Rameen: Coming up on City Spotlight, the focus is
on education in Mattoon.
We will talk with Lakeland College President, Dr. Josh Bullock, about the Illinois state
budget's impact on Lakeland plus we will discuss Lakeland's role with Illinois' correctional
education.
We will also talk Mattoon schools with Mattoon High School Principal, Rich Stuart, and Mattoon
Middle School Principal, Jeremie Smith.
That's all next on City Spotlight.[music plays]City Spotlight is supported by Consolidated Communications.
CCI is honored to salute the cities and their leaders in the area, as well as providing
TV, Internet, and phone service for the local homes and businesses.
We live where we work, and are proud to support the communities we serve.
More information available at consolidated.com.
Thank you to all of you for joining us for this latest edition of City Spotlight.
Today, we're talking education in Mattoon and we're going to start the program off with
Dr. Josh Bullock of Lakeland College, the President of Lakeland College.
Josh, welcome back to the program.
Josh: Thank you, Rameen.
Glad to be here.
Rameen: Pleasure to have you on here at the start
of 2017 and the spring-winter semester is underway at Lakeland and we're going to talk
about the fall semester and the current semester.
Josh: Yes.
Rameen: Let's start off with how the Illinois state
budget has been impacting Lakeland.
It's a recurring question that I've asked many community leaders such as yourself and
how is Lakeland been able to navigate through this Illinois state budget impasse.
Josh: I think for any publicly funded institution,
the budget crisis has had a profound impact on those institutions.
Lakeland college received a significant portion of its funding from the state of Illinois
and we were blessed to have staff in fact, they really pulled together this year.
We balanced our budget on anticipation of 50% from the state so essentially, we worked
to cut about $5.7 million out of our budget this year and our staff did it without complaint.
There were the beauties of being in the state of Illinois is the work ethic.
They were people that really pulled together for the benefit of our students.
Unfortunately, we did have to make some staff reductions.
We have a number of positions that are vacant, that we are unable to fill and we also have
cut out operational budget by 25%, so we've really done all we can to adapt to the budget,
but I think as you hear from other institutions, it's not something that we can other, or other
institutions can sustain in the long-term.
We really do need soon hopefully, a budget from our state legislators.
I'm optimistic that it will happen this spring.
Rameen: We heard those similar words from Dr. David
Glassman from Eastern Illinois on a recent episode of City Spotlight.
Talking with you beforehand, this has taken a lot of your time and a lot of university
and community college presidents, just everybody's time.
It's an overwhelming situation for a lot of people unprecedented that we've had a state
budget impasse this long.
Talk about the amount of time that you are consumed to dealing with things in and around
this?
Josh: Well, when you're down to cutting as much
as we've had to cut and as much as many institutions have to cut, you literally scrutinize every
single purchase, every expense and the hardest part is the unknown for many of us.
If we were to say have the state tell us, "Gosh, you'll have a 10% cut this year or
a 20% cut."
We would find a way to adapt, but with all the unknowns you're constantly analyzing because
you don't know and we didn't know until we had the stopgap budget in June, whether we
would get 100% funding or no funding and so you are working perpetually to understand
where your expenses fall to analyze every process to see where you can find efficiencies,
so it truly does for many become all-consuming and it detracts from the ability to look futuristically
and look to the benefit of the institution what it can be in the long-term.
We have been able to balance that as we've made a lot of the cuts we've had to make and
a lot of the staffing reductions.
We've done so very strategically, really considering what should the institution look like 10 years
from now and how will this facilitate us getting to that point, so that also, it takes a lot
of time to use that level of planning futuristically.
Rameen: How has this impacted or not impacted tuition?
Josh: We did see a tuition increase this year.
We increased our tuition $10 per credit hour at the start of the fall, but even with that
tuition increase as we saw our peers increase their tuitions, we are still one of the lowest
cost education providers in the state.
It's about $3,800 a year right now to attend Lakeland College, all-in, books, fees, tuition,
so we have really emphasized in working with our trustees that we retain that ability for
every single resident of our community to achieve and education at a minimal cost because
money's tight for everyone.
We need to make sure that education is accessible for every student and it's one of our goals.
Rameen: I think you've mentioned just a minute or
so ago about your staff and the flexibility and the no complaining and be able to work
with staff at this constant changing with this budget situation, talk about your staff
and how they've been able to work with it?
Josh: Our staff again realized that this wasn't
something that Lakeland College caused and so our goal is to adapt to that.
The interesting part is as I walk around campus in this first week of class back on campus,
I've been walking the buildings and there is such a positive attitude on campus despite
the budget woes, our faculty are engaged.
They're there for students.
They're smiling.
They're happy.
They're getting the students rallied in the classrooms.
Our staff are there to help the students.
From a staffing perspective, we have not seen that, "Oh, gosh, why always us?"
There's that mentality as a family, when you're struck with adversity, you work together.
You band together and you find a way to overcome that adversity and our staff has really done
that, our faculty have done that and it's been amazing.
As a matter of fact, this past year, our faculty signed a memorandum of understanding with
the college district to say we won't take any pay increases, benefit increases.
We'll put off hiring any new faculty to help us get through this crisis, so they were there
at the table saying, "Let us help.
How can we help the college?"
It's just been amazing.
Rameen: Let's talk a little bit about some supplemental
funding that we're taping this here in about the second week of January 2017.
Some supplemental funding was passed that will help Lakeland.
Josh: We were blessed that in early January, the
Board of Higher Education did pass supplemental funding.
It came out of the original stopgap budget and that funding was for those colleges who
had a high dependency on state aid and property taxes.
Those whose property tax percentage was less than 25% of our operational budget and those
who have already made significant cuts, so although we had a balanced budget, we met
all the criteria because we have been doing our best to make sure that the financial impact
has been minimal and so were be blessed to receive some of that supplemental funding.
It's $428,000, which is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but enough
that it will help lessen the burden of some of the cuts we've had to make.
We have had to bring back some positions that we weren't anticipating just because the workload
was too heavy and so that will allow us to continue to do some of that.
We're in the 2016-17 school year, so talk about your fall and spring enrollments.
What are the numbers like at Lakeland this school year.
Fall enrollments were strong for us.
We were flat, which across the state of Illinois, the community colleges saw an average 8% decrease
in enrollments and we were flat.
This spring, we're looking a little bit better so we're looking to be flat if not up slightly
at that point in time, but we know we've done a lot to help encourage that.
We've had a number of initiatives that have helped us to get to that point.
We started the Lakeland promise last year, which said that any course that has six students
enrolled or more, we guarantee that course will run and that's because we know so many
students balance their life around school and it's not fair to them to at the last minute,
the last week before classes start, change their schedule so we've done a lot to make
that commitment to students and we think that it really is helping students because the
enrollments have been strong, much stronger than what our peers have experienced.
Rameen: What are some of the details on that Lakeland
promise?
Is there a certain number of students, minimum number of students in the class and if there
are, the students can continue to take that course?
Josh: Yes.
If we have six students enrolled in the class, one week before the class, we will guarantee
that that class will run and the other nice part is our faculty have stepped to say many
of them, if it has fewer than six students, we'll run it as a limited student section.
We'll run that class for significantly reduced pay to make sure that those students have
the opportunity to take the class and again it speaks to the values of the Lakeland College
family that they're willing to do that to make sure every student has that ability to
get an education and that because of a state budget problems and other things, we will
not disrupt that ability to have an education for those students.
Rameen: Great new way for students at Lakeland to
benefit from.
Let's talk about some career academies.
There's currently a career academy involved in Mattoon and on a recent episode of City
Spotlight, we talked with Mark Doan from Effingham School District about them, starting up the
Effingham Regional Career Academy.
I understand that Lakeland is a part of both of those.
Josh: We are a strong partner of both.
Lakeland College's career academy here in Mattoon.
We started about a year and a half ago with the idea that there are so many students that
get disengaged early on in their educational experience that are bright, energetic, enthusiastic
students that if you can capture that energy in a field that allows them to work with their
hands, you can keep those students and so we started that with automotive, build a construction
trades and manufacturing trades.
This year, we also added some IT programming and that's been wonderfully successful.
You move that down to Effingham, we've been working on this for about three years.
It's a partnership between the school districts, Lakeland College and business industry, and
what's wonderful is it's a way to look at consolidations strategically versus necessarily
having somebody force consolidation upon you.
In a time when school districts are finding it hard to hire an automotive instructor or
an ag instructor, this model says, okay, what if we looked at all the schools, where their
capabilities were and what they had for available resources and share that between the school
districts and Lakeland and the businesses, to have really a seamless opportunity for
not only high school students but incumbent workers who might need training or that person
who is under employed who says, "Gosh, I really want to be in this field, but I don't have
the ability to get training for it."
We have the ability now with the career academy to build a structure that supports all three
of those and ultimately benefits the communities because it provides well trained employees
for those organizations who want their businesses to stay in local communities.
Rameen: A great opportunity for a lot of people to
benefit from those career academies.
Josh: Absolutely.
Rameen: Let's talk about the Presidential scholarship
at Lakeland.
Josh: We started the Presidential scholarship a
year ago and that scholarship is for any student in our communities high schools that graduates
in the top 15% of their class or achieves a 26 or higher on their ACT, can attend Lakeland
College tuition-free, and that's again to ensure that every student has access to education.
We know there's a tremendous amount of rural poverty in our district and there are students
who even $3,800 a year is insurmountable for them so we built this program to allow those
students who really want an education who worked hard to get it.
We had 140 students apply the first year in coming to Lakeland College and this year,
we had 160, so we have 300 Presidential scholars roughly on campus that are there and we're
also building experiences around that, student experiences that allow those scholars to have
some additional honors type class as an honors experiences, above and beyond just being a
Presidential scholar to create that well rounded student with the goal of either getting them
into the workforce when they graduate or getting them to transfer to an institution like Eastern
Illinois University.
Rameen: With a couple of minutes just remaining here,
Josh, let's see if we can get through a couple more subject areas.
Sustainability at Lakeland, I understand there's some changes going on there.
Josh: We continue to be a sustainable campus.
In the last several years, we've moved from wind technology to photovoltaic or harnessing
the power of the sun.
We've added 340 KW of photovoltaic under the restaurant buildings where nobody can see
it, but it's there generating energy in this summer, it exceeded all of our expectations.
The amount of energy we were generating on top of the buildings was not only powering
the buildings, but distributing energy beyond that.
Now that does mean that we're starting divest ourselves from wind technology.
We've learned that wind technology we have used at the college is just not the appropriate
wind technology for the area and so we will be divesting ourselves of our turbines come
this spring.
We'll be taking down one of our turbines entirely and the other turbine we'll leave for up training,
but we'll be removing the blades, locking the nacelle in place and really using that
for training, not only for the students who are training in sustainability programs, but
we also have local law enforcement who train in confined spaces in that tower so.
We're still happy to be sustainable campus, but the sustainability footprint on campus
will look a little bit different.
Rameen: Okay, look forward to seeing how that pans
out.
Last topic here, Josh.
Let's talk about Lakeland and correctional education in the state of Illinois.
I understand that benefits the state quite a bit.
Josh: It does.
Most folks don't realize that Lakeland College is the largest provider of corrections training
in the state of Illinois and probably one of the largest in the nation.
Currently we serve 19 institutions, 2 juvenile centers and 17 adult centers.
We serve almost 7,000 students a year, unique students and what that means for the state
of Illinois is by educating students in fields that we know they can get jobs in when they
come out of the facility, it reduces recidivism by over 50%.
Now when you consider it cost $22,000 a year to house an inmate, if we can reduce recidivism,
that is tremendous savings.
On average, it cost $1,400 a year to educate them, so the return on that investment for
the state is immeasurable.
Students also when they participate get, well, used to be called good time credit that for
every credit they take in school through Lakeland College in the facility, they reduce their
sentence and so I believe last year alone, we reduced about 140 years of good time credit
in sentencing.
Rameen: Wow.
Josh: You multiple 140 times 22,000 a year, that's
a pretty significant savings for the state of Illinois.
It really is an investment for our tax payers to educate these inmates so that they don't
come back and continue to be a drain on our system.
Rameen: Those sites are all across the state of Illinois
so.
Josh: They are all across the state of Illinois.
Rameen: Very impressive.
A lot of good things going on at Lakeland College over in Mattoon.
The President of Lakeland College, Dr. Josh Bullock.
It's been a pleasure and look forward to talking to you again when we have a state budget passed.
Josh: I would like that.
Thanks, Rameen.
Rameen: Coming up here next on City Spotlight.
We'll continue to talk in education in Mattoon.
We'll talk Mattoon schools with Mattoon High School Principal, Rich Stuart, and Mattoon
Middle School Principal, Jeremie Smith, but first, let's take a look at some of the upcoming
activities going on in Mattoon.[music plays]
We're back here on City Spotlight as we continue this episode on Mattoon.
We're going to shift gears now and talk Mattoon schools and I have two principals from a couple
of Mattoon schools.
Rich Stuart from Mattoon High School.
Welcome, Rich.
Rich: Hey, thanks for having me back.
Rameen: Pleasure.
Jeremie Smith from Mattoon Middle School.
Welcome, Jeremie.
Jeremie: Hello, thanks for having me.
Rameen: Rich is a return guest and we'll get to that
in just a second, different school venue, but Jeremie, you're a first time guest on
the program.
Can you tell us how long you've been at Mattoon Middle School?
Jeremie: Sure.
Hi, I came to Mattoon Middle School in 2000 as a teacher and coach and have climbed through
the ranks.
2005, started as an assistant principal and 2008, took over the principalship where I've
been serving as the principal since that time.
Rameen: All right, very good.
Glad to have you on and look forward to hearing about Mattoon Middle School.
Jeremie: Yeah, I appreciate it.
Rameen: Rich, we've had you on the program.
Last school year, you were the principal at Shelbyville High School and now you've come
over to Mattoon, but it's not a place you're unfamiliar with.
You were under Michele Sinclair who we had on the program last year, so talk about coming
back to a familiar place.
Rich: Yes, I left, I spent four years at Shelbyville
High School, and I was lucky enough on my friend, Michele Sinclair retired last year
that I was asked to come back and given this opportunity.
Having spent nine years as a teacher and assistant principal there previously, so coming back
to familiar but also a lot of new faces and entirely new student population because the
graduating class prior was my freshman, last freshman class so got a whole new set of kids,
but it's been a great welcome back.
Rameen: Familiar place, so did that make it an easy
decision for you to apply and obviously, you took the job, so did that make it easier that
you had been here before?
Rich: Yeah, it's knowing many other community members
and the community as well as a great deal of the staff has made the transition to a
much larger job than the Shelbyville position.
It's more easy and I'm very happy I did that.
Rameen: Moving from one place to another, it's still
the same job title but different location.
What transition challenges have you had along the way?
Rich: Catching back up on new policies.
One of the great things that Michele did, along with the staff and along with partners
here at EIU was starting BIONIC, Believe It Or Not I Care mentoring program that I believe
she's talked about on this program, and seeing that impact and the opportunity for kids to
be leaders in our school has been awesome.
Time commitment and the extra guidance that goes along with that program is considerable
but is definitely something worthwhile and that I look at improving, along with help
of Dr. Larson of EIU.
Rameen: It's a fantastic program.
As you mentioned, we did talk with Michele Sinclair there at Mattoon High School last
year about the mentoring program.
Anything new to it?
Any additions, changes or any feedback you can tell us on how it's going?
Rich: One of the many things I think, counting in
from the outside so to speak, is being able to see attendance, grades, credit earned all
improving from when it started four years ago to today.
Some of the changes we've made is better supporting kids in terms of they need help with school
work, so better pairing kids in regards to homework help and skill development.
I think that's a shift for this year that wasn't there last year and something that
we'll continue to manipulate but is bringing us some new gains.
Rameen: Both of you gentlemen are in the start of
your second semester of the school year and before I get to Jeremie on some questions
about the middle school, anything notable that you'd like to highlight that happened
in the fall semester at Mattoon High School?
Rich: It was a great semester, kids accomplishing
a lot of things.
I had successful sports seasons with plenty of highs there as well as kids achieving different
academic awards and whatnot, so it's been a good, it's a really good fall semester.
I consider myself very lucky.
Rameen: All right, excellent.
Thank you so much.
Jeremie, let's bring you in to the conversation.
A couple of things that you told me you want to talk about, you had some things you wanted
to bring about Mattoon Middle School and that you, as you said hang your hat on, and one
of those was teaming.
Jeremie: Sure.
The teaming concept, it's really at our core.
It is the thing that we feel like makes the difference in a pretty difficult time of development
for kids.
It really becomes the school within the school philosophy.
We can partner kids with teams and start to wrap them almost immediately upon entrance
into the school.
They develop their own personalities and those personalities change every year.
Really, it kind of ebbs and flows as the kids come and go through each of the grades and
the teams are very responsive to that.
The teams are comprised of subject area teachers and they go through the advisory programs
with the teachers and there's just a very close inspection of what's going on with the
kids and the teachers are very in tune with what each of the kids have going on in their
lives and are able to get to those things very quickly versus trying to just spread
that out across an entire grade level of sometimes 270 kids.
Rameen: Okay, next up, you want to talk about opportunities
for kids.
Jeremie: Yeah, I think one of the things that we are
super proud of is the fact that as we have seen a lot of struggle in schools in Central
Illinois that we have worked diligently to try to increase the number of opportunities
for kids that we're trying to find and identify for them.
When they come to school, they have that thing that is going to be a place where they feel
most comfortable with, peer groups that are like and have similar interests.
The opportunities are there in terms of the arts and music exploration, in terms of extracurriculars,
in terms of athletics but I think even beyond the scope of that, it's the things that are
happening before school and during lunch in terms of video gaming and chess clubs and
just a lot of different things that are piquing kids' interest.
What we ask, if the student has an interest in being involved in something, seek out a
teacher and we'll see what we can do.
We just implemented the Fellowship of Christian Athletes into our building this year, with
some of the direction of Coach Johnson over at the high school, and that's a student population
right now that's reaching near 80 kids, so it's just about trying to find different things
to get kids connected to the school because when they're connected, they want to come.
Rameen: Excellent, great to hear about that new program.
Third, you want to talk about supportive staff systems.
Jeremie: Yeah, I think sort of tying into what Rich
is talking about with the BIONIC program, we recognize that transitions are very difficult
for kids, and not only in coming to the middle school but also transitioning to the high
school and I think that there's really a hyper awareness now of how critical those transitions
are and we are pretty reliant on the support systems that come into place, that when a
kid is struggling to transition, either between grade levels or between buildings, we've got
the necessary supports in place to be able to pinpoint what's wrong and then start to
implement resources to try to address those things far sooner than maybe what we have
been in years past.
Rameen: Great to hear about that correlation between
the two schools and it is tough changing, as those of us that remember going from one
school to another, so great to hear about that.
Lastly, Jeremie, the Horizon Schools to Watch, it's something that Mattoon Middle School
has been a part and applied for so can you explain what that is, please?
Jeremie: Yes, yeah we just completed the third year
or the application process this past spring.
We were redesignated for the third time this past spring and it's something that we're
very proud of.
It is truly a reflection of the hard work of the teachers but it also is a reflection
of the support that we get from our Board of Education, from the district level administration
and certainly from the parents and the teachers and the hard work that they're doing.
It's what we feel like to be a pretty prestigious honor.
We had an opportunity to go out to Washington DC with other schools to watch this summer
and be recognized out on Capitol Hill and work towards continued legislation for middle
schools across the country, and it's something that we're very proud of but it also means
that the day following that recognition that we begin the school improvement process all
over again and have a certain number of goals and things that we want to try to achieve
over the next three years, so it is ongoing.
Rameen: It sounds like you have the consistency and
something really working there and congratulations on the honor as well.
Jeremie: Thank you, thank you.
Rameen: As we have a couple of minutes here left with
you, gentlemen, is there any collaborative work that you guys can talk about between
the two schools, because obviously as you just mentioned, middle school to high school,
that's where the progression of children going, can you talk about any collaborative work
that you guys do together?
Rich: I think, kind of picking up where Jeremie
left off in terms of supporting that transition, that's one of the areas I think we've grown
a lot in and it seems simple at that age to just have a conversation but it's hard to
have a short conversation about and sum up a student.
I think the level of collaboration between the teams at the middle school and at freshman
level, we do teaming as well, has really led to much smoother transitions and allowing
kids who are struggling to get help more quickly and for the things that don't need to be repeated
in terms of learning, what works best for particular students, there doesn't have to
be that learning curve, so shrinking that allows us to better serve the students more
quickly, and that's thanks to the teachers at the middle school and obviously Jeremie
as well.
Jeremie: I think a couple of other things there, we
work in conjunction with Mattoon High School.
Our students ride the bus over.
They participate in the ag program that's held at Mattoon High School.
Our students go over there and they're under choral directorship over at the high school
as well.
It really is expanding the boundaries of our buildings to make sure the opportunities are
there for kids.
Our kids are receiving instruction that they want at the high school level, and hopefully
it's helping them segue into the high school when they get there that it's something that
they're already familiar with.
I think even beyond the scope of that and to reach even further down into the elementary
buildings, our collaboration has increased exponentially just in the last year and a
half.
We are meeting as an administrative team on a regular basis so that we can become more
consistent about professional development, about the evaluative component, about the
systems that are in place so that these kids are transitioning more smoothly into the next
grade level.
I think our administrative collaboration is definitely an upside for us and working out
very well for us right out of the gates.
Rameen: Great to hear about this working together
as a team here.
It's all of Mattoon School Districts so gentlemen, I appreciate your time here, coming on to
talk about your respective schools and the work that you guys are doing together.
Jeremie Smith, Principal at Mattoon Middle School.
Jeremie: Thank you for having me.
Rameen: Rich Stuart, Principal at Mattoon High School,
it's been a pleasure.
Rich: All right, thank you.
Rameen: Thank you to all of you for joining us for
this episode on Mattoon, talking Mattoon schools.
We'll see you next time.City Spotlight is supported by Consolidated Communications.
CCI is honored to salute the cities and their leaders in the area, as well as providing
TV, Internet, and phone service for the local homes and businesses.
We live where we work, and are proud to support the communities we serve.
More information available at consolidated.com.[music plays]
For more infomation >> Super Mario 3D Land #03 - MONDE 3 & PREMIÈRE MORT ! - Duration: 23:41. 
For more infomation >> For the first time in the world incredible impression on the land and made 11 runs off 56 balls Tige - Duration: 1:29. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét