 for hosting the event tonight. This is a gorgeous, gorgeous facility. It's one of my first times having a chance to be in here and view it, and it's an outstanding venue and perfect for tonight's meeting. So again, welcome to the event here where we're gonna talk about the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Morganton campus. Want to talk a little bit about, well, we're supposed to have some slides up here for the, for, for, to view, and the slides are not up here, but there they are, and want to talk a little bit about the project and how we got to this point. So, this worked a little while ago. The slides aren't advancing, but anyway, so I've done this about 25 times so I can do it from heart. The North Carolina School of Science and Math is, I want to say just a little bit about the school in case you haven't, in case you're not familiar with the school at all, and hopefully those of you who aren't or weren't familiar, over the past year, you've become much more familiar with NCSSM. Our school is the school that was founded in 1980, the first of its kind in the world, which is a school where North Carolina was looking for an opportunity to grow talent within the state, keep them here in North Carolina and help to advance the economy of North Carolina as it was moving forward. So we were the very first school of our kind in the world in 1980 when the state of North Carolina established us. And since then, we have grown to now where we have 680 students who are residential students on the campus who live there. We educate another thousand through our virtual education programs. And over the years, we started as a part of the state of North Carolina and we became a part of the university system. A lot of people don't know that NCSSM is one of the 17 constituent campuses of the University of North Carolina. So they treat us just like UNC Charlotte, UNC Asheville, Appalachian State, all of the other campuses. And so that's been a great benefit to be a part of that. And today at NCSSM or this past year, for example, we had almost 1500 students who applied to attend NCSSM. And of those 1500 students, we could only accept 340 students into our residential program. So there are many more students in North Carolina who want the opportunity and who can't have the opportunity because of lack of space. So our school began to look at expanding really back in 2008, 2010, we lost the ability to add any more students to the school. And so over that time, we began to look at expanding the school. And really in 2012 was my first conversations about the possibility of opening a second campus here in Morganton, North Carolina. And those conversations began with a real grassroots effort here in the local community led by many of the leaders that are here tonight, the Collett family was one of those folks, the city and governmental leaders in the county and the city of Morganton in the Unifor region. So those conversations really started back in 2012. And then in 2013, the General Assembly asked us along with the Department of Public Construction and the UNC system to conduct a feasibility study to look at the possibility of expanding to a second campus here in Morganton, North Carolina. We did that and presented it to the General Assembly. And then through continued efforts in the community and in the region to help promote this. In 2015, the General Assembly put forward a $2 billion bond issue to improve the facilities in the state of North Carolina. And part of that was $58 million to open a second campus of NCSSM here in Burke County in Morganton. And so that is the sort of the long path to where we are today with the facility. And a lot has happened since the bond passed in March of 2016. And what we did was the first thing we did was to hire an architect for the project. We brought the architect team on, then we brought the Friday Institute out of NC State on to help us plan the educational program. And then we hired our project director, Kevin Baxter, who lives here in Morganton since January of this past year. And since that time, we have begun the planning process in earnest. Again, the conversation started along before January for this project. But since then, we established a core planning team which consists of 23 members of that planning team. And those folks include NCSSM alumni, faculty and staff. And it also included five leaders from this region. And those folks are here this evening. And after I had mentioned their names, I'd love the whole core planning team who I think almost all are here to raise their hands to be recognized for their efforts because over the past eight or nine months, these folks have met many times and looked at a whole lot of information. We've had thousands of people that have provided information through surveys, through focus groups, through design surets. We've done visits to schools in Virginia and South Carolina to look at this. And all this has come together in the plan that you're gonna see here today, which is the educational program vision for the campus as well as the master plan for the facility design. And so the core planning team, those 23 members, in the local community, we had City of Morganton Manager Sally Sandy. We had WPCC President Michael Helmick. We had Larry Putnam, who's the superintendent of the Burke County Schools. Enoch Moeller, who's the head of the Google site in Lenore and Ellen Collett, who lives right here and was one of the folks that really helped from a grassroots level move this project forward beginning in 2012. So all of these folks have worked really hard over the past nine months to get to where we are today, which is a milestone for this campus. So the core planning team members, I see a lot of them here. Those of you that are on the core planning team, if you could raise your hand and let us give you a hand for your work to get to this point. And I also wanna say that beginning in 2012, I've been involved in a lot of projects in my 25 years in public education, and I have never been involved in one that there was universal support from the entire community and region. From that earliest conversations, the business community, local governmental agencies, all of the various community leaders, K-12, higher education, have all been, from the very beginning, they came and they said, what can we do to be helpful for this project and have been on board ever since we started. And so I just wanna say for me personally and all of the folks at NCSSM to say a big thank you to all of the leaders and members of the community here in Morganton, as well as the Unifor region for your support to getting us here today. So thank you all for all you've done. So let's give yourselves a hand. I think by the fact that if you look around the room, we have a number of legislators for whom this project is something that they're very proud of. They're here this afternoon and evening. We have a number of the city leaders who are here, the county leaders who are here, and leaders from all over the region. And I think by their presence and all of your presence, it speaks volumes to the importance of this project. And for not only this region, the Unifor region, but for the state as a whole, as we've gone around the state and talked to people about this project all over the western part of the state, it's an unbelievable the enthusiasm for it. And I think there's just as I've gotten the sense of in this part of the state, there's a real feeling of as I like to think about it as it's a pot on the stove that's boiling or moving towards boiling. There's a lot of excitement and we're just so happy as a part at NCSSM to be a part of the excitement that went on right here. We think that we can bring something to the region and we know that we're gonna get a lot from this. I think you'll see as the plan unfolds, we've tried to shape what we're doing with NCSSM-Morganton to reflect the resources that are here in this community and take advantage of the great opportunities here to create a unique program that builds on what we've learned at NCSSM over 38 years. So I think you'll be very proud to see what's transforming here or what's being built here in Morganton. I wanna, we have, we're really fortunate to be able to start the presentation and Kevin Baxter will come on to walk through the plan in just a minute. But we wanted to start with about a seven minute video that one of our alumni, class of 2011, put together. When he heard about this project, he and Kevin talked and they looked at an opportunity to sort of chronicle this project from beginning to end and this first video really captures the project up to this point. So Caleb Oluwabi is the alumnus who you'll meet after the video but his production team has done a fantastic job of capturing the project to this point. I think it's a great way to look back at what started about eight months ago and brought us to this point. And then Kevin's gonna come on in just a minute and let you see some of the specifics about the plan at this point. So this time we'll roll the video. And again, I just wanna say thank you for being here tonight. But more importantly, thank you for all your support over the past nine months that allow us to be where we are today. We could not have done it without you. And we look forward to your continued involvement and support as we move forward over the next four years to a 2021 when we'll open the campus. So again, thank you so much. Founded in 1980, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics is building a second campus due to open in Morganton in 2021. Let's follow project manager Kevin Baxter and his team as they survey the site, engage the community and dream about new possibilities for this innovative model of STEM education. We opened our doors in 1980. At that time, we're the first school of this kind in the country and in the world even, which was a publicly funded residential high school focused on STEM. North Carolina was transitioning from that time from being an agriculture and textile base primarily to more knowledge base. You know, the research triangle park was up and coming and so the goal was to think about how to make sure we have the talent in the state to grow those industries as the state developed further. And so one of the strategies was to provide this opportunity for students all over North Carolina. And so we bring students in from all 13 congressional districts are involved in enrollment and so that started in 1980 and we opened the doors with 150 students in the junior class and added 150 the next year and this year we enroll 680 juniors and seniors in our residential program. Right off the top, the most exciting to me is that we're gonna serve 300 more students. We've hit capacity in Durham for many years now. For about seven years, we've not been able to go beyond the capacity we were, the ceiling we reached with our student body and so 300 more students a year beginning in 2021 are gonna have a residential experience. We spoke with Vice Chancellor for Student Life, Terry Lynch, about the unique opportunities that come with building a new campus. And then for me being able to have sort of like a blank slate to create different structures, different systems and use the knowledge of what we do on the Durham campus but perhaps do it slightly differently for the Morganton campus. And that could be the layout of a residence hall, having more lounge spaces for the students to sort of gather the dining amenities for the students, the opportunity to engage with the Morganton community. Those are real sort of neat opportunities that because we're building a new campus, it gives you the opportunity to sort of think and be creative versus sort of doing the same things over and over again. A lot of times as an administrator, you may be able to build a new building or build a new sort of suite. There's very few times where you're actually building a new campus and opening a new campus and so that's really exciting. But we also see a tremendous opportunity to really build out an entirely new type of applied learning experience, which could become a pilot that maybe finds his way back to Durham as well, where students get into the real world to advance manufacturing settings and renewable energy development settings and sustainable agriculture settings and all these different types of experiences where they can work alongside professionals in the field. It's really a tremendous opportunity to expand the mission of the school to serve more students across North Carolina and take advantage of the resources and opportunities that present themselves in that part of the state. The most exciting thing for me is the opportunity that I think it's gonna bring to all of Western North Carolina. Obviously, a great opportunity for Morgantina, which I'm quite passionate about. Think about this is the hub and all the different educational opportunities that can happen. I think it changes the game in Western North Carolina for the value of education and the ability to increase the educational attainment in all of North Carolina, especially Western North Carolina. And Sally Sandy isn't the only one excited about the unique setting of Western North Carolina. The campus is gonna be very different. I mean, it's gonna be a little over three times the size in terms of the actual footprint of the campus. And it's gonna have a much more green space than the Durham campus does. And so that may impact our ability to do some things differently with the curriculum around environmental sciences, for example. Given that schools science and math was the first of its type, and now we have the opportunity with the UNC school system to develop that next university system, I would not be surprised that the other STEM organizations throughout the state, throughout the nation, we're looking at us and saying, well, how did you do this? And can we copy that from you? And that's gonna be a model that we believe is forward-looking. It starts to respond to the interests of today's students and also the interests of industry. So the students that we're looking for, they're intellectually curious. They're entrepreneurial. They're innovative in their thought processes. They're critical thinkers. And most importantly, I think they are collaborative. They want to work with other students. They want to engage with faculty. They wanna ask questions that have never been asked and answered before. And that creates an environment that helps them to thrive as an individual, but also as a community. I think when you really consider the mission of the school and you really look at the realization of the mission to not just be an experience for the individual students who come, go through the program and then move on, but really the school's cumulative impact, I think when you look at the opportunity that we have through a second campus in Morganton to number one, increase the number of students who have the experience, but also look at the opportunity that it creates to for us to impact in a different setting and a different part of our great state, the extended opportunities that the school offices offers in terms of reaching out and partnering with local communities all across the state. I got excited because of the amount of independent businesses thriving in Morganton and the surrounding areas, the amount of corporate and industry kind of presence that has over the last decade or so really established themselves throughout the Unifor region surrounding Burke County and within Burke County. And so there's a lot of momentum in my mind in that part of the state. The need there is for someone to shine a spotlight on it. Grayson Cooper, an NCSSM alumnus, has served on the core planning team for the Western campus. So the notion that we can have more students across the state have access to those kinds of caliber of experience that are gonna give them a jumpstart not only in terms of the content but in terms of like what they're really curious about and interested in is really exciting for me. We have tried to be as inclusive in our process as possible to maximize the inputs that affect the direction of the plan. And so as we built out the educational program plan and simultaneously the master facility plan for the site, what we've been doing is kind of collecting feedback that would direct or inform those plans and on top of all that what you have is you have a team, that same team, Kevin Baxter's team, the Friday Institute, and due to pain, you would think that they've been together for 20 years doing this but it's really been just six, seven or eight months. They are a partnership, a collaboration and they are working extremely well together. It's really impressive. We think that's a win-win. It's actually a win-win-win. It's a win for NCSSM. It's a win for the industries and it's a win for the state of North Carolina. So we're excited about that in particular. Get some recognition and also to tell us a little bit about what inspired him to, because he reached out to us and volunteered to do this in the fashion house in Asheville. And so, Caleb, what inspired you to do this work? Thank you, Chancellor Roberts. First, let me say, you guys all look great and that's coming from a fashion designer. So you should give yourselves a round of applause. I mean, honestly, absolutely. It's a really great question. I think, you know, I'm an alumni of NCSSM, the youngest of three brothers that went there and it was actually at my sixth year reunion that I went and I was speaking with some of the original class of 86 and some of the other years and it dawned upon me that all these men and women were giving in their certain ways. What are ways in which I could begin to give, you know, in my small way, in my start of my career? And so, you know, this idea came to me kind of like an epiphany, I guess you would say. And it was just such a great idea and I saw it and I saw the idea that NCSSM and the STEMs were coming closer to the West, you know, where I grew up and we were just branching out into all of North Carolina. And so, to me, it just seemed like the perfect fit, the best idea. So I gathered up one of the best production houses in all of Asheville, Telescope Productions. Some of you have probably interviewed with Elijah, but what we did is we created, you know, a segue into what we hope to be an ongoing web series. And so, you know, highlighting the STEMs, highlighting the sustainability that all of North Carolina shares. And so, you know, I am privileged to be a part of this and to be a part of a great legacy at North Carolina School of Science and Math and now to say it's closer home. So I hope to be speaking with a lot of you as well and meeting you and I'm just thrilled. So thank you. It'll be great to chronicle this experience because I think it's one of the folks on the video who said that this has really not been done before what we're doing here. So it'll be great to capture the process by how we get to the campus in 2021. For this point, I'd like to introduce Kevin Baxter, who's the project director for this particular project that we're working on. And he was brought on in December, I mean, in January and has lived in Morganton since then and has done an absolutely fabulous job of leading the core planning team in working with our partners at Due to Pain and the Friday Institute Development Finance Initiative to get us to this point. So at this point, please welcome Kevin Baxter. How's everybody doing? Wonderful. Well, they told me when I started in January, there's something about accepting the greater challenge which is a bit of a tagline at NCSSM and anytime you use AV, good grief, you accept the greater challenge. So for those that are interested, we had a Wi-Fi blip and it dropped our whole presentation and then we had to recover and, you know, we'll see how it goes. It's almost like being on a reality show to see if your presentation drops and then what happens next, you know, we'll see. So we are going to hope to show you some slides as we go through this, but if they do cut out, I'm just gonna start making some things up and calling people in the audience up to the stage and we'll just talk about their vacations or interests and so on. So we'll see how this all works out. But again, thank you all for being here today and for your interest in the project. You know, let me see, this isn't even working, I don't know why I'm using this. So I could tell you that this has been an incredible experience for me personally and it's been made all the more so by the reception in Morganton, throughout Burke County, within the Unifor region and really across Western North Carolina. We have had an exceptional amount of interest in this project since at least January, if not going back years and years. That really originated with a few key champions. I cannot possibly call on everyone in this room who wrote a letter or called a legislator or made a contribution or did anything that you possibly could to help impact the selection of Morganton for the new campus. What I can do, because I have a mic up here, is acknowledge that we have an incredible pair of legislators who represent us here in Burke County with Senator Daniel and Representative Blackwell and I believe both are in the room and I just wanna extend our appreciation to them for their tireless efforts to beat the drum for this incredible campaign to bring NCSSM to Burke County and to the Unifor region and I think we all thank you very, very much for that work. So NCSSM is really, you heard about this in the video, we really rely a lot on collaboration and on teams. My team in Morganton is supported by Kelly Lookadoo and Blith McNeely. They will not be on stage, you will not see them upfront waving but I want you to know as members of this community and of this region that the event this evening and all the work that's gone on to this point is not possible without their support as well. So if you come across them, they would kill me if they knew I was talking about them. They're probably out in the lobby, setting up for something else. So just know that there is a great group of people working on this in Morganton and there's a great group of people working on this in Durham. We have about 26 of our faculty, staff, and administrators here in Morganton today from the Durham campus. They are assembled in the front few rows and we appreciate them having made the trip out and really the incredible work they've done above and beyond a very full plate in each person's case to make this project the best it possibly can be. So again, thanks to you all as well for all that you have done and continue to do for this project. As we, yes indeed, give them a round of applause. We're gonna try this one more time and upon realizing nothing happens, we're gonna ask Justine Davy. Anyone know Justine Davy? Come on out here Justine. Yeah. This is Justine. She's an alumni, an alumna of NCSSM and she had no idea this was about to happen. I'm gonna be asking Justine to help me behind the scenes so she's gonna be toggling the slides as we go through since my clicker has been rendered useless. So if you can help us out, see if we can get through this or else it's gonna be a really interesting evening, okay? Thank you, Justine. And you can try your very hardest to advance the slide deck and if that does not work, then we're gonna make it. Okay, look at that. We're back. We're gonna talk about the color orange. You know, this is, there we go. Okay. Aren't you glad you're not the one up on stage right now? Okay, so we're gonna talk a little bit about the project to give a full scope of really what all the work is that's happening at this point in time, how we've gotten to it. And I'm gonna move through this rather quickly because I want to keep your attention and also make sure that everyone in this room and everyone joining us on live stream has a real appreciation for the amount of work that's gone on and what are the outputs or the outcomes from that work. So as you can see up on the slide, we do have a number of recommendations that have been moving forward from this process. You heard Chancellor Roberts make reference to our core planning team who have been incredibly committed to this process since January 30th. They have been engaged in a number of meetings and events as you heard. Their work has been to inform and advise the plans that flow forward to our Chancellor and our Board of Trustees. As you all know, you're represented in this part of the state with a number of individuals on the core planning team. And we also have the talented folks back at NCSSM and in our alumni ranks and so on. They made such incredible time in doing their work that we got ahead of schedule right out of the gate. We found ourselves on May 26th being able to put forward to our Board of Trustees a site recommendation. For those who've been involved since the beginning, you know that we've been looking at that whole 800 acre parcel of land between Berkman Avenue and Enola Road. And it was a lot of work that had to go into that particularly from our colleagues at Duda Payne Architects. The outcome of that process was really a spoiler alert to look at the School for the Deaf's Eastern Ridge. That emerged without question as the top selection for our team and for our campus. And it was not because of the fact that it was just an educational partner at the School for the Deaf. That was important to us. We value that relationship. We see a lot of opportunities on both sides of that relationship to be engaged and to do some collaborative activities together, collaborative curriculum potentially, shared facilities, all sorts of opportunities to make the very best outcomes for both programs. But also just to our south is Western Piedmont Community College. And Western Piedmont, that's where I call home. That's my office is at Western Piedmont. And their whole team, Dr. Helmick through their administration has been incredibly supportive in also trying to realize from their perspective how we can partner with the Community College, which is something we've not done a lot of at NCSSM and Durham. So this is a really neat opportunity for our institution to be looking at ways to engage the Community College system and to have a partner like Western Piedmont literally out our back door when we open this campus is gonna be an incredible opportunity, not just for us, but for Western Piedmont as well. So that connectivity to educational partners is critical. We also looked at everything from green space to space to grow the campus over time. If that was the direction we intended to go, we looked at the existing facilities, the opportunities to stay on our timeline because we're very sensitive to that in this community. Are we not? That's right. So we are going to make sure 2021, this campus is going to open, or we'll have a new person in my shoes and probably in Todd's too, that matter. So we're gonna make sure we open it by 2021. He's crying backstage. So we are very much looking forward to accelerating this work now that we have that site selection. The board unanimously approved it and then we moved forward to September to this month really with two recommendations in mind. If you've been having trouble falling asleep at night, you would have gone on to our website to find about 200 pages of reports or at this project that have been sent up to our Board of Trustees for their review and consideration. That set of reports, one is an educational program report that our colleagues at the Friday Institute at NC State University have authored alongside of our core planning team. The second report is the master plan for the campus that was authored by Duda Payne Architects. Each of those are really the substantive elements of what is moving forward to the Board of Trustees tomorrow at their meeting here in Morganton. We hope that they will approve those recommendations. And if they do, we will have our blueprints in place to move forward for the next four years with the build out not only physically of the campus, but also in terms of our educational structure, the intersections we're going to pursue with private industry, with institutions for higher education, K-12, as well as back to Durham and NCSSM. So really exciting opportunities are ahead. We can advance the next slide, Justine, and see some great pictures up here that really are representative of some of the engagement that we've tried to pursue as an institution as we've gone through this process. We've had a number of opportunities, not just here in Morganton and Burke County, but really from all the way out in Cullowee and Dillsboro, through to Asheville, down to Charlotte, up to Boone and Blowing Rock, over to Hickory and Winston-Salem, tremendous enthusiasm and interest from the entirety of Western North Carolina in this project. I think there's a recognition, not that this will dramatically alter the landscape or that it would all of a sudden change the values of this place that we all treasure, but rather it will be a catalyst. And you heard me reference that in the video, trying to shine a light on all the incredible things that are already happening in West North Carolina. And we are in a really neat position at NCSSM where we have every opportunity to work with every different sector across the landscape. We can work with K-12, we can work with higher ed. We're not competing with those institutions. We can work with our partners in business and industry and we can begin, we hope, to really generate a lot of enthusiasm for folks to locate themselves in this part of the state, to contribute in this part of the state and also to make some more blended lines between sectors so that really we have this opportunity to engage the full community, kind of writ large across Western North Carolina. We went out to Dillsboro to meet with the folks at the Green Energy Park and some of the incredible things they're doing to blend public projects with community art as well as with trying to use some methane that's coming off an old landfill. It's incredibly innovative. You would never know it was there unless you happened to cross somebody and now it's a premier opportunity for us to have a partnership with them at NCSSM for summer programs potentially, for art programs that go out for excursions and so on. And it's been great to be in this role for the last nine months because I've had the opportunity and the excuse really to go out and learn about all the incredible things going on in this part of the state. Written around in a pickup truck at Biltmore Estate, looking at their sustainability programs, went over and met with folks in the high tech sector in Hickory at their data center conference, been up to Appalachian State to learn about new river power and light and the incredible things that they're doing with some seed funding from the UNC system. So there's just tremendous opportunity for us to take full advantage of. We also want to pull in our alumni. We want to pull in our stakeholders at NCSSM and Durham so that we can really begin to have some opportunities for the overall, the state to benefit from our institution even more than they do today. I'm gonna point out to you, for better or worse, there's a question link at the top. It's online so who knows where those questions will end up tonight. But our intention is that you visit that link as we go through the presentation if you have any questions that you'd like to see answered. And when we find that page in a few years, we will answer those questions as quickly as we can. And we'll make sure that you are heard eventually, if not in the moment. As we get into the substance of the program, we're gonna start first with the educational program plan. And while I'm up here on stage, I want it to be maybe very clear that I had a very small role, if any, in the educational program plan or the master plan. I've been in a facilitating role and the work has really gone on at the Friday Institute at Due to Pain and with our core planning team in particular. So as we go through this, just recognize that you have a number of folks here in the room who are resources that you can engage this evening if you're so inclined to ask them follow-up questions as well. The educational program vision was a big question when it started. How expansive is this question? We've got nine months to work with, which is not a lot of time. And we've got some really serious questions to pose because there's not many institutions across the country where they say we wanna build a second campus, which is seen as an equal to the first. Not an extension, not some outpost in another part of the state or another part of the country, but an equal. And when you raise that opportunity in that way, you really are challenged to really question the way the institution operates in some ways to see how can we convey elements to two places and what should be conveyed and what should be distinct. And as the core planning team worked with the Friday Institute, they arrived at an academic vision statement, which it notes it's proposed because it's going to the board tomorrow. They really hit three guiding principles. And it is kind of the perfect marriage of borrowing from and adhering to the legacy of our institution, a hard-earned legacy from 38 years of success that's been operating in Durham and then more recently with our tremendous online program. Preserving those values and identifying what is part of our DNA in Durham and online with our institution and making sure that we are absolutely bringing those elements to Morganton. However, we also acknowledge there's an opportunity for some flexibility here. Durham and Morganton are not exactly the same. There's a little bit of a subtle difference between the two communities. And if you look at what surrounds each of those communities, it's a very different footprint of industry, of educational institutions. There's strengths in both places, but they're not mirror images of one another. And so we don't want to approach this in a way that requires us to follow the same precise approach in a different place. And so as a result, there's been this recognition that we want to have differentiating flexibilities exist for the Morganton campus. For example, we have a tremendous, tremendous mentorship program where our students are going out, many of whom are going to Duke University and UNC and NC State and North Carolina Central University and engage in tremendous research experiences with faculty members there. Those are literally in the backyard of our campus. It's not very difficult for students to access those opportunities in a very proximate way to where NCSSM is located. So when we look at Morganton, certainly we can work and we intend to very directly with UNC Charlotte, UNC Asheville, Western Carolina, Appalachian State, and our private institutions like Montreak College and Wake Forest and so on. But again, it's not as though you can go there for just an hour and a half or four hours of your day. It might take you an hour and a half to get to some of these places, right? And so we're trying to call that question, how do we do this? Do we force that model or do we have a different model in place? And that's where these flexible opportunities really come into play. We are able to then have a very different opportunity to call that question again and look at it as if we can rethink another option for the institution. And what might emerge is something that goes back to Durham or goes back to our online program as a second or a third model in how we approach something like mentorship. When we look at some of the other areas of the report, it's very dense, but because there's a tremendous amount of information that needs to be shared, we try to distill it down to a couple of different areas here. There are a number of guiding academic principles and we only selected two. I mentioned our mentorship program. We're also looking at the Morganton campus as an opportunity to have what we started calling a Center for Teaching Excellence, but what has evolved into this idea of a teaching and learning innovation collaboratory. It's a much cooler name, I think, first of all. It's also something that could be distinct. It would not be seen necessarily as precisely the same thing as what's happening at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching or at our colleges and universities in this region who have colleges of education dedicated to some of these very things. Rather, we see our role and our place in this community as having an opportunity to engage with all of those players in a way that we could spearhead some new and exciting professional development opportunities for educators across the state, certainly in this region, and also have some opportunities where we can extend NCSSM in a different way into some of our partners across the UNC system to look at everything from student-teacher exchanges as a possibility to a research agenda that would be explored through the teaching center. So very exciting, a new opportunity for our institution that can happen through the Morganton campus. We see the structure of the school calling a number of questions ranging from the governance of the school and how that looks and operates to the residential environment. And here are two examples of things that we intend to pursue. One is to have a living and learning environment that is distinct here in Morganton that really allows for a 24-7 residentially-inspired education model, and our students have a very different kind of feel than they might in Durham. Now if there's Durham alumni in the room, I promise you we are not gonna give them carte blanche to go out into the community after sunset or anything that would look wildly different than it does in present day in Durham. Rather, we're looking at the way our facilities build out, the way our campus is oriented, and the way in which we identify and select personnel for the campus that can support a somewhat more efficient model, but also one that leverages the power of the place. We have an incredible environment around this campus, right? We wanna take full advantage of that. Finally, you see external partnerships. If you're in the room, most of you have already been engaged in some way with the campus, and that's reflective of our goal to try to bring the public sector and the private sector to the table for this conversation. One of the ways we see as an opportunity of doing that would be to have a public and private space where you might see incubators, you might see research bubbling up, but most importantly, you would see a collection of talent. You would see students from NCSM, faculty from NCSM. We would hope community members, whether they're youth or thriving adults who are doing great in business and industry, and then our partners in business and industry who can bring their brain power and their capacity and their resources into the conversation. You see this happening in a lot of large urban areas where you have these incredible American Underground and so on and so forth where you have this collection of talent that is incredible to stimulate startup activity and to provide particularly our youth with the appropriate amount of guidance to help push them to reach their full capacity. We wanna try that in Worgenton in a very different way and in a way that might be contiguous to our campus. Talk about that in a little bit. You can see that we have a number of defining features. I'm not gonna read them all because most have probably heard these before. The two or three I'll call out. We are calling this NCSM, Worgenton, to make sure that people are clear which campus we're talking about as we get through the planning process over the next four years. We will serve 150 high school juniors in our first class in fall 2021. That class will be followed the next year by a second class of 150 students who would join that junior class and so you'd have 300 in the full complement. 150 juniors, 150 seniors. Everyone gets a little stuck on, will it be 300 that first year? The answer is no. It will be 150 in fall 2021, full build out the following fall, fall 2022. And then finally, we will also have a number of opportunities on this campus to realize some efficiencies within our institution and across our partnerships in the region. Within our institution, you'll see things like a standardized academic calendar, standardized admissions requirements, and standardized kind of core soft range that serve as really our core curriculum. We'll build out around that in some exciting ways, but you will still find science, mathematics, humanities, engineering, computer science, very much at play and in effect in Worgenton just as it is in Durham. The two campuses are not too far apart, takes about two and a half hours. I've done it once or twice. It's an easy ride, it's a beautiful ride. It's more beautiful if you're coming west than going east in my opinion, but it's still splendid. And what you can see is that it's not such a tremendous difference that it can't be overcome. Think about today in Durham, how we have students who are coming into that program from Murphy and coming into it from Okra Coke, from all over the state. And that's a tremendous distance for some and it's very close for others. It will be precisely the same in Worgenton. We very much are adhering to the institutional value which is to promote that diversity across our state. We want students from Okra Coke in Worgenton. We want students in Murphy in Worgenton. We want students from Worgenton in Worgenton. We wanna make sure we have the same type of diversity where we can look at all 100 counties and say there's a place for you at NCSSM. This is just gonna be that many more seats that we can offer for our residential program and we're excited to be able to distribute it across both campuses. This is probably somewhat difficult to read, especially if you're in the back. But I'll explain real quick. This is some guiding information that was employed by our team at Due to Pain as they approached the master plan as they really thought through what does the program look like on this Worgenton campus? What is it we're looking to accommodate in terms of the curriculum that's emerging in terms of the extracurricular activities for students, the residential environment, and the student community that we wanna promote. And so they did an inventory really of all these different areas and made sure that as they worked through our campus master plan, these items all had a home in that master plan. And they do, I can assure you. And so know that it's not at such a high level at the master planning point that we haven't given thought to the specifics of our experience. We have, we just can't tell you exactly which room on which floor of which building the physics lab is gonna be. Yet, that's work to come in the months ahead. This is a map that I think the spirit of it is important to note. And the spirit is that we are a member of a community or member of a number of communities. This is the, this Pentagon shaped area, if it's not familiar to you, is the 800 acres that I mentioned earlier with I-40 on the Southern Point that runs along the horizontal area there. And then Enola Road on the right side and Berkman Avenue on the left. This is a collection of public agencies that are on this land with a tremendous amount of existing resources to work from. Whether it's the School for the Deaf, Western Piedmont Community College, the County Agricultural Extension, the Broughton Hospital. We have a lot of opportunities to build some partnerships. But there's a lot of undeveloped land on this site as well. And the reimagining Broughton project that the Department of Commerce has engaged in is something that we are excited about, that we are supportive of, and we are at the table just alongside our partners on the site in discussing opportunities with that project. This map calls attention with orange flags or squares to already known resources in our educational district, so to speak, on the western side of the property, where we see already facilities that are in place at the School for the Deaf in Western Piedmont that could be ripe for partnership. Just as they see on our campus plan as being built out new facilities that will be created that may be ripe for partnership for their students and faculty and staff. And so we have been working very hard as a collaborative group to try to make sure that we are aware of these. In particular, because the last thing we wanna do on our new campus for 300 students is build an auditorium with precious resources that we need to use very wisely. If there's an auditorium sitting 100 yards away at the School for the Deaf, there's an auditorium sitting 300 yards away at Western Piedmont Community College, and oh, by the way, there's an auditorium that we could all walk to from the campus right here. And so we're trying to be very thoughtful about understanding what exists in close proximity and not duplicating our efforts where that can be avoided. So this is an aerial site overview of the School for the Deaf. The School for the Deaf, again, I've said this a few times, but their partnership is very important to us. We have not just spoken with their director, we've spoken a lot with their director, Audrey Garvin, who I'm sure is in the room somewhere, and we appreciate her support very much, but also each of their different affinity groups, whether it is their foundation board or whether it is their historical museum or their alumni association or their administrators, whatever it may be, because each has a slightly different perspective on not just the school, but also the opportunities that are arrival to Worgenton has for the School for the Deaf as well. And so we've been working alongside them to understand what is the history on this site? What are some of the treasured elements of this site on the grounds that we need to be respectful of and make sure we are attentive to in our planning process? And then also, what are the areas of the site that really are not historical or tell that story that maybe can come down to make way for new construction, new green space, new community space? And so as we look at the site, you can see at the top of the site is the core campus for the School for the Deaf, very much in use today and thriving with their student enrollment and their programs that they do throughout the year. The lower half of the picture is what we've identified as the Eastern Ridge on this site. This is as it sits today, and so you can see a number of buildings represented on that site, not all of which are necessarily within our plan. In particular, we're looking at three buildings as really opportune for adaptive reuse. So it is very much our intention to reuse and breathe new life into the historic cattle barn, which you see on the furthest to the left on this slide, as well as Joiner Hall, which is the one in the center with the green boundary and Goodwin Hall, which is to the right of it. These are historically significant structures. The architecture is spectacular for these buildings and they tell a story and we wanna protect that story and invest in that story and we will. And so we are gonna put elements of our program into these three facilities. Now you'll note, I did not speak about the others. There's no green boundaries around the other ones. The other buildings that you see represented, we do intend to bring down and the reason for that is to make way for new buildings and or green space that would be available to our students and faculty and also in different cases available to our partners on the educational district and throughout the community. The orientation of our campus as it's envisioned by the Due to Pain Team, which we have fully bought into, is really to leverage kind of this axis that exists and if you're familiar with that piece of land, if you look at the main building for the school for depth, for the depth, which is just a gorgeous structure and its orientation to Avery Hall, which is over on the Broughton Hospital site, between the two is Goodwin Hall and so Goodwin Hall is the building that has the arrows to the north and I guess I'd be the west and the east of it on the map and that really seems to us to be a point where we can really connect with our neighbors architecturally and in terms of our campus orientation but really a point to then build out from in each direction and so we see a centerpiece of our site as Goodwin Hall and that would be in our minds where our main administration would be located for the school on this campus and it would have buildings in every direction from that and so when we start to actually drop those onto the map first of all you'll notice a lot more green space because we've removed the buildings that we would intend to clear and you'll see two facilities which really are part of the central neighborhood that are flanking both sides of Goodwin Hall. We see that as the major elements of our kind of student community, student commons in the center of our campus and so one of those buildings is intended to be truly a student commons facility that would integrate dining as well as the library and media center as well as student study space and activity space and meeting space and bring all of that together under one roof in a very kind of open concept and on the other side, the second building we see as a wellness facility where we could try something new for us at NCSSM which is to bring our wellness programs and professionals together in one space so our counseling department and those professionals together with our athletics professionals as well, our studio space for everything from, I just mentioned yoga or my wife would kill me, from yoga to whatever else people do for exercise, I don't know myself, but I hear it's a wonderful, wonderful thing and then we would also be looking to include a small multi-purpose gym for recreational use not for athletic competitions and so really having these two facilities flanking the main Goodwin Hall would provide that really major neighborhood in the center and then as you build out from there, all of a sudden you see some new buildings and what you see pictured on the map right now represents the extent of our phase one concept. So when we open in fall 2021, we really hope we can open with the campus looking as it does on this map. What you would see as you go down the spine of the campus I'll get to in a moment, but I wanna point out that there's probably a few savvy people in the room who are thinking, Kevin that's not the center of the campus, that's the endpoint of the campus, what are you talking about? I know that Goodwin Hall is in the center in a different scheme. In this scheme it really is one endpoint of our construction that goes from Goodwin all the way down to the barn, but as you look at the full master plan and how it could be realized if we expanded to serve say 600 students over some amount of time after we opened, all of a sudden you see Goodwin in that central element space, that central neighborhood and it would be able to serve residential and academic spaces on both sides of the campus in either direction. So we're really thinking long term here and trying to be very strategic with how we are able to build out the program. So what are these buildings? What is gonna happen on this campus? You can see some of the functions represented here and I will start down at the barn and note that this is a building we're very excited about. I just finished talking about how we would not have an auditorium per se on our campus. However we do see the barn serving some of that function. We understand that it can seat about 400 people in that facility in the plans that are being drawn up by due to pain. We're thinking about a mezzanine in there, prep kitchen on the bottom floor, some storage space so that you really could modify that space on an as needed basis for everything from lectures to academic competitions to student events to community events. And so we really see a neat opportunity to leverage that space in a way that can serve a number of different uses for our students and faculty and staff but also have an opportunity to serve this region as well for different activities. As you go up from the bar and you see some dorms that are located, there are two dorms that have a connected element in the center. One would be envisioned as serving about 150 students. Probably all the males would be in one and all the females in the other. And so about 150 beds in each building and that would kind of wind up past an academic building. The academic building is where we position most of our labs and classrooms, not all but most. And then as you continue up the spine there, you would get to that student common space, the Goodwin Hall building and the wellness facility as well. And then if you continued up the spine in phase two, you would see two more dorms, additional academic space and at that point an auditorium because that would present a challenge to have about 750 seats needed as that really doesn't match up with the other resources in the community. So that's something we would park in phase two. This is a different way of looking at it by neighborhood. So again, in the center of it, you see the commons and then on either side, living learning villages that would include academic and residential space and then the barn at the southern point there. This is something that probably, it may not seem like an exciting slide but it's the one I'm most excited by in the whole deck and the reason is because it really helps to tell a story of what the art of the possible is on this land. What you see here is certainly the structures that we intend to build out on the ridgeline but you also see some pretty intentional connectivity to School for the Deaf, to the West and to the Western Piedmont Community College to the South. We are envisioning a new roadway that would come in off of Berkmont and be able to serve not just our campus but also serve as an additional entrance to the School for the Deaf and an additional entrance for Western Piedmont Community College. Something that we could all share that it would give all three programs good visibility off of I-40 and also for emergency services and security reasons to give us all multiple entrances is something that we all desire. You can see a connection to a greenway system. If you're a savvy Morganton resident, you're saying that doesn't exist today. It's a proposed greenway extension that would run along Hunting Creek along the entire length of the district and we would very much want to connect our campus to that greenway in a way that made it accessible publicly. The line that encircles the ridgeline, which is our campus, is envisioned as a one-mile loop and that has a couple of functions. For one thing, we can use it to tell students, you know, here's a boundary line to know that by sunset you need to be inside that line. Just like on our campus in Durham, very important that they're back on campus by sunset no matter what time of the year it is. They love us in December. And so what you could see with that boundary line is it also has the opportunity to connote some of the wellness elements that we're really excited about on this campus, be a publicly available trail that could be used for walking, potentially for biking, and again, connecting to the greenway spine as that's realized. So again, community amenity that we can leverage. And then here you see the whole district and the way that the roadways are mapped out on there as well as the opportunity to help push our students and faculty toward downtown. They're not permitted in Durham to bring cars on campus. So that's an assumption we're making today that it would very likely be the same in Morganton. So they'll be out and about on public transit or on bikes and on foot, exploring the community and the region. This is a really inspiring quote that I can't read from here. Hopefully you all can. It really speaks to the sustainability theme that certainly as an institution of the state, it's a priority to make sure that we are engaged into some sustainable programs that will create some efficiencies for our institution. But it goes much beyond that. If you look around this landscape, if you look around this region, you see so many emerging opportunities to connect to what's happening in private industry and in the public sector with renewable energy, with sustainable agriculture, with trying to invent the next best thing that can really promote the environment around us and protecting that environment. Our students are very passionate about that. We have some incredible sustainability programs already in place at our institution in Durham. We want to take that to the next step, potentially here in Morganton and to use the build out of this campus to do that. So as we look at the next steps for the planning process, what you see here is we got a lot of work to do. This seems like a, this is a milestone. This is a point of celebration. It's really coming, people, I promise you. And it's coming in just a few short years. But in spite of the fact that we're celebrating today, we have a tremendous amount of work ahead of us for the next four years. That needs to happen as we build out our program and build out our facilities. And what you can see referenced here is that just in the next few months alone, we're gonna be making some recommendations to our board, submitting our master plan to the State Construction Office to keep us on schedule with our construction timeline, getting into schematic design with our partners that do the pain. So we understand exactly how that program is gonna manifest itself in the buildings being developed on our campus. Select the construction manager at risk which will happen in the next few months. We'll be doing some additional site visits to look at facilities and programs that exist around the country that can inform the design of our programs here in Morganton. Completing an asset inventory. We've been engaging the development finance initiative at the UNC School of Government to look at an eight county area that looks all over this region to understand exactly what we coldly call them assets but what partnerships are ripe to explore. And so we're looking at the educational setting, we're looking at the business industry side, the public sector and so on. And it's really an incredible canvassing that's already yielded more than 10,000 items or enterprises that we can establish some relationships with potentially. And then we're going to begin, most importantly, to operationalize elements of the plan that have been developed and that we voted on tomorrow to build out our curriculum, to build out our student experience and to do so in a way that is congruent with but still allows for some distinction from our Durham campus. So with that, we have a, why don't we do this? I think it would be good to pivot to a microphone down here. I'm gonna ask Sophie Williams, who picked the wrong seat, if she can come right over here and grab this microphone. And Sophie, we're gonna give this to you, okay? This is how we're gonna do it, folks. Sophie's got the chancellor's phone, I think, so we'll see what happens. Now's the time to make your budget requests if you're in the first three rows. What you can see on the top is a link. And what I'm seeing on there is there's already questions. So it's working. So if you, I have a question and you would like to drop it in there. Sophie will read the question on the microphone so everybody can hear it. And then from there, we will bring up the experts to answer it. As we prepare to do this, I want to invite two specific experts up to the stage and that is Darren Lathan from Duda Payne and Tripp Stallings from the Friday Institute. These guys have worked tirelessly for nine months on all the work that's gone into this project. They are much better equipped than I to respond to some of your questions and they will also, along with me, engage as needed other members of the team or from their consultant teams as well. So you guys can walk through that door. If you end up at a bottle shop, you've gone the wrong way. So just go up the stairs, there you go. And we're gonna ask Sophie if she will start us off here. Is that microphone operational? All right, can you hear me? First question from Isaac Crouch. Are there any plans to provide public transportation to and from downtown in order to connect the two areas? Isaac, well done, Isaac. Citizen Earth Media, everybody listen to them? Where's Isaac at? How you doing, Isaac? Very appreciative of their support. I'll answer this one and that is to say we are intending to pursue that. We were working, we actually were involved with a grant request that went forward from the Western Piedmont Council of Governments that involved the city, the county, Western Piedmont Community College, and a number of other stakeholders to look at an establishment of a pilot bus route that would actually run right alongside this campus and go all across the region. And we're still working on funding for that, but we are supportive of that project. We're hoping within four years that is able to gain traction and emerge as a real opportunity. Beyond that, we do maintain our own vehicles at NCSSM so we can take teams to their events to their academic competitions and so on and so forth. So there's a multiple ways we can approach that, but I would say to all the members of the community who are here, as you're looking at public transportation options to serve the communities across the Unifor region, please keep us up to date in ways we can be supportive of those innovative requests so that we can be a player at the table and help lend any support we can to those ideas. So yes, very much so we are pursuing that. Next question. Are there going to be opportunities relating to online students at this campus? The focus of the curriculum is different, so will that mean more classes are being offered? Yeah, I'm just gonna say yes to that question and I'm actually gonna ask Tripp if he can just provide a little bit of a snapshot around how this conversation is bubbled up in our core planning team and where there are some emerging areas that we see some opportunity to engage our distance education division and our online program on the Morganton campus. Thanks, Kevin. Now, as Kevin has said earlier, a lot of this is early stages, so we can say possibilities, but not certainties. The way the conversation has evolved is to think about ways in which students can be connected across campuses between Durham and Morganton, both synchronously and asynchronously, but also how can we expand the very large footprint of the existing distance learning program that already is part of the school science and mass offerings. And in addition to that, something that Darren brought up when we were talking about the design of the building, this is more of an aesthetic thing, it was kind of a cool idea. As technology expands and extends, we're thinking about ways to visually link the campuses also so that perhaps we'd even have spaces where students of the Durham campus and students of the Morganton campus would be able to see each other in action across their link-ups. There's a number of different opportunities and a number of different possibilities here. And one of the things that's most important to keep in mind is how the campus expansion here allows for an expansion of that distance learning process. I think there's more potential here than we've even realized yet, but there are quite a few ways that this group, especially that I see a lot of core planning team members here in front of me who have thought through how to make the most of the opportunities for distance learning here. And that's not just for students, but also for teachers as well. Kevin mentioned earlier that the idea that the core planning team had to develop a collaboratory for teaching and learning. And that's gonna require not just a physical space, but also a digital presence as well. So a lot of different opportunities. One of our folks at the Friday Institute who helped us think through some of the tech infrastructure noted, and we kinda laughed at first, but it's serious. He said, we need to be thinking about planning this space to accommodate internet connectivity, or network connectivity for up to seven devices per person on the campus. And we laughed a little bit, but when you sit and think about all the things in your life right now that are connected, I'm a technology Luddite a little bit. I came up with four or five just for me. And his point was that we're going to be rapidly expanding all the different ways in which we connect. So the campus itself as a living space is gonna have a number of different ways to connect, not just through classrooms and online learning, but also through more social aspects of that as well. So that's kind of an overview of all the different ways that we thought about not just online learning taking place, but also the connectivity across campuses and across the state. What can you share about how teachers will be brought on? Where will they be coming from? We have built out a projected personnel plan for the new campus where we would see, and this is inclusive of both the faculty and the staff, but we would see a need to bring on about 100 new positions by the time we opened the campus. And those are across the gamut for all functions that need to be served by the institution. When we look at the faculty positions, we would see our first step is being to identify some leaders to build out the curriculum on site here in Morganton. And so one of our first asks for operating support will be to identify a few individuals that can come in to begin to build out some of the plan for how the curriculum manifests itself in Morganton. And then as we went much, much closer to opening day, so probably in no earlier than 2020, I would imagine we would look to start recruiting and hiring the balance of the faculty so that they had ideally a year on site to build out the curriculum, the remaining parts of the curriculum and then begin to do their work on site. And so we will be doing national open searches. And so we would be eager to have applicants from all sectors. And I can tell you that Chancellor Roberts and I here on basically a weekly basis, and I have since I got to the job in January from individuals who've heard about the project as far away as California and Oregon and in the Midwest and so on who wanna work here and wanna come here. And so that's inspiring. And we know that there's a huge talent pool out there that's a lot of whom are coming from institutions of higher education, some from K-12 and some from private business and industry as well. So it will be an open process. We'll be working very hard to make sure that information is pushed out broadly when the time comes in the months ahead. How will admissions look for students who apply? Will they pick either the Durham or Morganton campus? The one of the defining features is to standardize our admissions model as we do today. If you apply to NCSSM, you have a choice. The two programs that run throughout the academic year, you have NCSSM online and then you also have our residential program in Durham. And so students can apply to both of those but they have to tell us which is their top choice. And so that would be the pool they'd enter first for consideration. We would be a third option here in Morganton. And so students again would apply to the institution. They would apply to NCSSM. And then at the point of application make a decision about how many of the programs they wanted to compete for and which one would be their top choice. If they were gonna go with all three, which would be top, which would be their second choice and which would be their third choice. We will not consider students for either campus who don't want to be considered for that place. And so if a student applies and only wants to be considered for Durham, they would reside in that pool. We would never look at them from Morganton and vice versa. And so we would do that in a standardized way that follows current practice for the institution. This is from Kevin McCloy. He asks, the curriculum will obviously focus on STEM, but are there plans to have innovative humanities curricular opportunities as well? Is that from Elizabeth Moose? Who said that? Kevin McCloy, Kevin McCloy. Okay, she's misrepresenting herself. Elizabeth Moose is our Dean of Humanities who's in the room and she's the greatest champion for humanities you will ever find or meet and she's spectacular. We have an incredible humanities program that operates in Durham. As I understand it, it actually offers more courses than any other discipline. Maybe that, I don't know if that's right or not, but that's what we say. So, you know, good for you, Elizabeth. I could tell you that the intention is across the entire curriculum to leverage existing elements that are in Durham. So some things would follow us to Morganton and other pieces would be built new. So there will be innovation in every area that can support Morganton but also can feed back into our Durham campus and into our online program as well. So, yes, in humanities we will pursue that but also across all the other disciplines as well. Will there be any interface with homeschool organizations? Oh, that's a good question. Tripp. You see how this works, right? That is not something that's come up in our conversations with the core planning team but it's that kind of thing though. I wanna use this as an opportunity to talk about the role that you guys are gonna be playing in the next four years. The educational program vision is a plan that tells the School of Science and Math or gives the School of Science and Math some direction on what should be done, who should do it and when it should happen, but not how. And these next four years are a really important time for this community to start investing and helping the school figure out the how. And a question like that, which hasn't come up yet, is the kind of thing that they're gonna need to really expand and think about what is the potential here? So I don't have an answer for you. I'm not gonna make one up for you because we haven't talked about it. But the mere fact that it's come up is an indication that you're ready to engage with this school on figuring out what things like that are going to look like. Currently in the Durham campus, we have homeschool students that are involved in a number of different ways. First of all, they can apply to attend the school. And we have many homeschool students who end up in our online program, for example. But we also have homeschool students who participate on our robotics team in the local area. They come in or part of the robotics team at NCSSM. So there's a number of different ways that that happens through various programs currently in Durham. So we would assume that they would be similar here. And as Tripp said, there may be new opportunities that we have yet to think about. What are some of the coolest examples of student or community interactions at the Durham campus? And how do you foresee students interacting with the community here in Burke County? It's from Anna Russ. I'm gonna ask Chancellor Roberts to be and give a good example on the Durham campus of a really neat community interaction our students have. If you can briefly respond to that question. There's different ways, both we talk about the mentorship program where they're growing out and specifically being involved in a, with a business or a school or a variety of different learning opportunities. But there's also through service. There's a service requirement for NCSSM students. They're 60 hours. And so they do that in their home community, but they also do it in the Durham community in a number of different ways. For example, tutoring at local elementary schools. They work with the local food bank to collect food and distribute the food. So there's a number of different service opportunities that they get out to into the community as well as some just begin to start their own business there. And I would say on this campus, we would see opportunities. We've visited with the team at CHS Blue Ridge to talk about opportunities at the hospital for students who are on the service side, but also on the research and mentorship side. There's some really neat opportunities to explore there. We've been out to Catawba County to look at some of the incredible work happening in the high tech sector, whether it's at Comscope or in Google or at Facebook and so on. We see a lot of neat opportunities to bring talent together. And that's something we would see happening locally, whether it's through service again or mentorship as Chancellor Roberts mentioned. Will the existing Durham campus be referred to as NCSSM Durham moving forward? That hasn't been determined. It's come up in a lot of questions about exactly what that would be and the determination of calling NCSSM Morganton as Kevin mentioned earlier was for distinction between the two. We often refer to the two campuses as NCSSM's campus in Durham or NCSSM's campus in Morganton. So there's not a set near what we're gonna call the Durham campus. In NCSSM Morganton, it may not be the final version of what this campus is called either. This is from Alan Nuddle. Any chance the robotics team can work something out to be able to either use the machining resources at WPCC or collaborate with students in the computer integrated machining program for fabricating parts? The very short answer to that is yes. We are, as noted, we are incredibly interested in partnering. And we have already begun to see that we had our academic programs division, our deans and directors and our vice chancellor come out to Morganton this past June and visit sites from Conover all the way out to the Morganton area. And on those stops, the whole point of that was to really begin to understand all the different partnerships that we could explore that could support the curriculum to support our mentorship experiences and also that potentially could begin to get some student placements now to get to work with our Durham campus or our online camp program to begin building relationships in the near term. So yes, we are working directly with Western Piedmont with Burke County Public Schools but also with our partners across the Unifor region and Western North Carolina to understand where there's an interest and then we wanna tap into that wherever we possibly can to promote those partnerships. Will there be competitive athletic programs for students on campus? There will be athletic programs. I hope we're competitive. I would say we get a lot of questions about which athletic programs. We have 21, I believe, athletic program, team sports in Durham. They're very competitive in a number of sports and we intend to do that in Morganton but when you only have 150 students in your first class and it's broken down nearly 50-50 male-female, their students are gonna drive that. They're gonna tell us which sports they want to pursue because we're not gonna field 21 sports with 150 students. So as the campus grows over time and gets that second class and then potentially if we're to grow down the road, we would explore kind of catering to student interests where we could field teams and where we would have opportunities to compete in this general region but there will be an athletics program. We just can't get into the weeds yet on specific sports and won't be able to until we understand who our first class is going to be. What is one specific and significant difference you envision between Morganton and Durham? One specific. What is one specific or significant difference you envision between Morganton and Durham campuses? Well, the easy answer to that is the campus design. We've learned a lot from the Durham campus and that's because of the student feedback, the faculty feedback, the staff feedback, the alumni feedback. They have all offered very open feedback around what works exceptionally well with the way that space has been designed and what are some of the limitations or challenges that have been observed over the last 38 years. And so we are putting that information to work through Duda Payne's team to make sure that we try to offer some new strategies and pioneer some new space, approaches to space and to the campus overall that could potentially again affect Durham down the road as well if we learn some things on the Morganton campus that could be made portable to affect Durham as well. This is from Tracy Salinas. How might NCSSM Morganton integrate the rich cultural heritage and cultural assets of Western North Carolina into its curriculum and other opportunities? There are countless ways. First of all, we have the opportunity at NCSSM to develop a very innovative kind of evolving curriculum across all of our areas. So we're not teaching from one lesson plan for 10 years at NCSSM. That's just not gonna happen. And so when opportunities emerge for partnership for some new approaches, whether it's experiential learning opportunities or ways to affect the actual curriculum, we can explore those. There are tremendous opportunities just in the Unifor region alone. But then when you go out closer to Buncombe County or down to Mecklenburg County, you see so much to explore partnerships around. And it all comes back to partnerships. Where there is interest, we are gonna be willing to sit down and talk through ways that our curriculum and our student experience can be affected in a positive way by building out those relationships. And so we're open to it. We don't have specific examples in mind because we have not yet been able to tell folks what our actual program's gonna look like. And so as we get over the next year and a half, as we get more detail and continue these conversations, we'll more intentionally look at how we can affect the curriculum build out through those relationships and through some of the storytelling that can happen in Western North Carolina. Are you going to have a community garden and grow organic ingredients? After all, you're in the mountains and this is core to the culture. Community service can help with maintaining it and it could be a biology classroom outdoors. So community gardens and several other types of outdoor activities are gonna be planned, both at the district level and on the campus level. I think you saw on some of the slides, the partnerships with Western Piedmont, for instance, they've got a great sustainable agriculture program already in place. But also we're looking at ways to incorporate green roofs into the architecture or to build in the courtyard spaces between our buildings, stormwater treatment gardens that can be a feature but also a learning opportunity. Maybe we will have vegetable gardens that are associated with the dining hall. So there's lots of potential for really great ways to engage the outdoor environments in the educational process. Will you use local contractors, suppliers and manufacturers for the build? For the construction? I assume so, that's all they said. So of course the general contractor who's selected will have a lot to do with that but obviously finding the resources in Western North Carolina is gonna be critical in terms of meeting our schedule and so that will be an active part of the process of seeking out local opportunities. Sophie, we have time for one more question and then we're gonna go online and answer others in a public way online. We'll tell you more about that in a moment. Is there a plan to have the two campuses compete in academic competitions or collaborate? The answer might very well be both. There could be opportunities where teams will compete in academic competitions because there's students that we have a science Olympiad team here or they're competing in Siemens from both campuses but there may also be opportunities for students to collaborate across the campuses and develop a team for an academic competition. They likely would compete because of the rules against each other in athletics but academic competitions they certainly could collaborate together and likely they'll be competing against each other as well. Okay, so thank you Sophie for stepping in. Didn't she do great. There are more questions than we have time to answer but what we're going to do is with all of those questions including the ones we've already answered is write out a response to them and post it as a PDF to our NCSSM-Worganton webpage next week so that everyone who did take the time to ask a question will have that question answered. I would also offer that this is an ongoing conversation. As you know, there are blueprints that have been developed by way of these sets of recommendations but they are not fixed. There's opportunities to respond to new and emerging areas where there's interest or there's energy and so please do not hesitate to reach out to us either through me and Morganton or through the team in Durham with any ideas that you have that are ripe for exploring for our online program, for our residential programs in either campus or for the institution overall. This has been a tremendous opportunity for us to reestablish and reinvigorate relationships across the state in this institution. It really is the state's high school and what you have seen is from colorway to Wilmington people have come out to learn more not just about what's happening in Morganton but what's already happening through incredibly successful programs in Durham and through our online program. So please do not be strangers. Please reach out to us with any ideas that you have. Please continue to be attentive to what's happening with this project as it moves forward. And if you're in a position where you think you might have something you can contribute, we have a bucket, we can pass it. No, I'm just kidding, we don't have a bucket. Rather if you have some talent or expertise that you think you could bring to bear on this work please make that known. Please reach out so that we can connect you with opportunities as we build out the next leg of our volunteer infrastructure as we figure out how to operationalize these incredible plans that have come from so much work by our consultants and also by our core planning team and others. So with that, again, thank you all so very much for investing your time tonight to learn more about the campus. Please reach out to us and let us know how we can be helpful to your efforts to keep it Western North Carolina moving. And again, stay tuned, there's more to come. Thanks very much.