Academic Senate President’s Report to the Board

Meetings:

Superintendent/ President Laguerre and I met this week and had a chance to catch up on some housekeeping items such as bringing Strategic and Operational proposals forward to Shared Governance, sending faculty to the ASCCC Equity and Diversity Institute, reinstating the Senate budge, and the job description for the Dean of Library and Student Success. I think of substantial importance as well was Dr. Laguerre's commitment to include faculty in future discussion about the Vallejo expansion. He explained the current set-up and the need for a community based group (the Vallejo Expansion Committee) that would vet and then report out to an internal group that would include faculty voices. While this did not occur seamlessly this time and is a somewhat mute point since it seems this particular deal has gone sour, I look forward to working with Dr. Laguerre to appoint faculty to an internal group that as yet needs to be created. Having productive dialogue with effected constituents is vital. These are the standards of "institutional planning and institutional effectiveness" that we will live and die by (or rather get on or off sanctions for) with ACCJC. We also spoke about the College's continued commitment to build a new library. As I'm sure you recall, the Board passed a resolution on June 24^th (agenda item 8.a) in support of a Final Project Proposal (FPP) to build a new library and to renovate the theater basing its decision to go forward with the FPP relying on Measure G funds that we had thought the College would use as 50% matching funds. Since that time it has since come to light that those Measure G monies were already encumbered. I was glad to hear of Dr. Laguerre's strong commitment to "making it happen" and to not lose our place in the "line" at the state for this project.

Dr. Steinback and I have met to continue our planning for the next accreditation report. I know that she is on the agenda so I won't steal her thunder.

I was also a member of a TRIO grant writing committee with Joe Conrad, Erin Vines, Arturo López, Philip Andrieni, Jerry Kea, Rob Simas, Shirley Lewis, and Nora O'neil. The grant is designed to serve first generation, low income students. We are hopeful that our efforts will provide the funding necessary to serve these students at Solano.

Dr. Jensen was back on campus to give a workshop on enrollment management. As the College faces even harder economic times, understanding the relationship between enrollment management, the budget, and our ability to best serve our students is critical.

As Senate President I was asked to help lead the college with Rob Simas and Dr. Robert Jensen in discussion about our Strategic Plan (the mission, vision, core values, and strategic goals and objectives.) You'll be pleased to know that we were able to pull together both the internal and external groups and have quite a bit of information to synthesize. Without going into too much detail I would say that the discussions were very honest and direct. In particular with the internal group, those present were able to clearly identify the College's current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and then articulated some very self-reflective observations that lead to the re-vamping of our Strategic Goals. The external group, too, provided some very useful insights and perspective, at times in harmony and at times in conflict with the internal group, to the discussion. Our commitment to all of those present is to synthesis their comments and to report back out the "new and improved" Solano Community College Strategic Plan. (Many thanks to Ross Beck, Director, Public Relations, Marketing and Communications and Tracy Schneider, English professor and Learning Outcomes Assessment Coordinator). I would say, however; that at the end of the day, the work we did over the last week or so is the easy part. Solano is very good at making plans (ACCJC even commented on this) but what we are not so good at is implementation and evaluation. While the College should be glad that Dr. Laguerre made a commitment to follow-through in these areas, I think that the responsibility lies with the campus community. We should be holding ourselves accountable to do what we say we are going to do and then to continually evaluate our efforts.

Senate Business

The Senate held a special meeting with our educational administrators on November 30^th and then did not meet during our regularly scheduled December 7^th meeting.