportional funding added to the vice presidents’ budgets “giving budget managers more control over spending.”

• A change in policy requiring Hicswa to sign off on all contracts.

• Working with Wyoming legislators to help them understand community colleges’ fiscal needs. She said she recently received word that Northwest College will receive $425,000 in additional funding through the recapture and redistribution process, which equalizes funding among the college districts.

Due to declining enrollment, Hicswa said, the state’s seven community college districts do not plan to submit supplemental budget requests for the 2015 Legislature.

Enrollment

Hicswa said enrollment at Northwest is estimated to decrease by 6.7 percent this year.

“I know you are concerned about our enrollment decrease, as we all are,” she said. “However, it is not just us. Community colleges throughout the Untied States are experiencing declining enrollment due to the economic recovery. ... But rest assured, we have planned appropriately.”

Hicswa said the college did not increase staffing when enrollment reached its peak in 2009, and therefore will not need to reduce staffing now.

“Nonetheless, pride in our fiscal integrity requires that we are proactive in dealing with this issue,” she said.

“I have asked the institutional effectiveness committee to determine what our ideal enrollment should be by analyzing the demographics of our region, changes in our funding formula, our facilities usage, capacity for career and technical AAS (associate of applied science) program development and opportunity for increasing our international student population.”

Pride in student experience

“Pride in the student experience in many respects encompasses all four of the Big Rock categories,” Hicswa said. “It is the reason we are here.”

She said the Higher Learning Commission, the organization that grants NWC’s accreditation, has implemented some revisions.

“We must now document how our governing board, administration, faculty and staff demonstrate fair and ethical behavior,” she said.

In addition, “We now have to document that administration, faculty, staff and students are involved in recommending policy through collaborative efforts.”

Hicswa said Northwest College’s accreditation is in the lower tier “standard pathway,” which applies to 5 percent of institutions.

“This is simply not acceptable,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do in the next three years.”

Examples of successes in improving the student experience include a new weeklong Boot Camp program before the start of the school year.

“These types of courses minimize the amount of remediation students need,” she said.

In addition, “last year’s fall-to-spring retention rate for students enrolled in freshman seminars was 91 percent,” she said.

Hicswa said the NWC Foundation has partnered with the college’s Financial Aid Office to develop a HERO grant to provide emergency funds to help at-risk student.

“In doing so, they have also begun looking at ways to maximize scholarship funding,” she said.

Pride in the future

Hicswa said the college needs to consider implementing seven practices that are making the most difference in community college student completion:

• Mandatory placement.

• Required orientation and first-year experience programs for all students.

• No late registration.

• Accelerated developmental education.

• Class attendance.

• Supplemental instruction and experiential learning.

When planning for the future, “we are going to do the right thing for the right reasons,” Hicswa said. “We are not going to focus on doing better than the competition. We are going to make the competition irrelevant.”

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