Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Greetings Peralta Community!  Welcome to issue #3 of our new district newsletter, Peralta Gems. In case you missed them, January 3 is available here while January 10 is available here. Issues are archived on the Peralta website here. We hope you find it informative and useful. Once you've read it, please let me know what you think of this new format.  And please send me stories you'd like to be shared with our colleagues across the district. Thank you! Mark Johnson markjohnson@peralta.edu

Laney College Steps into the Spotlight

Check out this fabulous video produced by California Community Colleges featuring Laney College football players past and present, Coach John Beam, President Tammeil Gilkerson, and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. As many of you know, Laney football will be the subject of the next season of the Netflix series "Last Chance U." But Laney is NOT your last chance...as President Gilkerson says in video, "We are the first choice, we are the best choice for students in every unbeatable way."  Coach Beam proudly points out that Laney athletes have a 90% graduation and transfer success rate. Success on the field is nice but what really matters is preparing students for success in life off the field.  Which we do. #LaneyBuilt #OaklandProud. Go Eagles!

District Flex Day at Merritt College

Participants were asked to write down their wishes for the new semester, to help us be mindful about what we are trying to achieve.

The District Flex Day took place on Thursday, January 16, 2020 and not even the rainy weather could spoil a great day of staff development programming. We are ready for Spring 2020 to begin! The event began with welcoming comments from Alejandro Acosta (Peralta Classified Senate Vice President), Jennifer Shanoski, (PFT President), and Donald Moore (DAS President).  Dr. Regina Stanback Stroud gave the Chancellor's Address followed by an interactive performance by Gritty City Rep Ensemble actors Lindsey Krumbein and Robert Paige. Janine Greer, BCC Mental Health Counselor introduced the actors who performed about about incarceration, the impact that has on families and loved ones as well as the incarcerated, and the critical need for education and support programs for those involved. The morning session is available on the Peralta TV YouTube channel here. 

Flex Day was organized by Scott Hoshida, Staff Development Officer, who expressed gratitude to the many "magic elves" who helped bring the program together. Scott will be stepping down as development officer at the end of the semester, which creates opportunity for someone else to take on this important role.  Scott is not going away though; he's returning to his full time role as BCC faculty.

Chancellor Stanback Stroud gave a powerful speech that called upon members of the District to be our better selves.  Dr. Stanback Stroud said, "We have the opportunity to model excellence, professionalism and respect instead of contempt and vitriol." She spoke about the progress made on addressing the FCMAT recommendations.  She spoke about the new Standards of Excellence that will be introduced, which all managers in the district will be asked to follow. One change that is coming soon will be to reserve access to the various FAS email distribution lists for official organizational business, an announcement that was met with enthusiastic applause. The Chancellor also laid out her vision for Peralta which includes: Making each of the four colleges a model of excellence Making Peralta a great place to work, with fair pay and respect for all Making Peralta the major source of social and cultural capital in the community Making Peralta an even more vital economic engine for the community This summary fails to capture everything the Chancellor addressed. The talk is substantive and definitely worth watching. This link goes to the start of the talk, which lasts about 34 minutes.

Flex Day included a number of excellent workshop breakout sessions, including one called "Black Student Retention and Umoja Practices: Building Community, Raising “Intentional and Deliberate,” and the Ethic of Love."  The session was led by Umoja Faculty and Coordinators and Katrina King, Umoja Regional Coordinator.

Another excellent session was "Data Dashboards: How to Deepen Inquiries into Student Success" presented by Dominique Benavidas and Sriram Battineni, part of the Institutional Research group.  This session demonstrated how to navigate and use Peralta’s data dashboards to support student success. There were many more excellent sessions following the cross-campus departmental lunch meetings.

Courtney Brown from Merritt College proudly worked a table sharing information about Merritt's department of Computer Information Systems (CIS), their award-winning Cyber Security certificate program, A.S. Computer Science degree program, and four brand new transfer courses for UC & CSU. 

On-Time Audit Delivery to State Chancellor

Adil Ahmed

Peralta at Budget Workshop in Sacramento

L to R: Steve Crow, Christine Williams, Andrea Stokes

On Wednesday, January 15, 2020, a number of Peralta employees made the trip to Sacramento for a budget workshop put on by the Association for California Community College Administrators (ACCCA) and the Association of Chief Business Officials (ACBO). Peralta staff took advantage of this one-of-a-kind opportunity to hear from a panel of experts from the Chancellor's Office, Department of Finance, and the Legislative Analyst's Office to review the Governor's budget proposal just days after its release. In addition to those pictured, the meeting was also attended by Rudy Besikof (Laney) and Stacey Shears (BCC).  Thanks Stacey for the photos!

L to R: Shirley Slaughter, Victoria Menzies, Derek Pinto, Adil Ahmed

A Translation Crisis at the Border

Cheers to Laney College instructor Henry Sales, who is quoted extensively in the January 6, 2020 issue of The New Yorker. The article, "A Translation Crisis at the Border," describes the challenges around providing translating services for people who speak the Mayan languages and particularly Mam. The institutional racism described is shocking, but sadly, not surprising.

Laney Instructor Featured in Roadtrip Nation Documentary

Laney Faculty Member Adam Balogh

A new Roadtrip Nation documentary, “Community Driven”, features three California community college students as they travel across the state to meet with California’s changemakers and community college alumni, and learn about exciting possibilities for their futures. The hour-long production is both a travelogue of our beautiful state and a teaching tool intended to help inspire students to pursue a community college education. As community college educators, it's definitely worth a watch. But there's an added hook fore us here in the Peralta district...

Laney College President Tammeil Gilkerson reports, "I watched the full one-hour special and was touched by the featured students and their candid interviews with community college alumni.  I’m also happy to share that our outstanding machine technology faculty member, Adam Balogh, is featured in the documentary.  He brings a different flavor to things.  After initially getting a degree in comparative literature, a machine technology degree from Laney College helped him make the switch to working as a machinist and YouTube streamer.  You’ll get a peek at his passion for the work and I’m so grateful that he continues to pass on the 'gift' he was given." 

What was that gift? A Laney College Course Catalog! Click here or the image below to watch "Community Driven" from the start. Adam's section of the documentary starts at 33 min 25 seconds.  Safe Travels!

Google AdWords

In an effort to drive enrollment and raise awareness of the Peralta District and the four colleges, we have started using Google Advertising to display our message in search results. The preliminary results of this campaign are very promising. In less then a month we've seen 8700+ ad impressions lead to 1400+ site visits, half of whom have not visited Peralta.edu previously. We know from Google Analytics that these ad respondents tend to stay on the site for at least 3 minutes and visit 2.5 pages, which is what we want. That is the path to enrollment in Passport. Over time we'll have more data that will help inform our ads, and how people navigate our website, but this is a very positive start.