I am pleased to announce that Dr. June Eastridge has accepted the Interim Dean position in the School of Nursing, effective immediately. June joined Nevada State in 2014 as a Lecturer of Nursing. After four years in this role, she received her EdD in Higher Education Leadership from Concordia University and accepted a tenure-track position at NSC. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she has also served as the Director of the RN-BSN program.
Dr. Eastridge holds BS and MS degrees in Nursing from the University of New Mexico. Prior to joining NSC, June was an Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of New Mexico, Gallup. She began her career as a registered nurse and nurse supervisor at Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital in Gallup. An award-winning teacher, June researches in the areas of assessing nursing education effectiveness and student success measures for nursing.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. June Eastridge on her Interim Dean position. A national search for a permanent Dean of Nursing will commence in early fall 2019.
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Student Life is Lively
This past week at NSC’s leadership team meeting, Phil LaMotte, our Director of Student Life, and Carlos Navarro, our Student Life Coordinator, presented their vision for campus Student Life. This vision has roots in the student life planning process from last year, and it will continue to evolve as we develop ideas, consult with stakeholders, and integrate the goals and initiatives into the institutional strategic plan. The plan is already is a strong foundation on which to build the student experience over the next several years.
As you can see here, the plan begins from an evidence-based framework – tailored to our student population – and includes initiatives that provide students with a more engaging experience and help them develop into future leaders. If you have questions, feel free to contact
Phil LaMotte.
What Does a Starfish Have to Do with Student Success?
If we’re talking about an actual aquatic life form, probably nothing. However, if we're talking about the
student success platform that was approved in this budget cycle and facilitates proactive advising, E-Alert, student case management, and the referral of students to campus resources, it should be a boon to student success. Next month, the Academic Advising Center will begin implementing Starfish; you will hear more from them and other campus stakeholders as the project moves forward.
Kudos to Kunkle
I want to take a moment to commend Alex Kunkle, our Director of Advising, for being selected as a mentor for the 2019-2021 Class of Emerging Leaders for NACADA (a global organization oriented around best practices in advising). Alex is one of just 10 people selected internationally for this honor.
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Emergency Contact Cards
You may have seen these laminated cards in classrooms recently; they provide a simple visual explanation of how to call the police from a classroom, office, or cell phone. We've placed these in every classroom on campus to ensure faculty and staff know how to contact emergency services in case of a medical or safety issue during class.
We're working on distributing them to full-time faculty and staff for your offices; I recommend placing them on the wall near your office phone, or another easily visible location. We'll determine the best method to ensure they're available to adjunct faculty as well.
CARE Team Certification
Next month, Laura Hinojosa, our CARE Team Case Manager, will attend the NaBITA Behavioral Intervention Team Best Practices Certification Course. Our CARE Team uses NaBITA's
threat assessment protocol (in collaboration with campus police, who conduct background checks and other risk assessments as requested). The certification course will train Laura in effective interventions, risk assessment, and how to reduce cultural bias while conducting risk assessments.
Policies Update
The following policies were approved recently:
- AA 3.1 Academic Workload Policy (revision)
- AA 12: Department Chairs Policy (revision)
- AE 6: Student Medical Leave of Absence Policy
- SA 4: Animals on Campus Policy
These have all been added to the Policies folder, found in the Documents section of the portal.
Do You Have a Teaching-Oriented Publication?
As part of our accreditation evidence, I'm putting together
a list of teaching-focused articles by NSC faculty and staff between 2011 and 2019. I've collected quite a few, but if you have an item that isn't on the list that was published while you were employed at NSC, email me at
gwen.sharp@nsc.edu and let me know.
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Innovation and the Rogers Foundation
This week, I’ve been putting together a report of the achievements made possible by the Rogers Foundation. The Rogers Foundation donates $500,000 annually to NSC, supporting the Nepantla Program, our Writing Center, portions of the Teacher Academy initiative, and our recent pilot of the CircleIn app. This support has allowed us to complete a long list of achievements each year. For FY19, there are too many accomplishments to list here, but some highlights include:
- Continued success from the Nepantla program. If we look at all of NSC’s first-time, full-time students who started since fall 2013, 15.3% graduated in 5 years. However, when we look at Nepantla students, the 5-year graduation rate jumps to an incredible 43%. Leilani Carreño, Johanna Araujo, and Dr. Leila Pazargadi have worked incredibly hard to make this one of our flagship programs.
- Innovative Scholarship from the Writing Center. In addition to providing excellent one-on-one support for our students, our Writing Specialists are also remarkable scholars. Several Writing Specialists presented at national conferences and won awards for their work in FY19. For example, José-Angel Corral-Rodríguez, Eduardo Mabilog, Hugo Virrueta, and Breanna Tavernini all presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the world's largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition.
- Expanding the Teacher Pipeline. Support from the Rogers Foundation helped Dean Potthoff increase the number of Teacher Academy partnerships from one (with SECTA) to four (SECTA, ECTA, Liberty, and Mojave), and we’re just getting started.
If you’d like to see some additional highlights from these projects, take a look at these Spark presentations our marketing team created: (
Update 1,
Update 2,
Update 3).
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Nursing Program Growth
How much has our Nursing program grown in the past 5 years? If we focus on admitted students in the regular and part-time tracks, the answer is over 200%. The chart below shows that the number of admitted students in the Nursing program has more than tripled in size from Fall 2014 to Fall 2018. The orange line indicates students who started at NSC as first-year students - growing from 6% to 18% of the total admitted students.
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NSC Office of the Provost | 702-992-2663 | http://nsc.edu/provost
Be Bold | Be Great | Be State
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