Area Report for Board of Trustees

Accessibility Resources Updates

Accessible furniture: In alignment with our campus wide efforts to increase accessibility for students who experience disabilities, the college has approved $79,000 in Guided Pathways funding to purchase height adjustable tables and chairs for the classrooms in buildings 10, 17, and 19. Eleven classrooms with tab-arm desks were previously identified by Accessibility Resources as inaccessible in the original proposal to Executive Cabinet. These desks do not meet minimum ADA standards for accessibility, specifically for wheelchair users, people with chronic pain, those with medical issues, and larger individuals. This funding will also allow us to identify and address other inaccessible classrooms or areas on campus where students congregate and receive services. Ensuring the accessibility of classrooms and other student spaces reduces the need for students to request adjustable furniture through Access Services as well as decreasing the burden on Central Services to move desks, chairs, and tables around from quarter to quarter.

Practices for the accessibility of campus events: Executive Cabinet approved a proposal, drafted by Marc Lentini, Jenni Sandler, and Iesha Valencia, to address the campus wide challenges of creating accessible events. The proposal, grounded in Highline’s four core themes, identifies practices for campus wide event accessibility in three areas: 1) Required proactive accessibility for flagship campus events and those with a broad audience, such as Opening Day, Unity Week, the Black and Brown Male Summit, and Commencement; 2) Responsible proactive practices for inclusion and accessibility to maximize participation for all members of our community, including signature campus events like LGBTQIA and Disability Justice Week, the Foundation Gala, and ELCAP Orientation; and 3) Reactive accommodation strategies, essentially a response to a request for accommodation made by a student, employee, or community member.

The approved proposal includes:

• A transparent policy for determining which events should receive which accessibility measures.
• An approach for allocating the direct costs associated with these measures.
• A clear process for students and employees requesting accommodations.
• An estimate of current hourly rates for ASL translations, live captioning, and post production costs.
• A 2019-20 spreadsheet displaying how the direct costs would be distributed across college divisions within the categories of the proposal.

Achieve Updates

Achieve student hired from internship as video game accessibility tester: Achieve student Wesley has a great interest in video games and his long-term goal is to become a software engineer. As a part of the Achieve certificate program, students work with Community and Employment Services Employment Consultants to participate in career-based learning and to secure and maintain employment. The pandemic posed additional challenges in developing career-based learning opportunities. Wesley’s Employment Consultant persevered and found an opportunity in videogame testing. At the internship interview, Wesley was offered a job on the spot. His Employment Consultant will support Wesley to learn this job in the coming weeks.

Achieve, in collaboration with International Student Programs, welcomes our first international student: Achieve will be welcoming its first international student in Winter 2021. The Achieve and International Student Programs team worked together to support the student and family to enroll and transition into the US higher education system. New Achieve student, Richard is the first or one of few international students to attend a transition program for students with intellectual disabilities in the US. Think College at the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a national disability related research organization, reports they have not encountered transition programs that serve international students. He is interested in studying computers and working in the IT industry. He will be starting his HC experience remotely from Malawi, which has a 10-hour time difference from Seattle.

Achieve enrollment – # of students, % dually enrolled in a k-12 district, race/ethnicity/gender breakdown, names of 2020-21 partner districts 

Total students: 46

Dually enrolled in K-12 district: 74% of cohort are dually enrolled students

Race:

• 26.1% Asian
• 19.6% Black or African American
• 6.5% Hispanic or Latino
• 2.2% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
• 23.9% White
• 21.7% Multiracial

Gender:

• 28% Female identified
• 70% Male identified
• 2% Non-binary identified

Partner districts:

• Tukwila
• Highline
• Fife
• Seattle
• Kent
• Issaquah

Achieve receives May and Stanley Smith Charitable Trust Grant for $100,000 over two years. Achieve was awarded another $100,000, 2-year grant from the May and Stanley Smith Charitable Trust to support program activities.

Achieve and Starbucks partnership a success

Achieve received a grant from the Starbucks Foundation, via the Highline College Foundation to develop a Micro-Credential in Customer Service designed to increase access to postsecondary education, training, and work experience for individuals with disabilities. Program activities quickly moved to a virtual platform and were designed to prepare students for employment and launch them on a path of opportunity – armed with skills, confidence, and a certificate.

All students who began the program completed it and earned a college credit and certificate in “Global Excellence in Customer Service.” Not only that, every student attended and participated in every class. Not one student missed a single assignment. Starbucks executives participated in course activities. The program culminated in a Starbucks Experience Day at the Starbucks Roastery Reserve in Seattle. Students were given tours of the facility, completed coffee tastings, met with, and learned about a variety of positions within the Starbucks organization, learned to make coffee, and were treated to snacks and T-shirts. Multiple Starbucks executives were in attendance.

Program Student, Joey Beltran, his mom (and Highline College Director of Continuing Education), Crystal Kitterman, instructor Cody Herrington and Director Julie Pollard participated on a Starbucks Disability Advocacy Network panel presentation for National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Click The Path to Meaningful Employment: A Panel Discussion with the Highline College ACHIEVE Program – Oct 29 to view the presentation.

Educational Technology Updates

Educational Technology continues to support faculty as they teach remotely. 130 faculty have participated in the Fall 2020 Remote Teaching online course, a resource that supports teaching online, hybrid, and virtual classes. The department held almost 100 hours of one-on-one and “Search for Ed Tech Intelligence” drop-in sessions.

EdTech Faculty-in-Residence and the Learning and Teaching Center collaborated on four Mini-Inquiry Groups, which were small group learning opportunities to address key struggles faculty experience. About two dozen faculty participated. The topics were:

• Does working from home get easier?
• How can I be more present in online and virtual classes?
• How can I make Canvas courses more inclusive?
• How can I do surveillance-free STEM assessments?

The Faculty-in-Residence are:

• Sarah Adams, Mathematics
• Maurea Brown, ELCAP
• Sue Frantz, Psychology
• Tarisa Matsumoto-Maxfield, Literature/DGS
• Avery Viehmann, English

Health/PE Division Update

The nursing program is in the midst of writing their self-study for accreditation and will have an accreditation site visit for both the State Nursing Commission and their accreditor (ACEN) in Fall of 2021.

Learning and Teaching Center Updates

Forty seven faculty participated in the Fall quarter “Reflecting with Peers” project.  One of the deliverables we asked for is “at least one recommendation about how the college can better support your teaching as we move forward with remote learning.” A common theme we are hearing back is to “Keep up the ‘relentless offers of assistance.”

Seven faculty are participating in a “Four Connections” faculty inquiry group.  In addition, while not part of the faculty inquiry group, we have introduced all twenty faculty in this year’s new faculty cohort to the Four Connections, which is an evidence based practice for increasing retention.

Other professional development offerings for Fall included:

• Opening Week:  A selection of 8 workshops for faculty and staff including topics such as mindfulness, online engagement, and building relationship with students
• Professional Development Day:  A selection of 21 workshops for faculty and staff across a variety of topics including teaching & learning, technology, human relations, cultural responsiveness, and outcomes
• The year-long New Faculty Seminar which has a cohort of 20 faculty.  Goals include:
  • Building a sense of community and belonging to Highline College
  • Fostering equity-minded teaching practices
  • Informing best practices to promote holistic student support
  • Engaging in self-reflective and collaborative professional development
• Mini-faculty inquiry groups on increasing collaboration and engagement in Zoom classes
• Discussion groups:  Employing equity-minded and culturally-affirming teaching practices in virtual learning communities
• Formative Assessment workshops:  Using student feedback to reduce equity gaps
• And finalizing plans to roll out the Effective Teaching Course to all faculty in January

Library Updates

The Highline College Library collaborated with Central Washington University Libraries to celebrate our Freedom to Read banned and challenged books featuring LGBTQIA+ themes and characters, funded by an American Library Association Freedom to Read grant. We developed a resource list and digital book display highlighting banned and challenged books featuring LGBTQIA+ themes and characters in our own collection.

Another exciting new library collaboration: all Highline College students and employees now have free and automatic access to the King County Library System Online Library, no matter if they live in a different county! For more details on access and what’s included: https://library.highline.edu/KCLSLibrary

Pure & Applied Science Updates

MaST: In late August and early September, Rus Higley partnered with SPU faculty Peter Moe to articulate and display a whale as part of SPU’s BIO 4950:  Whale Skeleton Articulation, likely the first and only time the class will be offered.  The work done by 20 students was the first face to face class at SPU and set the school’s standard for social distancing and other protocols.  The 29-ft gray whale is now permanently displayed at SPU’s Eaton Hall.  The MaST Center’s Marine Mammal Stranding Team and several Highline students, staff, and faculty were involved in obtaining and preparing the animal.  This is the third whale that Higley has built and the 7^th that the MaST Center’s Marine Mammal Stranding Team has been a part of.

When Peter contacted NOAA about the process and how to proceed, he was told to contact the whale guy Rus Higley.  The recently weaned juvenile whale was starvation skinny and was one of 200 whales that died in the “unusual mortality event” in 2019/2020.

More information can be found at https://spu.edu/academics/college-of-arts-sciences/biology/whale-project and https://www.peterwaynemoe.com/building.

Media coverage included a KNKX story https://www.knkx.org/post/how-know-whale-students-articulate-skeleton-seattle-pacific-university and a couple days of coverage on KIRO 7 at https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/spu-students-assembling-skeleton-gray-whale-that-washed-up-beach/HY5A2FEJVNG5TPJC324FXMVM24/

Microbiology Home Lab Kits: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic the Microbiology faculty at Highline College, Colleen Sheridan and Lydia Garas, wondered how they were going teach microbiology labs at-home.  In conversation with Steven Simpkins, Highline’s Nursing Program Coordinator, our nursing program depends upon our Microbiology class to teach their incoming nursing students the essential skill called “aseptic technique.”  This skill is required for healthcare professionals to keep both themselves and their patients safe from further infection.  So, together with our amazing Biology technician team, Mariola Kulawiec, Heather Woodhams, and Cindy Lee, we designed and tested a Microbiology Home Lab Kit for students to be able to practice this essential skill.  Students are working with Baker’s yeast and yogurt bacteria to practice aseptic technique at home, while also learning how to isolate pure cultures, explore ways to identify the types of microbes through biochemical testing, and determine how antibiotic and antifungal medications would affect different microbes.  We have had rave reviews from students in being able to do actual hands-on work at home!!  Our team is constantly working together with our students to improve this essential experience to make it more efficient, valuable, rewarding, and fun!

Mariola and Colleen have presented this work at the Northwest Microbiology Community of Practice meeting, supported by the SBCTC, to share our experiences with other Microbiology instructors around Washington State.  As a result, many colleges have adapted our Microbiology Home Lab kits for use in their own programs, in close collaboration with Mariola Kulawiec.

Student Idea brings COVID-19 Testing to Highline: Here is the link to the article written about the COVID testing site.   https://documents.highline.edu/mediareleases/081820.pdf   Our amazing Public Safety team has also just finished the transition to having Seattle & King County Public Health on-campus testing 6 days a week!!!!   Here is the article from this recent news:  https://www.highline.edu/covid19-kc-testing/

Faculty Laureates

• Josh Gidding (English): His essay, “The Performer”, will appear in the 2021 issue of Crosscurrents Magazine, a literary journal whose Spring 2021 issue will feature work from faculty at a number of Washington community colleges.
• Wendy Swyt (English): Her creative nonfiction piece, “Preparing the Body”, will appear in the next issue of Crosscurrents.
• Shon Meckfessel (English): Shon was invited to give a lecture on October 26 at George Mason University, in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, at an invited conference on the possibility of civil violence around the US elections. The title of the talk was, “Would Neighbor Kill Neighbor? Contemporary US Society compares with recent societies before Civil War.”
• Susan Rich (English): Her poem: “Outline for Freshman Comp Essay” was just published by the Minnesota review out of Duke University Press and she also read her poem, “For the first time I am afraid…” from the anthology Take a Stand: Art Against Hate for Raven Chronicles.
• Ben Thomas (Music): Ben worked with the Austin Piazzolla Quintet (tango group from Texas) for the last several years, touring around the United States playing concerts and performing with orchestras and dance companies. On November 28, they are releasing a film collaboration with Parasol Arts in Colorado based on the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires by Piazzolla (http://parasolarts.org/)
• M. Sell (Political Science): TM chaired the Current Issues in Northwest Politics panel, and gave the Washington state report, at the Pacific Northwest Political Science Association’s annual meeting on Nov. 7. The University of Nebraska Press has agreed to publish his book, The People’s Business: Government and Politics in Washington State. His article, “Using Elections to Teach Civic Engagement,” was published in the fall 2020 edition of the APSA journal The Political Science Educator.
• Jenn Ritchey (Political Science): Jenn currently has 25 Global Studies students participating in a Global Virtual Exchange Challenge with students in Jordan. Each week, they meet virtually as a bi-national team and learn more about their respective different cultures and ways of life, while at the same time working to solve some of the greatest challenges the world is facing with sustainability. The team has chosen to focus on food packaging and is currently designing a prototype of Casein packaging that they will use to compete in the Global Solutions Challenge in early December. The competition will be tough, with more than 300 participants but the bi-national team is working incredibly hard and are looking forward to this challenge.  For more information about the competition- https://www.irex.org/project/global-solutions.
• Eric Baer (Geology): Eric delivered a presentation at the Geological Society of America meeting last month entitled, “Supporting Student Success at Multiple Scales:  Lessons on Promoting Change from SAGE 2YC Change Agents.”  He was also invited to serve on a review panel for the National Science Foundation.  In addition, Eric is the lead faculty facilitator for the Geosciences STEM Community of Practice set up by the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges to help faculty with the transition to online teaching.
• Žanetka Gawronski (Fine Arts):In 2019, Sound Transit announced a competition for mural artists, Žanetka entered with her portfolio and was one of 12 artists chosen to paint the temporary murals at the Kent-Des Moines construction site across from Highline College. She was contracted to paint 10, 5-foot by 10-foot murals. She had plenty of ideas for the murals, however because the light rail stop is located right across from campus, she thought it would be really great to include Highline College in the design process, try to reflect our campus in the murals, and teach folks that were interested how to design and paint a mural. She spent December 2019: sending out an email to Highline campus requesting design submissions, building moveable easels that would accommodate a 5-foot by 10-foot mural, ordering painting materials, and going through all of the design submissions from Highline. Žanetka worked with Sound Transit reviewing the designs and once 10 mural designs were chosen, she was going to work with whoever designed the murals to fine tune the design and paint the murals. She began working with Sarah Adams in the Math department and Amanda Hood Sweeney in the Fine Arts department on the murals they submitted. The three of them started working on our respective murals, Sarah painted T.E.A.M.Amanda painted the black and white Design mural, and Žanetka started working on her own mural design. The murals are up across from Highline College! And there is talk of continuing with Sound Transit to paint a few more murals.
• Justin Taillon (Hospitality) was the the keynote speaker at HITEC 2020, which was held virtually for the first time in its 50-year history. He wrote an article that summarized his keynote speech. The article was published in Hotel Executive, a monthly publication intended for global hospitality leaders:  https://www.hotelexecutive.com/business_review/6802/is-customer-service-an-oxymoron-or-leadership-tool-for-hospitality-managers. Here is an abstract of the article: Based on Cyber HITEC’s 2020 keynote session of the same title, this article investigates an emerging trend in management strategy: customer service. What do you think of when you hear the term hospitality customer service? Do you perhaps recognize a front desk agent, server, or valet parking attendant face-to-face with a customer? Customer service is much more than these examples though.

Report submitted Dec. 03, 2020 by Vice President Emily Lardner, Ph.D.