TORRINGTON – The Eastern Wyoming College (EWC) Board of Trustees met for its July meeting on Tuesday, July 13. This meeting was the first in-person meeting for the board since the beginning of the pandemic.

To begin the meeting, Chairman Robert Baumgartner welcomed everyone back to the first in-person meeting since the pandemic began. Meetings have been held on Zoom, but most of the board members would be in the boardroom for the regular meetings.

The first action item of the night was the July financial report presented by Kwin Wilkes, the vice president for Administrative Services. 

Wilkes reported to the board he was unable to give them a report tonight due to the lack of information he was able to collect for the rest of the month of June after the 17th. His financial report will be pushed back to the Tuesday, Aug. 9, meeting. The board unanimously approved tabling the report for next month.

The next action item was the unanimous approval of the fiscal year 2022 college budget presented by Wilkes. The budget was approved as presented with no changes or additions made to the budget.

Following the approval of the 2022 budget, the next action item was the unanimous approval of the fiscal year 2021 transfer of unexpected/unencumbered appropriations and requested budget authority increases. A public hearing was held Wednesday, June 30, regarding this topic and no comments were offered from the public regarding the hearing.

The restricted grants and contracts fund was increased by $2,878,000 to balance the revenues and expenses. This money was from revenue received from the state and federal government for COVID related and other grant expenses that were not originally part of the budget when it was approved.

The next item on the agenda were two different addendum items. The first item was the unanimous approval of the amended scholarship and grants budget for fiscal year 2022. The scholarship budget was originally approved earlier this year, but it is recommended to be increased to $2,017,446. The increase of $233,828 comes from the second round of CARES funding.

With the new increase in funds, it will be divided up with $30,000 to Lancer Incentive Awards, $40,000 Division Scholarships, $30,000 Wyoming Border Scholarships, $43,000 Livestock Judging Scholarships and $90,828 applied to athletic scholarships.

“The purpose behind this was to try to buck the trend of losing students,” Wilkes said. “If we had an opportunity to provide some scholarships of whatever sort they were, we could try to bring some students in to level that out.”

Following the approval of the amended scholarship and grants budget was the unanimous approval of the bid for the Eastern Hall backup generator project. 

The board approved the bid from Goshen County Construction in the amount of $189,950 for the project. EWC will receive $65,000 from a Homeland Security grant that will be used for the project. The remaining $124,950 will be paid out of the Major Maintenance fund.

After the approval of all the action items, the next topic for approval was the different items regarding personnel changes. All three of the personnel changes were unanimously approved by the board.

The first was the appointment of Dr. Monica Teichert to the position of even cohort Nursing instructor at the Torrington campus. The next appointment was Sage Chaput to the position of Admissions Coordinator. The final personnel appointment was Gerald Hawkes to the position of Business Instructor.

“All of these folks have been fully vetted through our selection committee,” said Holly Lara, Director of Human Resources. “All of these folks come to us highly qualified and all three will be excellent employees for Eastern Wyoming College.”

During the information item portion of the meeting, Director of Institutional Development John Hansen spoke about the upcoming EWC Foundation Golf Tournament. The tournament will be held on Saturday, Aug. 21 at 8:30 a.m.

Hansen said the tournament is a good way to show support to the EWC golf team who finished in 12th place at the national tournament and had the highest finish of any team from a northern state.

“We’re working on putting together a $20,000 50-foot putting contest,” Hansen said. “The amazing thing about a putting contest, whether you’re the age of 80, 88, anyone can have a shot at hitting that ball and we’d love to give away $20,000.”

Vice president for Student Services and Interim Vice President of Academic Services, Roger Humphrey, gave his update during the information item portion of the meeting and want to thank all of the hardworking people from the Information Technology (IT) Department for dealing with the recent cyberattack that occurred on campus.

“Within about an eight-day period, we were able to get Canvas access for both faculty and students,” Humphrey said. “That has been a minimal disruption and we did extend some summer classes two weeks.”

Another issue Humphrey has been dealing with lately is helping students with their transcripts. Currently, EWC has been unable to generate transcripts for the 2021 spring semester. They were also having issues with generating transcripts for students before those semesters, but they got creative in order to maintain that service for students.

The next EWC Board of Trustees meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 9, and will be held in the boardroom inside Eastern Wyoming College.