It was great to return home yesterday. Actually, made it to the college in time to have lunch with the administrative professional staff in the President’s Office. If you were unaware, yesterday was Administrative Professionals Day, day to recognize the professionals in our workplace. My personal thank you to all our administrative professionals, I know how much I appreciate our staff. Sorry I am late on the thank you.
A nice quote to remember:
“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” William Arthur.
Board President Nader shared the following report yesterday: Supporting Men of Color in Community Colleges. The following is an excerpt from the Executive Summary.
The analyses on which this report is based produced numerous points of note, including:
- Within the 42 community college equity plans, 924 different activities were proposed to address student equity gaps.
- Among those 924 activities, 295 identified men of color as facing an equity gap.
- Only 6% of all activities (60) explicitly addressed men of color, with the largest groups addressed being classified as men of color (17), African American men
- (16), Hispanic and African American men (13), and Hispanic men (9).
- Those 60 activities were analyzed and divided into five categories: (a) additional research, (b) direct student support, (c) outreach strategies, (d) professional development, and (e) targeted student services.
- Only 17% of all explicit activities fell outside of the categories of targeted student services (e.g., African American learning communities)—comprising 48%, and professional development (e.g., working with an outside organization to provide faculty with culturally-relevant training)—comprising 35%.
- Promising practices for men of color include: (a) implementing early alert systems, (b) providing high-impact professional development for faculty and staff, (c) ensuring a higher representation of full-time faculty in developmental education, (d) increasing support for part-time faculty, (e) integrating equity goals and efforts into institutional strategic plans, (f) hiring educators with a proven commitment to underserved students, and (g) engaging college educators in collective sense-making around student equity issues and concerns.
Taken as a whole, this report is intended to serve as a clarion call for community college educators and leaders to better understand and mitigate the challenges that exist for 18- to 24-year-old men of color and enact meaningful efforts to support them. Helping these students to achieve successful outcomes in community college access, completion, basic skills, and transfer is paramount to the social and economic vitality of California.
Definitely worth a read.
http://cue.usc.edu/files/2017/04/Report_Supporting_Men_of_Color_in_Community_Colleges.pdf
Vallo Riberto passed this along:
SWC Gallery
In honor of Earth Day and in memory of the poet Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born poet who died a few weeks ago.
Enjoy!
Diane
Earth
Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,
to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,
the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver
running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants
cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.
This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;
you can never be dispossessed.
Derek Walcott
Thank you to everyone who sent prayers and good thoughts for my family medical issue. Surgery went well and things are as good as they can be right now. I really appreciate the compassion and caring of our @SWC colleagues. Thank you.
