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Everybody grieves in his or her own way. I tend to be introspective and withdrawn, others need to cry and question, some need to talk and some just need to listen. People cope by springing into action to give blood, arrange vigils and memorials or build 58 beautiful white crosses. Many of us try to resume a normal schedule as much as possible. In the back of our minds we feel stopping life and becoming fearful lets evil prevail, it lets the bad guys win. I think it is a reaction we collectively learned from 9/11, “if you stop living your life, you let the terrorists win.” The caregivers give all they can to others, often at the sacrifice of their own self-care and need to grieve. They often do self-care “on their own time.” I want to recognize the faculty and staff of Nevada State College who have sacrificed their own self-care to care for and console our faculty, staff and students. I have been in a fortunate position this last week to receive daily updates of the outpouring of caring and special actions faculty and staff have made to reach their arms around a community that is confused and in pain. One of the unsung heroes of the week is Dr. Gwen Sharp who filled in for the Dean of Students in one of the most trying weeks imaginable. She kept going as the rest of us became weary, coordinating vital communications, organizing forums for students, faculty and staff to give and get counseling from one another, she attended vigils and mostly, she gave her skills and her tremendous heart to all of us. Thank you.
HSI Grant
On the week of September 25th, you may have heard cheers of joy coming from the third floor of the Rogers Student Center after learning NSC had received $2.7 million in grant funding from the Department of Education as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). The program is targeted at teacher education initiatives. Receiving this outstanding Title V grant serves as recognition of the outstanding commitment Nevada State College has always shown to diversity and inclusion since its inception fifteen years ago. We are equally dedicated to educating highly qualified teachers to serve Nevada’s workforce and address Nevada’s teacher shortage head-on. This grant funding brings together two essential foci of our mission, to educate our highly diverse student population and provide teacher education that is cutting edge and reflects the needs and demographics of Nevada’s families. I want to acknowledge the outstanding work of our diversity and inclusion, grants and business office professionals who have made all this success possible.
Partnership with Touro
Nevada State College and Touro University Nevada (TUN) have entered into an exciting new partnership that will give qualified students the opportunity to complete a NSC Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree and a TUN Master of Medical Health Sciences (M.H.S.) degree within four years. Other degree paths offered by TUN, such as the Physician Assistant or Osteopathic Medicine degrees may be completed in one less year than is typical within this program. Qualified sophomore students will be selected for “The Partners Program” in spring 2018 and begin their Master’s classes at Touro in fall 2019. Besides the efficiency of time to Master's degree in the Partners Program, an added benefit is that participating students will not be required to take the MCAT to complete these medical programs at TUN.
Deadline for Applications for two Associate Vice Provost Positions is October 23rd
Applicants must be full-time academic or administrative faculty members of Nevada State College. Applications should include a current CV and a brief letter of interest (no more than 3 pages) describing qualifications and experience relative to the duties and expectations of the position. Official service begins January 1, 2018. Qualified faculty members should email complete applications to Sita Sales in the NSC Provost’s Office.
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I had the good fortune to participate in a diverse array of projects over the past two weeks, in addition to roughly 27.4 hours of Workday training. Regarding the latter, I absolutely have to offer my highest commendations to the NSC team that helped bring Workday to life. It was a monumental undertaking that periodically taxed people to the limit, but everyone did amazing work and there is no doubt the College will benefit from the fruits of their labor.
Progress on the developing first-year experience initiative (“NSC Gateways”) continued in recent weeks, including a great discussion with our superstar team of first-year lecturers: Nate Silva, Myra Infante-Sheridan, and Dawn Butler. We soon plan to have a strong draft of our strategic planning document to share with the Gateways steering committee. In a related area, we’ve been drawing up plans to promote the success of our cohort of first-year students, including the most rigorous mandatory advising we’ve ever implemented and continued efforts to encourage the completion of core math and English in a single year.
This past week we also submitted our 10-year program review documents to the System Office. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Gwen Sharp for making that happen. Importantly, the Vice Chancellor is so impressed by our program reviews that she thinks other institutions should be copying our approach! Finally, some other key work was rounded out by an ongoing discussion about recruitment goals and activities – including a meeting with our very impressive recruiting team – and a discussion about our communication outreach to new and returning students.
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Grant Management Workshop TODAY!
Kevin Butler, Vice President of Finance and Business Operations, will hold a workshop on Grant Management that will address important terminology, regulations, and reporting for external grants and sponsored projects. The workshop will be held Monday, October 9th from 1:00 – 2:00 pm in NSE 352 (Conference Room).
Seeking Feedback on Search Committee Process & On-Campus Interview Experiences
The Attracting and Engaging Diverse Faculty and Staff committee (a subcommittee of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force) is seeking feedback on the candidate search process at the request of Cheri Canfield, Director of Human Resources. The goal is to summarize trends in feedback and make recommendations for improvements to the search committee process and candidate experience. The committee seeks feedback from newer employees (2 years or less) on your experience as a candidate during the on-campus visit and existing employees (3 years or more) on your experience as a search chair or committee member. The survey is anonymous and has 2-3 open-ended questions;
follow this link to take the survey.
Are You a Graduate Scorpion?
Danette Barber is spearheading a support group—Graduate Scorpions—for NSC employees who are currently in a graduate program and want to commiserate with other graduate students. The next gathering will be held on Friday, October 13th from 9-11 am in library study room #1. Come by to see who else is living the graduate student life and discuss ways you can support each other.
$2.7M dollars… It Takes a Village
I want to acknowledge some of the “boots on the ground” who helped navigate and execute our successful grant application. Edith Fernández and members of her Diversity and Inclusion Taskforce were integral in conducting preliminary research and connecting us to experts in the HSI world who could support us in the application process. The HSI taskforce had planned on applying during the 2020 cycle, but the release of this year’s funding announcement to support pathways into the teacher pipeline and Nevada’s critical teacher shortage made it obvious that NSC had to throw its hat in the ring. With a much accelerated timeline, President Patterson and then-Provost Scinta supported the funds necessary to hire an expert grant consulting team and Dean Potthoff rallied his troops to provide content expertise. Grant planning was a collective effort including brains from across campus: Dennis Potthoff, Lori Navarette, Roberta Kaufman, Shantal Marshall, Sandip Thanki, Pam Levins, Chris Garrett, Nathaniel King, and Tiffany LeMaistre. The meeting of these minds led to the development of well-rounded project activities. Although the grant’s primary goal is to increase the number of Latino students entering the teacher education pipeline, there are many activities that will directly support the entire campus, including additional peer mentors, tutors, course assistants, a pre-education advisor, testing fees for PRAXIS, library subscription costs, faculty professional development related to culturally-responsive teaching practices, and even a line for a Lecturer of Spanish (see Gregory’s update below).
NSC Awarded Another Grant for Childcare Subsidies
Two days after receiving the HSI award, we also received notification that our application to the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program was also funded. The award is for $200,000 over four years and can only be used to provide subsidized child care for student-parents. In the coming weeks, we will be working to develop more marketing materials and information on our child care partner, the City of Henderson’s Valley View Recreation Center. A four-hour block of care costs $20, but will be partially or fully subsidized depending on the student’s financial need. If you know students who could benefit from this service, please direct them to complete an interest form at
www.nsc.edu/childcare. Questions about child care should be directed to
Elaina Bhattacharyya.
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As per the
federal definition, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) is defined as an institution of higher education that (a) is an eligible institution and (b) has an enrollment of undergraduate full-time equivalent students that is at least 25 percent Hispanic students at the end of the award year immediately preceding the date of application. The graph below shows the growth of our Hispanic student enrollment. NSC crossed the threshold of full-time equivalent enrollment of at least 25 percent Hispanic students in fall 2015.
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Foreign Languages at NSC
With all the excitement about our HSI grant, you might be wondering about our foreign language classes. Our catalog lists Spanish I, II, III, and & IV, and a similar four-course progression for French and Italian. However, we’ve never offered a class in French (although we tried in 2013) and our last Italian class was in 2007. We’ve offered Spanish I regularly, but we haven’t offered Spanish II or beyond since 2009. So overall, our foreign language offerings are pretty minimal. Why? Up until 2009, we had a foreign language requirement for many of our programs. That no longer exists. Now, we allow foreign language classes to count as Humanities credits, but we only require six credits, and some of our degrees don’t allow for many electives. Finally, since many of our students are multilingual (often in Spanish), Spanish I often has students with a wide range of experience, from first-time learners to students who are fluent. That range makes it difficult for the instructor to challenge students at all levels.
However, the incredible growth in American Sign Language classes is proof that our students will find ways to take language classes if they are inspired and have a supportive community. If we can find ways to replicate that enthusiasm, we should be able to build up our foreign language classes as well. If you have any ideas about improving our foreign language offerings,
please send them my way.
Strengthening Our Core (without doing crunches)
If you’ve taught a class in our core curriculum, you most likely included a chart in your syllabus listing our Core Curriculum Learning Outcome categories (Communication, Critical Thinking, and Citizenship) and the levels at which your class satisfies these outcomes. These efforts help us determine which artifacts to use for core assessment, which is occurring again this fall. On Friday, Chris Garrett and his team of fulltime and parttime faculty began the process of determining how to assess assignments from our core classes so that they can pull artifacts and determine how well our students are satisfying our core outcomes. The assessment team is:
Zarah Borines, Nursing
Tiffany Briggs, Humanities
Christine Draper, CTLE
Jonathan Dunning, Psychology
Jennifer Edmonds, Biology
Chris Garrett, CTLE & Education (Chair)
Derryce Howell, Communications
Clark Pearson, Biology
Joanna Shearer, English
If you see these faculty in the halls, please thank them for their important work in this area.
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Academic Success Center
Under the leadership of our Director, Cristina Caputo, one of the ASC’s primary goals going into this academic year was to implement a “coordinated tutoring model” characterized by active collaboration and communication with the academic faculty throughout the semester to improve the quality of our tutoring services. The ASC tutors have presented about our services in various classes and have reached out to faculty members to review syllabi, course objectives, and course materials, which helps inform the work of our tutors. The ASC developed a folder on the X Drive where faculty can coordinate with tutors to share syllabi and preferred course materials throughout the year (X Drive: Department Folders: Academic Success Center: Shared Files: Course Materials for Tutors). Several faculty members added their tutors to their Canvas course shells, which has proven to be an effective way to fully engage our tutors with the course materials.
The ASC has seen 27% growth in appointments when compared to this time last fall (386 total appointments). We attribute this growth to the receptiveness of the academic faculty in these collaborations.
The ASC staff would like to acknowledge the following faculty who have actively collaborated with our tutors: Wendi Benson, Shantal Marshall, Zach Woydziak, Serge Ballif, Amber Howerton, Vikash Patel, Nate Silva, Sherrilyn Coffman, Angelo LaRocco, Cecelia Fernan, David Kelsey, Andrew Evanski, Kate Sprouse, Nicole Dunn, Hayley Jeeter, Aaron Wong, and Raul Tapia. Thank you for your support!
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We've had a number of staffing changes over the past couple of months:
New Hires
- Advising: Stefany Sigler, Danielle Johnson, Margie Toves, and Samuel Goodrich were all hired as advisors.
- ITS: Thomas Saia is the new IT technician.
- LAS: Dawn Butler and Myra Infante Sheridan were hired as First-Year Experience lecturers; Christina Squires is an Assistant Professor of Psychology; Katie Durante is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice; Seth Churchman was hired as an emergency Math Lecturer; Heidi Batiste accepted a position as an emergency Business Lecturer; and Heather Lang is filling the interim adjunct faculty coordinator role.
- Education: Vanessa Mari joined NSC as an assistant professor of TESOL; Christine Beaudry is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education; and Rachel Bower is an Assistant Professor of Math Education.
- Nursing: Suchawadee Yimmee was hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor.
- CTLE: Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa Api accepted the role of instructional technologist, while Christine Draper is the new instructional designer.
Changes/Moves
LaKiasha Hollingsworth accepted the position of Director of TRIO. Vincent Nava left Recruiting to accept a position as an academic advisor. Nate Silva (formerly the LAS adjunct faculty coordinator) is now a First-Year Experience lecturer. And Joe Loera is now a financial aid counselor.
Departures
Munyiga Lumumba retired from TRIO-Upward Bound; Anam Qadir left advising; Angela Bossio left Admissions & Records; Chad Cross (LAS-Math) and Donna Enrico (Nursing) resigned from their faculty positions; and with the move to a new Facilities provider, Imad Mehanna and Damon Ford (the former Facilities employees) no longer work at NSC.
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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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