TORRINGTON – The Eastern Wyoming College (EWC) Board of Trustees met late Tuesday afternoon at 4 p.m. for the mandatory monthly meeting of old, ongoing and future business.

Among those who were notably in attendance at the meeting were EWC President, Dr. Jeff Hawes, along with newly appointed Board Chairman, Jackie Van Mark.

Board Trustees Rick Vonberg, Katherine Patrick, Randy Adams, Robert Baumgartner, Doug Mercer and Kurt Sittner were also all present. Trustee Jim Wilcox was unable to attend.

Several topics were addressed throughout the course of the meeting ranging from financial opportunity for prospective students, updating technology, maintaining strong transferable relations with other institutions and the acknowledgement of new staff.

The meeting began with Dr. Hawes presenting two guest speakers in regard to the college scholarships award process. The two speakers were Executive Dean of Student Services, Tami Afdahl, and Director of Financial Aid, Becky McCallister.

“When it comes to scholarship awarding, this is a very detailed regimented process that has to be implemented in an organization,” Dr. Hawes began. “You will be presented tonight with a presentation on how our organization moves forward. It’s not a choice, it’s about compliance. We can’t go out and say a person is not eligible, but then give them 50,000 dollars to play ball at EWC. It depends on the individual scenario for every single student, and there are a lot of variables. This team has moved this along tremendously, and it’s been a lot of work.”

Both Afdahl and McCallister then proceeded to give an in-depth presentation concerning the strong, and stable financial aid that EWC is currently in. According to both speakers, this should most certainly result in more student enrollment if prospective students are made properly aware of the available financial opportunities. 

“I wanted to start out with financial aid, scholarship purpose and about how the EWC Financial Aid Office works along with many other institutions,” Afdahl added. “Financial aid is a big umbrella, and underneath that umbrella there are scholarships, grants, work study, anything that helps students with their expenses. Financial needs are the primary consideration when awarding aid, and students who participate in athletics and activities qualify for institutional scholarships. In fact, our foundation scholarships are around 350,000 dollars. Our other EWC packages, including athletics and activities, are just over two million. We are very fortunate to have so much aid to make available to our students.”

The next matter of business on the evening’s agenda was an informative presentation by guest speaker and University of Wyoming (UW) consultant, Anne DeMersseman.

DeMersseman spoke before the Board on matters relating to transferability, while ensuring a plan for EWC students that would have high prospects of smooth transitioning to other institutions once earning their degree in Torrington.

“This all really started with some generic questions about what our transfer status is with our agriculture courses,” DeMersseman said. “I realized that we are going to have to figure out which data sources we wanted to tap into. We had to be clear on what information was out there, why sources may have this same data or how it presents differently. I reached out to the Director of Transfer Services at UW, and it is my understanding that all of the Wyoming community colleges invested in this Wyoming Transfer isn’t an original data source. It gets pushed for Wyo Records, and what we found out through this whole process is there were some things on the Wyo Records site that weren’t updated when they should have. Or it was transferred as an equivalency. One of the things we found out is there was a data push that came out from Wyo Records that Wyo Transfer never got. UW was great, we got all of that cleaned up and know exactly now where our 500 courses now are. We need to bring all that data into the same warehouse, and we need to start matching.”

“When we think of Associate of Science (AS) or Associate of Arts (AA), that doesn’t mean that career courses are not academic,” Dr. Hawes added. “They are terminal in nature to which you go right out into the work force. It is our job to reach out to the universities. We’ve had courses articulated here with outside institutions very well. We do need to go out with many institutions. When we start growing enrollment, taking this data base and constantly updating we can have a lot of different AAs. One can be sufficient, but how do we build that structure? Because it can be built.”

The Tuesday night meeting then moved forward with an honest, yet humorous update on Information Technology (IT) and a possible future need for upgrades by college IT staff, Auke Daane.

“I’m all about transparency, and was thinking about making a presentation. There’s a lot of senseless information so I decided not to,” joked Daane. “In hindsight, what are we doing? How are we doing? And where are we heading?”

Daane proceeded to give a simplistic graph presentation before the Board, going over notable technological mishaps or incidents that had occurred over the course of the first semester.

“Basically, if a TV breaks that’s an incident,” Daane explained. “If it happens twice its annoying, but it’s still an incident. If there is a third time, then we have a problem. At the back end we work with a lot of changed process. That’s not a reflection in those numbers. In August you see a very high spike of incidents, and we did a lot of level change. Over time we see the trend becoming more stable, because we don’t lie on incidents. Incidents are not predicable, they just happen. In December when everyone is on holiday, we see them even lower. So as we are counting, it shows a trend of roughly 40 user tickets a week. That’s huge, but you see it stabilizing which is great. The response rate and the satisfactory rate are generally high. Now those are the highlights that we go over every month just to touch base, and can we adjust accordingly.”

“We can’t please everyone, but we can sure try,” Daane added.

Moving forward with the presentation, Daane advocated for the strong possibility of much needed technological upgrades within the next few years at EWC. 

As Daane point out, such upgrades would of course need the approval of appropriate funding.

“The overall same system we have in the dorms with the current Wi-Fi, and the situation outreach are the last two systems that are old school and are in the way for the school. It’s going to cost quite a bit of money to replace, but it needs to be done. And I think we have a lot of students in the outreach size that feel it needs to be done. Those are the last two projects that I can think of that are old school, and we are looking towards the future. I can tell you, and will tell you we will have to replace it in four years time. I need money to replace that stuff, and it also means that we can focus more on grants. I have no shame of begging for more money, but I would like to be predictable in telling you that it’s coming. With grant money it takes some time, but we can plan on that and get more mileage out of those dollars. We are also looking at more creative ways to recuperate some money, and old computers still have money value. 

“The last thing I would like to point out is that we are looking at ways to better work our internal supply chain. If you streamline those processes and have transparency, we must look at the truth. It can be ugly, it can be beautiful, but it is what it is.”

The meeting adjourned at 7:41 p.m. and will reconvene on February 13 at promptly 4 p.m.

If you have any questions or would like further information regarding the Board of Trustees, feel free to visit www.ewc.wy.edu or call 307-532-8200.