Area Report for Board of Trustees
Human Resources
Core Theme 4: CULTURE & CAPACITY, Create capacity for meaningful strategic planning and institutional transformation through intentional development of employees, facilities, and systems that support student success and close equity gaps
I am pleased to welcome the newest member of Human Resources, Alex Racy! Alex comes to us with several years of experience in many HR areas including payroll. In his role, he will report to Cariko Brent and manage time and labor, combo code updates, and various payroll tasks to ensure accurate information is in our system for payroll processing. I’d like to give a shout out to Leslea Berg who has been assisting Cariko with this work while we were staffing the vacancy. This is by far the best HR team I have had the pleasure to work with in all my years of HR. We collaborate, communicate, and jump in very quickly to help one another. HR is often a thankless job. But this team comes in every day motivated and willing to serve our institution with the highest levels of professionalism.
I would also like to thank Jordan for all of the hard and extra work she has had to put in to cover various roles within the Office of the President over the past three months. She led efforts for PDD while also managing her own tasks. I am not sure how she did it, but she managed to get things done and is heading into a long and well-deserved vacation. Thank you, Jordan!
This month, Human Resources partnered with the office of Equity, Diversity, and Transformation to attend the 32nd Annual HBCU Faculty Development Network Conference. This conference focuses on providing HBCU faculty effective tools and resources to ensure a collective success in meeting student needs. Highline sponsored a table and networking event to build relationships with faculty as well as administrators in an effort to build pipelines of employee recruitment as well as student transfers, and retention/success strategies. It was a VERY successful trip, and we are now engaging in follow-up discussions with various HBCUs on moving forward with our strategies.
Information Technology Services
Core Theme 4: CULTURE & CAPACITY, Create capacity for meaningful strategic planning and institutional transformation through intentional development of employees, facilities, and systems that support student success and close equity gaps
- Rosemary Darrough was nominated and chosen to participate in a state-wide task force to focus on process alignment efforts around Employee Onboarding and Offboarding. This Task Force will, over the course of approximately 5 months, review existing processes and make recommendations for process improvement and alignment at the system level. The Task Force Kick-Off meeting was held on 10/29/2025.
- Work continues on policy and operations around GenAI at both a local and the state level. Locally, our AI Workgroup, a campus-wide representative group led by Marc Lentini, Liz Word, and Tim Wrye, has almost finalized our proposed AI policy, looking to ground our AI work in principles that support the mission, vision, and values of the college. While the policy works its way through the process, the workgroup is planning the next phase of our work supporting AI literacy efforts across campus, working on AI tool evaluation and procurement processes and guidelines, and supporting and advancing existing work on AI literacy and pedagogy issues in Academic Affairs. At the state level, Tim and Dr. Penn represent their respective Commissions on the Strategic Technology Advisory Committee’s (STAC) AI task force, where that group is approaching policy, literacy, and collaborative innovation across colleges at the statewide level. The discussions at the STAC AI task force include evaluating and making recommendations about industry proposals to support our system with potential AI licensing and training materials.
- Tim Wrye is continuing to work to guide the college through the next phase of our Strategic Planning work. Work over the summer led to an updated Strategic Goals and Objectives page which makes the connections through to our indicators, measures and targets more transparent to all campus stakeholders. After spending time early in the quarter working with Strategic Planning Council (SPC) members to prepare for our recent ad hoc accreditation visit, the focus now turns to the future of SPC and our strategic planning efforts to enhance our reporting and tracking with improved documentation of the strategies employed to help us reach our targets. A small planning group will begin meeting soon with the goal of having a proposal presented to Executive Cabinet by the end of the calendar year.
Report submitted by President John R. Mosby, Ph.D.