Weekly Message from Dr. Belinda S. Miles – November 4, 2016
The Middle States Monitoring Report visit was a very strong affirmation of our work to document learning and institutional effectiveness and to advance student success strategies in each of our units. A BIG congratulation to the entire college on all the effort that went into contributing to a comprehensive visit and positive initial report! We must keep the momentum going as we await final formal feedback from the full Commission and prepare for follow-up reviews.
The Student Success and Academic Excellence Summit planning team has collated the information gathered at the summit and highlighted four major focus areas for our work ahead:
- Communication and Campus Culture
- A Comprehensive First Year Experience
- Professional Development (Faculty and Staff)
- Operations and Service Delivery
I invite you to join the effort in one or more of these areas to ensure that our approach is inclusive, collaborative, and cross functional. If you have been involved in past efforts related to any of these areas, your involvement is especially desired and will help ensure that we integrate and focus our talent and effort on achieving the results we seek for our students.
Please consider an application for the Westchester Community College League of Innovation “Innovation of the Year Award.” The League is looking for programs, practices, partnerships, policies, and activities that advance student success. As a college, we are limited to one submission. So we’re initiating a competitive process to select which of our many innovations we will send. Apply and showcase your good work! We need your ideas by Monday, December 5, 2016 at 5 p.m. in order to have enough time to select our best practice to enter into the League’s contest. Please see the attached instructions.
A first draft of our comprehensive strategic enrollment management plan is now open for comment. The planning task force has established an extraordinarily strong foundation for our work. Now we seek broad-based input from the whole community. In the meantime, we remain relentlessly focused on our 2016-2017 enrollment goals. Thanks to everyone who has committed to the mission-critical work to further extend access, ease the pathway for ongoing participation with the academic experience, and continually improve services that are essential to the student experience. I was proud to join a small Westchester Community College delegation during a recent visit with SUNY Administration and present the many exciting ways we are managing enrollment.
And please continue to encourage students to register for winter and spring classes. The list of classes is posted on MyWCC.
Thanks for making it a great week!
Dr. Belinda S. Miles
President