CMC President's Board of Trustees recap and news for August 2024

Hi CMC family. This is Darren Otten, Copper Mountain College Superintendent/President, with your board report from the August 8th, 2024 meeting. But before I jump into a lot of the details associated with that, I want to welcome everyone back with All Staff Day as well as Flex Week going on this week and all the exciting things to see people back getting ready for students to show up next week.

It’s always an exciting time of year as we start ramping up very,very busy. But that’s part of the rhythm that we all love in education.

So with that welcome, then I want to jump into a couple of things from last week’s board meeting, specifically the board meeting, did have a closed session that the board did not have any actions coming out of that particular closed session and then moved into regular business.

Primarily, the big item that I want to make sure we highlight is that the board got an opportunity to introduce all of the ASCMC officers and spend a little bit of time hearing a little bit about each one of their stories to be a student government member. I’m excited about this year’s student government team specifically working to bring some better communication, better cooperation, and really an opportunity for understanding both what student needs are, as well as working within the college structures to ensure that we’re meeting their needs.

On the board agenda from last week was also the board goals and the superintendent president goal. First readings. One of the conversations associated with the  superintendent president goals I my goals. There was a comment specifically made from one of the trustees around adding a goal about onboarding new trustees. I think as everyone understands and knows at this point, we’re going to have at least three new trustees at Copper Mountain College come December. So that is probably something that is a reasonable addition.

And I’m going to work on wordsmithing and then distributing through the campus community as we update those goals. Speaking specifically of the new trustees, one of the other things that is happening is the board has moved forward to plan a recruitment and appointment of a replacement for Liz Myers spot, who resigned, as you all are aware, from the board in July.

So just quickly, as outlined in California Education Code, the Board of Trustees does have the ability to make a appointment or hold a special election due to the fact that the board does not want to bear the cost for the district of having a special election. There will be an appointment. There has been a couple of questions about, well, why wasn’t this position just added to the November ballot due to the timing of the resignation, the ballot announcement or call to be included on the ballot would have had to have been several months prior to Trustee Myers resignation, so there was no way to add it to the regular election that’s scheduled for this November.

So to meet that obligation of recruiting, there has been a press release that’s gone out. There is currently information available in my office for interested parties and for interested parties that would like to be considered and interviewed for the District Four trusteeship.

They have a couple of requirements. One is to be a resident of Trustee Area Four. If you know people who have questions about their trustee district, you can refer them to either me or you can refer them to San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters website, where they can do a district lookup, but they must be an area resident of District Area Four, must be 18 years of age or older. Normal stuff like you have to be a registered voter and can’t be disqualified, those kind of things.

Two other things that have come up as far as questions, they cannot be currently, a Copper Mountain College employee cannot be a Morongo Unified
School Board member. And so those are the requirements for someone to be considered for the appointment. Interviews will be conducted at the  September 5th board meeting.

And I do want to make sure everyone here is that the September 12^th board meeting was canceled in lieu of the September 12th meeting, we are having a special meeting on the fifth, starting the day with interviews of interested parties and then ultimately moving into all the agenda items that would have been on the normal September 12th board meeting. So that particular item is primary concern for everyone, and the process that we will be going through over the next month.

Also, in last week’s board meeting, really an excitement, we all had an opportunity to have the board approved tenure track hires, two of them in
nursing and two of them in English. Those folks will be invited to meet the board and meet anyone else who is at the board meeting next month, and so that’s exciting. We also had a few other folks, a couple of classified employees, a management appointee, etc. that were also approved by the board last month.

Finally, there was the normal business office items of paying the bills and ongoing agreement with our Education To Go online course support provider. So there wasn’t a huge agenda outside of mostly the, ASCMC items, a few updates associated with board policies, and then, of course, the process outline for replacing a trustee.

So again, I just want to welcome everybody back to the fall of 2024. And I’m looking forward to an amazing term, and I will see you all in September.