Area Report for Board of Trustees

The Academic Affairs Division continues to do amazing work through innovative programming, faculty achievements, and strengthened partnerships. These efforts continue to reflect Highline’s commitment to our mission and our students’ success.

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

• Engineering Transfer Mentorship Program: Using grant funding from the Community College Research Initiatives at UW, the physics and engineering departments at Highline have continued to operate our peer mentorship program for transfer students. Highline alums from UW-T are matched with current Highline students to get personalized help and support in the transfer process. The program incorporates professional development around preparation for engineering careers and transfer success, as well as providing a strong sense of community for our students. In addition, student mentors and mentees take multiple trips to visit UW-T research labs, career events, and research showcases. This year the cohort consists of 18 Highline students which is twice the number as last year. Many of our mentees last year who successfully transferred are now mentoring Highline students. Photo: mentors and mentees learning to solder using robot badge kits in our Makerspace

• Informed Math Placement: Terry Meerdink (Math) and Kate Skelton (Math) moved Informed Math Placement (IMP) that we created a year ago to an open state platform (David Lippman, creator of WAMAP designed which is called Directed Self Placement, DSP) that us and others requested the state have developed which allowed us to improve screen reader accessibility for the math content. In this process, we also helped the creator of this state program work out some initial issues with the program and also provided suggestions, many which were incorporated into the program for overall improvement of it for others that might use it in the future. Multiple advisors have mentioned how they had advisees that kept putting off taking math and with the addition of IMP, they were able to get them placed and registered for courses.
• Data Science Education: A statewide initiative led by SBCTC aims to expand access to data science education through the development of a standardized “introduction to data” course. Proposed with a new DATA& prefix and a common course number (101), the course is designed to be transferable and potentially satisfy the Quantitative and Symbolic Reasoning (QSR) requirement under the Direct Transfer Agreement (DTA). Helen Burn (Math Faculty) has been leading efforts at Highline College and is submitting the common course number proposal to the Articulation and Transfer Council (ATC) this fall. As universities across Washington develop data science degrees and minors, this initiative offers an opportunity to align learning outcomes from K-12 through community college and into four-year programs, supported by strengthened high school standards, teacher development, and dual enrollment options.

Core Theme 2: STUDENT LEARNING, Increase educational success, collaborate to improve

• Highline’s 1^st Ever Student Learning Showcase: On Jun 6th, Highline held its first Student Learning Showcase and Celebration. The showcase is a place where students could present (or display) any project they have completed in their classes over the past academic year as a way to celebrate learning, build students’ confidence around their achievements, and create a place where students can interact across classes/disciplines. We had projects on everything from quantum physics to 3D printing to Multimedia and Research for Gender Studies and Decolonizing Research and Digital Technology. The Nursing Quarterly Senior Capstone Poster Project Presentations were also part of the celebration. A big thank you to Aaron Ottinger, Christine Couch, Aleya Dhanji, Deb Moore, Steven Simpkins, Laura Sposato, Kristen Raine and Eric Baer for their help in organizing the event. (photos: Student Showcase 2025 Photos – CUREs at Highline – Google Drive)
• Accessibility Resources: Achieve students are reaching their program completion and career goals. 95% of Achieve students successfully completed their certificates in 2025 and 69% are already employed. 83% percent of eligible 2024 graduates are still employed 1-year post graduation. We are excited to have 58 Achieve students this year, who are dually enrolled in 11 local school districts and 1 tribe. Achieve students are also completing 100 hour paid internships through a grant with Foundry10, with 15 completed, 7 in progress, and more in the works.
• Geology 103 Excavation: Stephaney Puchalski (P&AS Lab Tech) printed a life-size 3D printed skeleton of a baby T-Rex that the GEO103 students “excavated” and started to assemble in Spring quarter. Over the summer, she finished the assembly. The skeleton will be on display in the Geology classroom (29-342).

• Highline’s AI thinktank is representing Highline at the AAC&U institute regarding AI, Pedagogy and Curriculum development. This is a year-long commitment.
• Networking Lab Rebuild: Student volunteers and the CIS lab sysadmin rebuilt the infrastructure in the networking lab in early July. Modernizing the equipment was identified as a priority by the CIS Advisory Board and ITS funded the update. The CIS instructor redesigned the classroom layout around pods, then students rebuilt each rack, the workstations connected to them, and reprogrammed each router and switch to validate that they will work for future classes.

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

• Stephaney Puchalski (P&AS Lab Tech) gave an impromptu tour of teaching resources in the physics and geology lab spaces for a group of Vietnamese visitors that Josh Gerstman, IA, was escorting around campus (July 7th).
• Fossil Frenzy Dinosaur Youth camp: The Discovery Academy camp (Continuing Education Department partnered with Green River Community College) was hosted in the Highline ThunderLab MakerSpace and supported by Stephaney Puchalski (P&AS Lab Tech).
• Success Foundation Workforce Discovery Lab: IA hosted 30 high school students and their adult chaperones at the Highline ThunderLab MakerSpace on August 12th. Stephaney Puchalski (P&AS Lab Tech) led a 2-hour workshop where students learned about electrical circuits and then creatively applied that knowledge to make LED lighted badges using 3D pens and conductive filament.
• Bring Your Kids to College: Monthly outreach Saturdays sponsored by the Pure & Applied Sciences division continued through the summer. STEM topics rotate each month and we had two new themes created by Stephaney Puchalski (P&AS Lab Tech) in coordination with P&AS faculty: “Digital Discovery Zone” in June that was developed by Aaron Hayden & Emma Kong (Computer Information Systems/Computer Science Faculty), and Space Physics was developed by Aleya Dhanji (Physics Faculty). Over the last 3.3 years, we have hosted 35 workshops with a total number of participants exceeding 1600.
• Allison Green (English Faculty) has been reviewing literary fiction for a project called “100 Notable Small Press Books.” After reading a number of books, I forwarded reviews of three of them to a committee that will choose the final one hundred. In November, a national literary publication will publish the list.

Core Theme 4: CULTURE & CAPACITY: Promote a campus culture which fosters equity and inclusivity supporting employee growth and development, and institutional capacity for transformation

• Eric Baer (Geology Faculty) co-convened the Innovations in Two Year College STEM Education Summit, the first-ever meeting of invited awardees dedicated to the NSF’s IUSE: Innovation in Two-Year College STEM Education (ITYC) program. This gathering was designed to forge a vibrant community of TYC STEM leaders, empowering you to drive transformative change in STEM education. Over 140 people attended the Summit in Alexandria Virginia this summer, including Dr. James Peyton (Economics). The Summit was supported by a $440,000 award to Highline and Carleton College from the National Science Foundation
• A partnership between Highline College, Mt San Antonio College (CA) and Suffolk Community College received a $495,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and run virtual workshops to support community college geoscience faculty in developing, writing, and submitting grant proposals to the National Science Foundation. Eric Baer (Geology) is the principal investigator at Highline College.
• Pure & Applied Sciences has two new department coordinators, to help share department workload and build capacity for department improvement. Marie Nguyen (Chemistry) has been unanimously elected as the coordinator of the Physical Sciences Department. Physical Sciences is one of the five largest departments on Campus and includes Physics, Astronomy, Geology, and Chemistry. This department, with its multiple disciplines and responsibility for many lab spaces, is one of the most complicated on campus.  Marie has been a faculty member in the Department for twenty-eight years. Lydia Garas (Biology) has been named as the new coordinator for the Life, Oceans, and General Science Department.  Popularly known as the LOGS department, this department also includes Environmental Science and Oceanography and works closely with our MAST center to serve transfer students seeking to meet the natural science requirement, students preparing for health care professions, and STEM majors. Congratulations, Marie and Lydia!
• English faculty, Susan Rich’s book Blue Atlas was a Finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. She gave a lecture, reading, and taught at Writers’ Week at the Idyllwild Arts Center for a week in May. Her poem titled, “Self Portrait at ______” was published in Molecule Magazine, Issue 12
• Aaron Ottinger, English faculty, has a recent publication: “Impossible Roots: Mary Shelley’s Demonic Mathematical Ontology in Frankenstein.” Romanticism on the Net, vol. 84, 2025.
• English faculty, Joshua Gidding’s new book, Old White Man Writing (Mascot Books, April 2025), has just won a Silver Award from the Nonfiction Authors Association. It has gotten good reviews from Kirkus Reviews, BookLife (the independent publishers’ division of Publishers Weekly), US Review, and IndieReader, and has just received a rave review from The Bookish Elf
• Shon Meckfessel, English faculty, received a Master of Science in Data Science from Eastern University this summer.

Report submitted by Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Rolita Ezeonu