Area Report for Board of Trustees

Good day Trustees,

I wanted to take this last update of the academic year to focus on events and campus gatherings celebrating our staff, faculty and students.  We recently held the Student Legacy Awards reception that highlighted our great students of the past academic year.  A well-attended event, it was wonderful to see students and their families and guests, along with so many faculty and staff throughout the college.  Many thanks to our Student Life office for putting on another special event.

This past week, the President’s Office sponsored a campus forum highlighting accomplishments over the past academic year.  Executive Cabinet members as well as our Deans provided updates on our activities and college goals.  We have much more to do but there has been a substantial amount of progress for our entire campus.  A special thank you to Danielle Slota in the President’s Office for organizing and always providing great leadership to our town halls. 

In addition, Dr. Pham and Administrative Services hosted a budget forum that provided updates on the current and future financial outlook of the college.  Also, there were updates from various areas of campus on how collectively the community is building enrollment which ultimately positively affects the budget.  Thanks to Dr. Pham and others for always providing transparent information regarding our financial situation to not only the campus but our trustees as well. 

This upcoming week, a collection of staff, faculty and members of the President’s Office will be presenting the results of the campus climate survey to campus.  I look forward to hearing from the campus on their thoughts and observations while my office provides next steps to turn those climate recommendations into action for an update this upcoming fall during opening week.

There will be more events and celebrations as now are under two weeks until commencement.  And we will continue to celebrate our students, staff and faculty for their hard work and dedication this past year.

Information Technology Services

As Information Technology Services continues our re-organization to better align with current institutional needs, we have finalized our new team structure:

• Technology Support Services (formerly Customer Services)
• IT Infrastructure and System Administration
• Business and Data Analysis

Theresa Duhart will continue to lead the Technology Support Systems team; Business and Data Analysis will report to Pat Daniels, and we will soon be posting to fill the leadership vacancy in IT Infrastructure and System Administration.

Additionally, ITS is excited to welcome Kael Godwin as a new Data Analyst on the Business and Data Analyst team. Kael joins us coming from Clark College with extensive experience in a variety of roles, and will be working with the team to increase our capacity to support Institutional Research, Institutional Effectiveness, and student success efforts across the campus.

Core Theme 1: ACCESS, Reduce Barriers and close equity gaps to access for all community members

• The implementation of the Recruit module (aka CRM) for Aviso is well underway, and slightly ahead of schedule.  ITS is leading this effort in collaboration with Student Services and other key stakeholders from around campus. The team has already built out our first test Pipeline, new functionality to support communicating with and tracking students through their prospect-to-enrollment process.  The team is now exploring how to best configure the tool to support Highline’s processes.

Core Theme 3: COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS, Create a more inclusive working environment and a more valued, visible relationship with communities we serve

• Jill Hammitt provided an hour and a half training session for the system on ctcLink Student Attributes. These sessions ensure processes are consistent and best practices are shared across all colleges in the system so that we can more effectively help students complete their goals.
• Jennifer Jovanovich and Tim Wrye facilitated Highline’s participation in a day-long cybersecurity tabletop exercise about responding to a Ransomware eventon May 17. Representatives from all divisions across the college participated in the exercise.  Organized by the Business Affairs Commission (BAC) in collaboration with the Information Technology Commission (ITC), the event guided participants from most colleges in the system through a realistic scenario which allowed us to consider our current strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to improve our response stance.  Highline participants came away with a greater understanding of the operational risks of such an incident, as well as some action items such as more frequent rehearsals of incident response and recovery tasks and creating a closer relationship between IT incident response and institutional emergency response planning.

Human Resources

As the end of Spring Quarter approaches, the Human Resources staff is already looking forward to Summer and Fall.  Staff have also prepared for the upcoming Spring Luncheon, where we will celebrate faculty and staff who have made the decision to retire.  We are looking forward to this event and hope for a large turnout as it has not been held in person for several years.

Core Theme 1: ACCESS, Reduce Barriers and close equity gaps to access for all community members

Our recruitment team continues to fill both staff and faculty vacancies.  Mariya Matyash recently transitioned into our vacant recruitment position and has been busy working with our screening committees.  We will continue prioritizing our student facing positions throughout the summer and look forward to welcoming new employees to Highline in the coming months.

Other Human Resources staff have been focused on preparing the 2023-2024 exempt contracts, as well as the 2023-2024 full time faculty contracts.  We also had a very productive Labor/Management with representative of the Washington Public Employees Association.  We look forward to fostering the relationship with our staff union, and will meet again during Summer Quarter. 

Division Honors and Achievements

I would like to recognize Grace Kuhnly, Human Resources Consultant Assistant, for bringing back the Random Acts of Recognition program.  This program allows college employees to publicly recognize their colleagues’ accomplishments, and helps build community across the institution.  Thank you to Grace for reminding us to take a moment to stop and recognize one another’s contribution to student success. 

Title III Strengthening Institutions Grant

Title III accomplishments and challenges for June 2023 can be viewed by reading the linked supplemental report.

Report submitted by President Dr. John R. Mosby