Hi, folks. Daren Otten, Superintendent/President at Copper Mountain College, and this is the Board of Trustees regular meeting agenda from October 9, 2025 follow up report.
There were a couple of things that happened in closed session, though there was no action taken coming out of it. Although the Board of Trustees has started my annual evaluation process, and just for the way that that process works, there’s an agreed upon document that we all work through, the board then works through their evaluation both October and November, and in December. Ultimately, we finalize that annual evaluation.
Obviously, that means that my evaluation is based on the calendar year, which always makes it a little bit interesting as I’m working to provide progress reports of the goals and things that we have established just back in September. But because most of the time these things are pretty consistent over the years, it’s not the most difficult thing. But this year, as you all know, the goal structure changed just a little bit. So I will be providing the board a little bit of updates in those spaces.
Moving into the regular meeting, we had several new employee introductions and the Star Award was provided to Claire Davidson-Rubin for some of her work that she’s been doing up in Academic Services. Most folks had just normal reports for all of the kind of board reports, trustee reports, several new APs and BPs were shared with the board. And then Dr. Alma Correia shared the Institutional Effectiveness Report. And I wanted to talk briefly about the Institutional Effectiveness Report.
This is something that I believe you all know is informed both by employee surveys and student surveys on an annual basis, and we are in the process of updating those surveys. So Institutional Effectiveness right now is taking a look at both of those surveys. And there’s a couple of things and a couple of opportunities that we’ll be coming up to inform those things.
First and foremost, for the student survey it’s a very long survey. We have a lot of students who start the survey, but very few actually finish the survey. And the information that we have is that they often either run out of time, run out of patience, or just don’t have the answers that start to dig into perhaps some of the services that they haven’t used over the years. And so we’re going to be a little bit more intentional about making sure that we’re capturing the actual information that we want to get from our students, but it’s also one of the things that’ll be crossing most folks desks here at the campus is that if you use some of that student survey data for some specific report, or there’s a specific question that you absolutely need for your reports or for, you know, other reasons that you have to have that exact question answered by students, please let Dr. Correia know, because we will be updating several of those questions and surveys, trying to make sure that that we are capturing adequate information and yet not making it be 140 questions.
Regarding the employee survey, that has been a forced choice instrument for a couple of years, meaning that it’s basically a three-point Likert scale, which is it’s amazing, it’s horrible, or I don’t care. And that’s kind of the way that that that ultimately is panned out ultimately in the employee survey feedback responses. And so what we are going to be moving towards is a most likely a five Likert point scale to give a little bit more nuance into some of the feedback on those particular responses. This isn’t to do anything except try to capture a little bit more information about where the temperature of the campus is.
And so there will be opportunities, in particular with institutional effectiveness, as we work towards updating both of these surveys to make sure that, again, questions that employees need for specific reports are ensured to be stayed or will ensure to be stayed within those surveys. So just want to make sure everybody’s aware that that’s coming up. And Alma did a great job with that presentation. Shared a lot of good information about our students, our student success, and then obviously our employee information.
Really, from there, it was a pretty quick meeting, just paying the bills, several just kind of basic stuff going on. And the board did adjourn till November in preparation for our joint board meeting with Morongo Unified, and then our regular board meeting in November. One thing I did want to mention, though, just briefly, and this is just to affirm everyone. Obviously, we know the government continues to be shut down at this point, the federal government, and that continues to impact very negatively our friends at Joshua Tree National Park, many of our friends and colleagues over at the Marine Corps base. But for us here at Copper Mountain College, Pell dollars continue to flow to our students. Student financial aid continues to flow to our students. And so, I just want people to be very aware that what our students need the federal government for continues to happen. And so just continue to thank you all for your support, and I look forward to talking to you next month.
