Hi, folks. Darren Otten, Superintendent/President of Copper Mountain College, with your recap of the Thursday, August 13, 2026 Board of Trustees meeting.
First, I want to welcome everyone to fall of 2026. It’s really exciting to see both the students and faculty back on campus. The energy is high, and I hope everybody’s as excited as I am as we look forward to the 26-27 school year.
Jumping into the board meeting, obviously there were several things that were just kind of the normal procedural and normal reports, but I did want to start and just briefly highlight that attached to my board report on Community are several readings associated with Community College 3.0. And as everybody knows from the All Staff Day presentation, a lot of that has influenced my thinking around this space. And if you’re interested, I encourage all of you to take a look at the last couple of months of board reports on Community, as I have attached many of the readings that, again, are kind of helping shape my thinking and are really framing the national conversation about how we look towards the future of community colleges.
Moving into Sandy’s report, I also want to just thank everybody who attended the accreditation celebration at Sky’s the Limit, including Dr. John Watkins, who really helped coordinate putting that on and really was a great night under the stars celebrating and an amazing eight year accreditation. And so again, congratulations to the campus for that effort and that work. And again, a big thanks to to John as we moved into several of the presentations. I do just want to kind of highlight that.
Attached also to that board meeting is Meredith’s presentation specifically around the Learning Resource Center remodel in the library, the climbing wall, and the shade structures. So those obviously are the three big projects that we’re looking [at] and hopefully we’ll be able to get completed over the next year. And specifically, you know, work through both the competitive bid process, the final designs, but also acknowledging that over the last year, we took an awful lot of time to do some of the planning and collect constituent feedback specifically about what some of those spaces would look like, how they’d be utilized. But if there are things that you want to make sure you can, you want to share with Meredith or have concerns, questions, or other things about these projects, please reach out to Meredith in that space.
Additionally, the first read of the Board of Trustees annual goals and the first read of the Superintendent/President, goals were made. The board is still accepting feedback, specifically if folks have thoughts or items that they want to have considered to be wrapped into the board goals or my goals. As we look towards the September meeting, please share that either through public comment, through communicating with my office or through the constituency feedback process of College Council. At this point, I have received several pieces of feedback, both through the Classified Senate and Academic Senate spaces. And ultimately, we’ll be sharing all of those things with the board as they consider what these final goals look like as we look towards September.
September is a very busy month for board meetings. Both the, as we mentioned, the Board of Trustees and my goals are expected to be adopted. And then also the budget presentation. So my last comment on this is that, you know, California passed a very positive budget for California community colleges. But that doesn’t mean that there are California community colleges that are not struggling across their resources, across their enrollments. And I’m just happy to remind and, you know, acknowledge that Copper Mountain College is not in that place. We continue to be in a very strong fiscal place. We continue to be in a very strong enrollment place. And Meredith will be sharing that full budget in September. And I encourage anybody who is interested in learning more about all of those things to attend.
Thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you next month.
