 Thank you all, hope you enjoyed your time together getting caught up and visiting and let's give the community house a round of applause for a fabulous lunch. We have a rather unusual agenda today by design, but we are going to take a bit of a privilege and modify it a little bit. We're going to delay the Chancellor's report until after we hear the committee reports and consider the consent agenda items and so we will come back after these reports and then go from there. We have a couple of critical votes coming up and from the nominating committee as well as from the FAHR. So at this time, marginally, if we can turn it to the items. Yes, and I need to pull up my policy 2100. But the draft minutes are enclosed in your packet for informational and the draft minutes came from our August 15th meeting right before the beginning of the school year and we hope they'll be good enough to be approved on November night meeting and I will think about you guys. Have a motion to approve the executive committee minutes. So moved here. Okay. So moved the second. All right. And all in favor say aye. Aye. All right. Thank you. Well, the draft minutes are approved. Okay. Thanks. I didn't quite. I thought I had 55 minutes to do it, please. So in 2100, I am going to be looking for the general counsel to help walk me through this information. In the informational packet, it talks about section 202 and the changes that are recommended from a policy perspective. I would sort of like to talk to you about the impact and why we're doing this. So every year the executive committee is charged with reviewing our bylaws and to see if there are any changes to make. They can't make the changes. Those changes can only be made by the board. And one change that we've got to make in this year has to do with section 202, which is the special and emergency meetings and notice provisions that were in that section originally really didn't work out or make much sense in terms of the timing of how these special and emergency meetings would be scheduled. We've rewritten that division. They've matched it more now with divisions, similar divisions among the system, sister institution, excuse me. So it's really just a technical change regarding the notice of these meetings. And while we were considering that change, you came up with the executive committee meeting that in section 103, the names of the standing committees were outdated. And we really matched the names of those committees that they exist today. So they recommend that you change those agreements in performance with the committees that exist now. So the executive committee considered these changes and voted to recommend them to the board for its approval. And do I have a motion to make those changes that are recommended by the executive committee? So that's it. Thank you. All in favor? All right. Great. All right. You've hosted in Tom Looney's absence today. I understand you're going to give the highlights of the deep committee report. Yes. From the distance education and extended programs committee, we had a wonderful subcommittee meeting and I'll cover our highlights as an outcome. First, by the end of the 2016-17 school year, we had 1,293 middle and high school students from 93 counties and had at least one NCSSN residential or distance education course in their high school transcript. So that's really pretty incredible. We also reached more than 21,500 students and nearly 4,000 teachers through direct products and services in the 2016-2017 school year. From the digital standpoint, our outreach continues to grow at about 15% per year. We track 19,000 individual additions to our video playlist, which is an indication that these videos are being assigned in classes or used in a series by students for academic preparation, which is exactly what we want them to do. I also want to say thanks for the hard work and determination of our library staff and the support from the ITS. Our students in the IVC courses are not able to access the same library databases as any NCSSM students, so we brought them up to parody. We also have several new online courses in production for the spring to include race, ethics and leadership, organic chemistry and entrepreneurship. Our IVC program also seeks to grow enrollments this spring by adding additional offerings of honors computer science and also introducing the honors robotics to our course catalog. Moving on to the summer accelerator, another successful year. This year we serve roughly 450 students, which is about a 25% increase over last year. And operating for the first time summer programs on two campuses simultaneously with the addition of the Brevard College. And a lot of thanks goes to Paige LaMalle for helping up with that effort. We also doubled the number of underrepresented minority students participating in the accelerator from 31 in 2016 to 68 in 2017. And if you include the students participating in other programs supported by the summer program team, we're now supporting nearly 300 underrepresented minority students. In 2018 we plan to serve at least 500 students on those two campuses. And let me also add that in addition to the summer accelerator, our summer programs include our step up to STEM, a first robotics training camp serving students in underserved areas of the state, a camp for the visually impaired and blind and also the E&C STEM program. That's the Eastern North Carolina STEM program that's been highlighted by Grayson Cooper who is here earlier. He might be gone now. In partnership with the Northampton County Schools and also with our regular other programs. So we're engaged with accelerator of the summer programs. The trend lines are good and we expect them to stay in good stead. Any questions or thoughts? Back to you Tom. Thank you. Elisa. Okay. Good to have been with you. Great. We had a wonderful discussion this past Tuesday. Really centered around two of our strategic initiatives. The first initiative was to increase and diversify our resources of revenue and our resources in general. And the second was strategy number five to improve communications and public relations and marketing. I was going to just highlight from that discussion today are centered around those strategic initiatives. First of all, before I even go there, I want to welcome Stephanie Bass to the institutional advancement committee. We're really excited about having her on board. And in addition, we have the new executive director. I'd like Rob just to say a few words about and introduce her to our board. Sure. We are really pleased. She came most recently from Carnegie Mellon University where she was. People in their major gifts initiative there. And joining April was down here at the moment. And together, the director of development, Lauren is major gifts. And Clark is annual funding. So we have a gift office or team that is specialized in each of those lines of business. And real physicians as well who are coming out of the capital. And April, would you like to stand up and bring everybody here? This is such an inspiring time to be on board. So we're looking forward to working with you. We're glad to have you. Thank you. Have a good. The item is that we're also getting ready to post the position for the director of communications. There's a great need in that space across a lot of different areas and foundation in particular, but a lot of different areas within the school. And so we've shifted and kind of readjusted with having different folks take pieces of that role. But there's lots to do and there's definitely a need for the director of communications to come on board and hit the ground running. So Brock will be posting that as soon as possible within the next week or less to get that done. And also not with us at the moment, but Sophie Williams has been our interim director for the last few months and has done a great job. You said that you and Steve are doing that. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then the third, last but not least, April mentioned it. We're getting geared up for a comprehensive and a holistic campaign, a capital campaign. And that is exciting. And we are just looking forward to engaging all of the board in this huge undertaking. It is going to be fabulous. And just very, very excited about it and just need all hands on deck to really make it extremely successful. As we've heard, there's lots of needs to be filled on both campuses. So this is going to, you're going to hear more and more about that in the coming weeks and months and certainly at the board meetings. Any questions? Sit. Thank you, Lisa. Very good. Eric, how about APPC? Thank you, Mr. Chair. So we had our first meeting of the year on Tuesday and I'd also like to take a moment to recognize Eric Troll and I think Eric left. He's on the call. Okay, so Eric is a new member to APPC and he was able to join us on Tuesday. I'll try to just hit the highlights. We basically talk in our committee in four areas. One is the faculty-centered update that Ashton usually gives. And the one thing that came out of that that I found interesting this time is that there's faculty-centered and working with the Academic Honesty Council on a way to demonstrate for students in a very tangible and in this case visual way about how much collaboration, how much teamwork is allowed on certain projects. And so Academic Honesty brought forth a recommendation to the faculty-centered but the faculty-centered was not entirely convinced of that particular, there were still some questions. So they did not endorse that proposal at this time. Is that accurate, Ashton? It is and it was more because having a color-coded system that would imply what you could or could not do, a lot of people would choose the fuzzy reaction for a lot of it. And so they kind of outlined more how we have to explain to students about what appropriate communication, collaboration, citation, all those are aspects admitted in some ways they did open the conversation up a little bit better. And so we had more work to do. We also got a staff-centered report from Crystal and at this time they have now added EHRA staff to the staff senate, which had not been done previously. And so now they are looking at their concerns for this year, items of interest to discuss. And the top three that came out of that were professional development opportunities, cultural diversity, training for the staff. And what I thought was interesting and we spent a good deal of time in the committee talking about was mental health support for staff. We spent an awful lot of time talking about it in relation to our students, but don't spend enough time talking about it maybe in relation to our staff. So I thought that was a good conversation to have in our committee. Katie gave us an update on how the school year is off to a great start. Admissions program will open on October 15th. So far they've visited that. I think I got the number right. There's 155 visits that they've made so far. And counting. And counting, yes. The family day went well. STEM Hall of Fame was great. It was a fantastic event. So everything is going well in that regard. And then from Terry, we got our student life report. And I think the biggest things to come out of this work that I felt some things changed a little bit around college day this year. We had a successful college day on the 22nd, which was also the day of the gala. But they rolled in a financial aid seminar on Saturday during family weekend. And they said it was actually better attended by having it that way. So something they may want to consider. Laurie Hackney talked about the fact that we have an intern in counseling to give them some help for 24 hours a week. And then Terry just kind of updated us on the campus culture climate and diversity council, which we are now known as referred to as 3CDC. And we just talked about the makeup of that. It's 15 employees and 15 students. And they're going to focus on a deep dive of their assessment and their program and training for this year. So that was the highlights of our meeting. Questions and comments for Eric and KPPC? Oh, that's a fact. It seems to be a part of that diversity training as well. The faculty? The faculty absolutely need to be part of it. That's actually the diversity training. One of the characteristics of this, one of the primary things that committee 3CDC has on their agenda is to plan out that community-wide diversity training. Which is, you know, there's a lot of things that they do as the whole community, adults and students, and then there's some debate that's talking specifically to different members of the community. And I would say that that is one of our goals this year to develop that and not just develop a one-time only training but something that is on board and essentially adding to their goal is on an annual basis. Anything else for KPPC? Thank you. Mark Morgan has been called away professionally and I was fortunate to be able to join the FAHR Committee for their call meeting on the 19th of September, so I'm going to get the highlights of the meeting. And first, he and Colin have hit the motorload with three new FAHR members that have joined them with new Board of Trustees. We've got Robert and Geneva and Burl who have joined the FAHR, which is great. That committee has been a good strong committee but having some additional members from the trustees is great, so thank you to each of the new members from Committee Chair Morgan as well. With it being the first meeting of the year, Robert and his team, Joyce and others, Leah, took the opportunity to use that kind of as a new member of Board orientation as well and one of the things that's great that that committee has done is they've got kind of a quarterly calendar of major and special reports that kind of come up, kind of a year in review, so they took a chance to opportunity to go through and highlight those documents that are in there and very helpful. As far as routine updates and report, Joyce Bonny, the school's Chief Audit Officer gave an activity report on the audit. This information is all in your materials that you received prior to the meeting from the 2016-17 year where really each one of those internal audit items stands in terms of completion, continuation, or no longer needed. Leah Engelbreit, the Director of Budget and Finance presented the school's financial report as of June 30 and discussed the status of the school's cash basis, and spending for the 2017 year. Everything, again, as you can see in that report, is in line with what was expected, including the carryover funds from the General Assembly's special allocation for the Western Campus. Leah also presented the famous UNC FIT report, the green-red blue, or the green-yellow-red report and with some key staff positions having been filled, great progress has been made there and they're in good shape now of meeting the targeted dates and turnaround times for reconciling bank statements and everything else. So that was a very positive update with the new staff folks that have been hired. Gary Covington was also with the group, the Director of Plant Facilities and provided an update on the school's various construction renovation projects. Again, that document is inside your materials that shows the percent of completion, what projects are there. Some of them are carryover projects where they were waiting for additional R&R money to complete them. I think the big one is the hunt roof replacement. I think it's moving forward and on track and that's a very positive thing relative to the repair of renovations. Our new board members did hear that we have about $40 million of unmet needs and repairs and renovations on the current campus that continues to be a priority for the school. In terms of the action items, the committee reviewed and discussed the proposed projects for the internal audit plan for this coming fiscal year. That is one of your consent agenda items that the committee brought forward. They also reviewed the two proposed salary increase schedules for 2017, including the updated faculty salary schedule, as well as a schedule of EHRA non-faculty salary increases. When I finish my report, I'm going to ask for a motion to move the EHRA salary schedule that's not on the consent agenda item right now to the consent agenda item. So we'll come back to that. They all comply with the legislative increases and the chancellor done a cover memo with that document that came to us as board members explaining the changes there with, I think, each group, an average proposed increase around 2.86% for the faculty and 2.9% for the EHRs. Kind of the non-faculty is kind of the bottom line. Again, all of those items are on the consent agenda item. That's the highlight of the committee report. I don't know if there's any changes or additions from any members of the committee. Yes. It was one change made subsequent to our meeting. One change in the salary schedule that was changed was on... Yeah, there was an employee who was hired after July 1 on corporate entries, which that modification was made to the increase sheet that the committee had looked at and actually lowered the amount of money necessary to be... And that communication that you sent out was also in the attached... I know it read it. I don't remember. It was in the four packets. It went to the FAR committee. So it went to the FAR committee. So thank you, Geneva. Very good. So before we see if there's any other questions, could I first ask for a motion to add to the consent agenda item, the approval of the EHRA salary schedule? So many. Most are seconded by Eric. All those in favor say aye. Aye. That will be now a consent agenda item. Other comments from the committee? Mark regrets that he couldn't be here, but he will see us the next time. With that said, we're going to move to the consent agenda items. They're listed there for you. May I have a motion to approve the consent agenda items by Eric? So seconded by Allen. Any discussion on the consent items? Hence their consent items. All those in favor say aye. Aye. And a post. Mr. Chancellor, it's your... Ooh! Gosh, yes. Oh, we did leave that out. A non-chambering committee. We did leave that one out. Thank you. That is yours. Thank you. And Eric, the chairing, the nominating committee for us, and I'll let Eric give the nominating committee his report. So we did... The nominating committee met as we've discussed today. We're sad that Mark Drill will be leaving us, but that leaves us with a vacancy as the vice chair. And so the board was asked to put forth names, and one name was put forward and that was Tom Looney. So the nominating committee discussed it when we met, I don't remember exactly. The 19th. The 19th, and that name was unanimously approved. So the nominating committee will now put forth the vote for Tom to assume the vice chair. You have a motion coming from the nominating committee to approve Tom Looney to be the new vice chair, not to take Mark's place continually. Right. You make that motion. And even though I really don't want... I don't want to say any more of these places. I would love for Tom to be the new vice chair. The motion has been made. Seconded? Seconded. Seconded by Lisa. All those that want to discuss it, Tom will be great, right? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Thank you so much. Yes. If I were, I'd vote yes. Okay. This is who he is to be. Right? Are you going to say something? Paul? Yeah. Can you get me the other guy? Sure. No, no, no. That's all right. That's all right. That's all right. That was the guy I was thinking about. All right. Thank you, Chancellor. Yeah, that's truly nice. All right. So I will vote no. I do get to my report and before I get into the slides that we have, buying you an update on What some of our students, faculty, staff are accomplishing. So you have that with you in the Accolades and Lawyers document. And again, as much as it's anything that is just to examine what happens at the school and what goes on at the conference, I would also talk to the school about the community. Draw your attention to one item on the very last page. The back of the fact page is one of our own trustees was our speaker of certification this year. Jabbar Bennett spoke at our convocation and did a fantastic job. It would be, we obviously couldn't foretell the future. So we did it plan it this way. But it was our convocation happened right on the heels of events in Charlottesville and with Jabbar's role at Northwestern and what he does in providing leadership around diversity for that campus. I mean, it was well-timed in his speech and it was fantastic. And so it was a great way, quite frankly, to start the school. And so give a lot of kudos to Jabbar for that. So just wanted to point that out to you. So I'll just hop into my presentation and try to cover a few things about the start of the school, highlight some more than others. But if questions arise on any, stop me and I'll spend more time on it. Again, if you already hit this, but about the summer programs, this was our most student-served ever in total numbers as well as the number of different programs. And as was mentioned, we branched out to another campus. And if you think about in the strategic plan back in 2012 when this idea of running revenue-generating summer programs came about, that was just an idea. And then we had the opportunity with Melissa and her team bringing on Jen. And Jen's now brought on Julia. And they created a small business at that time. And we're not in the business of creating businesses, but we have done an unbelievably good job under Jen's leadership. And so if you just look at the results and part of the goal of starting this program was to help make our summer programs as a whole self-sufficient. And have these programs help fund the programs that we run, that you see the long list of here that are either grant-funded or serve our unique mission of how we reach into school, or we talked a little bit about onboarding students like the Summer Bridge and summer leadership programs. And so we're on our way to being able to do that. As a matter of fact, this year proceeds from last year's summer accelerator help to fund the student leadership or step up a STEM, I believe it was, program which serves rising ninth grade underrepresented minority students who are talented in STEM. So as you can see from the results from this year, we're well on our way to being able to even do more than that. And so I don't know if Jen wants to make any comments at all about this or anyone else or Paige. I just think it's worthy of note that we've had a 10 and a half times increase in four years to this small business. And I think anybody who's in small business would love to see that kind of growth in their endeavors. I'm just so proud of what Jen's been able to accomplish with the support of the school. And I think the potential here is really endless. And it's very, very exciting for NCSSF. And as it said, thank you for putting it that way. That was a great one. Well, we're all happy. It's a pleasure to talk about it. And so even beyond that, I think it's helped to expose students to NCSSF who now think about enrolling in school and applying for the school and then those programs. And so as a matter of fact, I believe Eric's, one of his kids came to the Accelerator program this year and was already looking forward to next year. I don't know if you guys want to say anything or not. You don't, you know. Yeah, well, besides, you know, having sort of a kind of life, our students get introduced to us, they also demonstrate this here by far. And a lot of quality programs outside of Durham. So I think it's a good, endless one and we'll be able to start off things here. Great. So it's been a huge success in many ways for the school. So just wanted to highlight that, yeah. Just having a high teaching accelerator. It's a fantastic opportunity. I had a great bunch of good teachers. Always keep in mind that we're adding more a lot of these things and some things like IT was pushing to doing a lot of things. They're fixing computers, getting people all these accounts, take them off. They weren't even necessarily doing as much work with focus as they were planning. So our success breeds, you know, opportunities. And so, but always just keeping in mind that there's a pressure on staff that is not felt on the faculty in the same way and all that and so I always keep that in mind. As we grow, and I'm glad we're all on site and sometimes we do, that's exciting. But the excitement is how do we do it as well as we can and I know there has been a lot of accommodations to help the staff and spread that out and just always keep that in mind that there's a change that we're going into of what the summer work flow is. And so, I'm always gonna bring that up. Yeah. Henry. Right on cue. How do we bring the hand? I thought I could tell. I can say what I think. I know what that's gonna be. I'm sorry. Minnie, but it actually is exactly right. I mean, it is logistically challenging, you know, because we do work in the summer to the facility and our facilities team and as a matter of fact, you know, Sarah Shoemaker who's out here who coordinates our summer research program which this year was double the number of kids had that opportunity than in the past and she helped coordinate with Mike Newbauer and our student life, a celebration of our facilities and housekeeping staff just this week for their work because it really does put extra on them but then we do bring in extra cleaning crews, the contract that come in and then take some of that load off but they have to, they're all summer long, you know, shuffling one haul to an X as we bring in because you don't bring in one group of students and have them come into a room, some other just group of students just left without cleaning it. So there's a lot of logistical challenges and one other benefit that I think that often doesn't get mentioned for the summer programs is the opportunity for those members of our faculty and staff who are not working in the summer typically it might want to have those opportunities like Ashton said to work and maybe teach a new course or something that they're interested in doing and also do to earn additional income which is a great opportunity for them as well which most of them, I would not say most but probably 75% of the folks that work in our summer programs are faculty or staff at the school. I would just like to comment and add to what Ashton was saying one, we put all of our community staff members and we also include that from what you saw that. So you'll see because of work that Jim is able to put together at the end of the summer that shows when he saw the pressure points that he noticed a lot here like with IT he mean provided the money from summer summers who have IT higher and additional, perfect. So that did not add on to IT in any kind of unexpected, active way. Also in there you'll be able to see that the amount of money that's being reinvested in our faculty. So how much money faculty members who are teaching classes and are able to add on top of a hundred dollars as well as a lot of other great people around the world and some of the service. So we're supporting how speaking by giving them additional funding for a student then they normally would accept a residential student because we know that we're putting those added pressure points on. So Jim makes it very clear that not only in verbal appreciation but in trying to use that money to reinvest that faculty to school both in programs and faculty to meet kind of in departments. So we see the pressure. And then we also have a great opportunity with our new department director who is going to hopefully alleviate one of our hardest burdens which is hiring so many contactant people over the summer and is that she has us with DMAT a system that will enable us to work with an outside entity to be able to do that. They don't want to put pressure off the data and they're going to stop this as well. Thanks for pointing it right to that. Was it just to add a few photos from the summer where kids doing various things on campus, off campus, those students in the top left were in China competing in a competition and you managed research on the right and kids up in Appalachian State for the sustainability conference so they were on campus and all over doing interesting things. And then I mentioned thinking about the start of the school year just a couple of photos. And there's a jump to gun on my comments. There's Jabbar right up there at the convocation and those photos were all from convocation which was a great way to start the school year. And then this fabulous and once in a lifetime maybe kind of opportunity of experiencing the solar eclipse which was academic programs did an amazing job of planning activities on campus for our students. And I think they bought like 900 and some pairs of viewing glasses. And so we had the whole community out watching the eclipse and I'll have to say from a personal standpoint it exceeded expectations. I thought it was gonna be more hype than cool and it was pretty high. I was for sure not really was amazed by the experience and as you can see, look at this booth, she was too. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. in kind of a new way to start the school year. So leading into that, we would be nothing without our students because that's what we do. And so they moved in, as you can see, and are off to a good start. And just to give you an overview of the admissions process, we're already talking about the class of 2020 at this point. But the class of 2019 is just settling in. So I'm going to introduce Rob Andrews and Katie O'Connor if they have any. Katie wants to add too. And they're going to walk us through these slides about both the process because there's been some change by necessity. Obviously, as you know, Dr. Mason left to take an opportunity down in South Carolina, which we greatly miss her. But Rob and the team have stepped up and are picking the opportunity to think about what we knew as well, which has been great. So I'll turn it over to Katie and Rob. So I'll just give a quick update before Rob takes over the slides just to let you know that we miss Latida terribly. And we are, as Chancellor Roberts just mentioned, that the admissions team has popped up and they are doing an amazing job, and what she'll hear about. I also wanted to let you know that you might have heard this already. But our registrar, Kathleen Allen and the Assistant Registrar, Wanda Munn, they are both retiring December 31st. So after I got off the floor and was able to process all this information, so one thing that this, we are trying to look at this as an opportunity and to really look at what the registrar's office does, what admissions does, see if there's already things that they do together, see if there's other synergy that can happen. And I'm really grateful to our new HR Director, Carla. She is doing something called a desk audit. So we have given her 12 positions of folks in those areas and actually one or two positions in deep, because deep has a position that is not called a registrar but acts like a registrar. So she's looking at all those positions and she's gonna give us a recommendation or two just to see are we being most efficient and as we move toward Morganton, what are some things we, maybe we should be looking at a different structure and so forth. So that's currently happening and that's why you haven't seen Latina's position filled so quickly. We're taking it a little slower, especially knowing what's coming in December with Kathleen and Wanda moving toward retirement, just to see what are some creative ways we might be able to move forward in the registrar area, the admissions area, potentially an enrollment services area and include online. So once we get a plan, of course we will update you and you will see positions posted but that's where we're at right now and I just wanted to let you know that we haven't forgotten to post it but we're just doing some behind the scenes thinking about it right now. And so I'm gonna turn it over to Rob so he can talk to you about what the team's been working on. Thank you. And recruitment has begun, actually Ms. Gattie Harkson is in Bertie County today, Andrew is in Hardinette County and I've been out here in the western area, everything west of here is already covered and there's 100 different schools and 48 counties. So we are moving forward. We didn't miss a beat as far as recruitment has been concerned. We got on the road the last week of August and have been visiting schools. It does require one of us to be in the office a little bit more to cover some of the roles and responsibilities of meetings and things with LaDita but we're very excited about the chance to see where our division can grow and she really did a great job of preparing us for when she was gonna be here any longer. So if we can look to the next, we've got some numbers for you guys. Well first of all with our programs this year, we do have four open houses, well three open houses for our high school applicants. These are informational programs where faculty and staff do presentations. We cover the admissions process and there's a tour at the end of the program. We'll also have a middle school open house which is February 3rd and that will be corresponding with the Native American pow-wow that after game. So all participants who come to the morning program get free admission to the pow-wow. We are already reaching out and getting those vendors for the pow-wow, we have dancers, we have performers and really looking at how we can re-dance the pow-wow moving forward to include Native American recruitment here in North Carolina. Discovery days schedule, all applicants, if you don't know, must attend if you're a resident of an applicant you must come to a discovery day where you get an information session and you get a tour of campus but there's also that math test that is part of the admissions process. So we will have three discovery days, two sessions each day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon where they will test and we will bring all our applicants to campus during that time period. Once selection is done, selection committee will meet the last month or last week of March this year with a few applications. Notification will be the first week of April and then the students will come. The first welcome day is the main welcome day. Last year for the first time we did our make-up welcome day rather than doing it on a weekday. We took another Saturday to have a second welcome day for students who couldn't make the first welcome day. The second welcome day is also generally when the waitlist students will come because at that point we want them to come in and be able to do the testing and we really try to make a day that is welcoming and accommodating for both groups. And that's a tough process because you have one group who's super excited to be finalists and you have the other group who are cautious. They're a little disappointed they weren't finalists but they are still excited that they potentially could be finalists so we're running on that day. We do have a goal with the strategic plan of increasing enrollment for students from rural and low wealth communities. This is actually been something we've been doing before this was even a goal. We've always tried to reach out to those communities whether it is through the high school recruitment, middle school recruitment. We are actually hitting twice as many middle schools now than we did five years ago to try to not only prepare those students for our process but the college process in general. We look at it as a chance to do outreach and even if a student decides in the 10th grade they're not going to apply to one of our programs we want them to be preparing for college at that point. And that's something Latita and still with us before she left that was always one of our missions was how can we give back to these communities even if they don't apply to the School of Science and Math. So a lot of those middle school programs are 50% science and math, 50% preparing for college. We've targeted different presentations towards underserved and underrepresented schools and tried to increase that outreach. If you have programs that you want us to come into in your home communities whether that's a scouting program, a church program please let us know if you're more than happy to come to your area and speak to those students. Many of the board members have been fantastic in supporting pages, you know, helping me so much in Transylvania County, reaching out not only to the public schools even to some of the other programs there. So we've had that support in the past. New partnerships, we're starting a lot in new programs to try to reach out to these students so through the first welcome outreach to Edge Town, Hall of Fans and Vax fans and Warren. This guy first just last week was at the Hwasi Pony Tribal School, it is a charter school in Warren County where she went and spoke to the students. We're collaboration with Black Uniforms. It's a new thing that we are starting with some of our African American alumni that Maddie has kind of put together. Working and mentoring with local organizations. So not only do auditions go out and do presentations we're actually volunteering in the community and doing outreach through some of the community organizations in the Durham area, especially those that reach the Hispanic populations and some of our underworked, represented populations in the local area. And then also potential collaboration with Black Girls Who Code. This goes along with some of the other programs we've been doing like WAMP in the area and some other things that we've done throughout the years. And that's going, building on established relationships and revitalizing the powwow that I mentioned earlier during that little school open house. And we're actually going to reestablish the Native American Advisory Council. And this was something that many years ago we had assigned to math led by Joe Wiles and was instrumental in getting into those communities and getting students from those communities. So we're going to be inviting some of our former alumni that are in North Carolina to come back and help us plan the powwow, help us reach out to those communities, try to get communities we might reach before, especially like in the Western part of the state, the charity nation, we're actually trying some things to get onto their tribal schools and getting into some of their programs. Also brainstorming new strategies, so it's just something we do all the time. This summer we actually came out to Morgantan and looked at the Western, looked at the school of death, looked at the Morgantan potential campus and we had our retreat out here. And just trying to work with the one different strategies and how we can reach more students during the course of the year. We can, at this point, visit every middle school in high school. We really try as hard as we can, but with scheduling, with forms, you know, actually have a delay two weeks ago. I missed three schools in Morgantan County because they were closed with the hurricane that came up through Western and North Carolina. So anything we can do, we try to, you know, we're trying to do strategies. Right now, 680 residential students, 360 online. So that's a total of 10, 1,040 students. And then we have the IBC everyone went of course through D for this fall and this spring. We also try to use IBC if we can for recruitment to do presentations. It's funny, I actually went into a school last fall and they asked me to come into this room and it's just Jamie Latham wanted to say hello to me. He was teaching class at West Hyrodale. So I went in and said hi to Jamie and the student and that happens to us every once in a while. But we'll have that happen when we have an IBC class and we're going into the school. We do have 93 out of 100 counties represented within the chief programs. That is not what we want as a missions office. We really every year have the goal of 100 counties and have at least a student from every county. That does not happen in my 16 years from missions and that's something I want to accomplish before I leave the company. And many of those counties actually I've been fortunate enough to go to all 100 counties in my 16 years. So it's really something we would love to see. And I think with the addition to the Morganton campus I think that's something we probably accomplished with the Morganton campus. Right. Of those seven counties that we didn't have this year how, over your 16 years how did the systems have come up? Two of them are like, Grand County we've had one student in 16 years and that's Robbinsville and it's not for a lack of trying. Their counselor actually has a pizza party and invites the top 15 to 20 students in the class to the pizza party. And I talked about the school. I talked about recruiting it. You know, I talked about all the different options and you know, students leave excited but what it is it's a very tight knit community. If you've ever been to Robbinsville it's a little bit more secluded even than Murphy and it's a little closer to us than Murphy. It's in kind of a geographic area where they're kind of nestled in a nice little valley there. The one student that we had from Robbinsville their parents lived two years before from Atlanta. So they weren't plowed into the community. They were transplanted within that community. Green County's the other county that consistently not represented and there's many factors with Green County that's one of Maddie's counties and we just traditionally, if you look at the entire 30 history here at the school Green County and Grand County only show up. The other counties are kind of hit or miss as well. I am proud to say districts 10 and districts 11 in the mountains, Graham is the only one we don't have represented in Western Carolina. And one thing before we get through the numbers the numbers you'll see are the numbers on campus today. What we did initial selection this year were mandated four to 11% for each congressional district. We actually selected six to 10%. So that means we didn't hit minimum in any district. We didn't hit maximum in any district because overall the application pool this year was very strong. Also with the online program in years past anywhere from 30 to 50% of the online students that would be their second choice this year that was the initial selection. So here's the residential numbers and you can see these are reflected after bringing in students off the wait list. But this is the first year we've used this congressional district map. As you know the maps come and go with the politics of North Carolina. And one thing to highlight is yes, district four still the Raleigh Durham, Chapel Hill, 300 applications. You're gonna have the upper 30s. District one has 37 students. That is maybe Northeastern, North Carolina. Northern Durham is also in there and well represented within there. But some of the other districts district three very strong on the coast as well. Like I said districts 10 and 11, 27 and 25 were actually closer to 30 in the initial selection. So some of the students when they get ready to enroll being further away from home. Those are the students that might decline and there is a decline survey or define numbers later on within. So we were very proud of the numbers this year. This is the online class. So you can see well represented. Pretty much throughout the state district nine down a little bit. District nine is Mecklenburg and then kind of rolling all the way over to Blading not as many applicants to the online program in that district but still good numbers statewide within the online for this year. And this is the residential decline, like I said. Not many declines throughout the process. This year for the first time we actually shortened our waitlist. In the past we would do 45 males and 45 females. This year it was in the mid 30s for the waitlist because we weren't, we don't want to set students up for disappointment. And we're not creating a waitlist as a consolation prize. We tell applicants out when we go over applications with them after the process. We do try to do reviews for the students who did not get in. Sometimes it's very hard in district four. You have a 757.50 on the SAT and it's great days and you know, but there's just not enough spaces. These are the online decline. So again this is down a lot lower. Very few declines in the online program. And I really want to attribute that to the distance education department and to some of the initiatives we made. We now have online student ambassadors. So if you're in your community and you see a more of a Duke Blue t-shirt with the catalyst on, they are an online ambassador with 30 statewide. We're in the process of selecting this year's junior online ambassadors. This week I saw three Henderson County that came to my presentations and taught students. So seeing those students in the community, even when I went into one school this two weeks ago, I saw three NCS STEM t-shirts throughout the school that were online students. I came to the presentations to encourage fellow students to apply to the online program. So they're really helping us in promoting school. These are the congressional district trends. One thing to note again is these districts have changed. I will tell you, we have students in Moore County doing back flips as they were no longer competing with Wake County in district two. Yeah, so with some of the districts changing, I will say as a non-political thing, these districts really do have a much greater representation. We used to have that weird strange river of district 12 that ran from Mecklenburg County to Greensboro. And that district was always very low application-wise, generally in the 30s or 40s. Now district 12 has kind of sunk into Mecklenburg County, it's northern Mecklenburg County, and we had 60 some applications from northern Mecklenburg County this year. We now call that the congressional district of Mecklenburg. Yes. Just Mecklenburg County. All right, now. And the heart rate gap. The admissions is the last. Since I've been assigned to Mecklenburg County, has been the number one ever second county on campus, that will no longer be the case in two years. Because of that congressional district, because Mecklenburg is still so strong in nine, and now they've been competing, there's one again. Mecklenburg will be our most represented county. If you try to say anything. You can see exactly what Rob is talking about, and particularly on this, if you look at the congressional district 12, huge increase in congressional districts, 13 and two large decrease. Decrease. They used to be, White County used to be in two, 13, five, and four, and now they're almost all in four. So you can see the number of applicants declined, and the enrollment declined from those, once White County's pulled out of that note. As Rob indicated, the total number of students went down, but the diversity of where those students are coming from is up, unless it's not all one county. Mm-hmm. And these are some of our enrollment tents. City-wise, we're very excited that over the last few years, our, you know, African-American numbers have come up. Now, the way we record numbers compared to the past, we have a lot more that are multiple or refuse. So those students could be, within any of these different lines. Of course, our standard numbers are up again. Actually, Asian-American numbers are down a little bit. You know, so there is, of course, a more diversity within these classes. And also, for these, again, is do summer programs and, you know, just the exposure we have with students in those communities and trying to reach out to those communities. This is the online enrollment for congressional district sentencing. Like the chancellor mentioned, district 13 went way down because of how the district was redrawn. But, you know, a lot of our districts, districts two, district three on the coast is, you know, a large number of our online students for those students are really looking for more opportunities. And I can really, you know, talking to some students already, I have the Northeast. I tease everyone. I have the pretty areas in North Carolina. I have the mountains. I have the Northeast. I have a moving scenario. So, you know, talking to some of those students, some of the programs in Furgerton are going to be the programs that are really going to want to come for, the ag programs, the sustainability and environmental programs. So, I can see students leaving, you know, district three to come. And this is our online, again, with ethnicity. And again, we've had some increases. One of the reasons we're looking at revamping that to pow out is to try to get those Native American numbers. Yeah. I noticed that district eight had increased sharply. And the online program, is there any? The redrawing. But you just think the reason is just redrawing? Absolutely. Brown County and Cabarrus County are now in that district, so you have two very strong, more County will send us a large number of applications, both presidential and online. Same thing with Barris. We actually have some charter schools in Cabarrus County, like Lake Norman Charter. They want to be the most represented school at the school of science and math. That is what they've told us. So, you know, they invite us in. They promote. And if a student does want to do residential and they're a strong student in their class, they're asking them to apply in the online program. Interesting. And it's the same way, Lincoln Charter here in District 10, actually this is both campuses, the Lincoln Charter, if you're not familiar, they're one school, but it's like, it's just now, they're going to have two campuses. They have one in Denver and one in the left of Lincoln. And those schools, they use this as a selling point for their school. They can grab the number of students they've had accepted over a period of time. Rob, thank you. So, my side was all right. Thank you. And Rob, I could hit the bell all over the state of North Carolina multiple times. And so, if you never need any tips on where to go, what to do. Yeah, I'm currently... I'm currently in the North Carolina barbecue spot. Yes, that's right. So, thanks for that. And, you know, I think probably by December-ish at that meeting, we might have some recommendations around the... what we might be doing in terms of restructuring with the mission for the Schroder and how those can help each other. So, just quickly, our legislative priorities that we went into, we talked about in May, what we were hoping for still at that time. And so this is kind of our scorecard if it were in terms of how things ended up for us. We... One I'll point out here, no budget productions again, which is a good thing. The UNC system as a whole was mostly spared. One of the things that changed this year at the last minute was how enrollment growth funding is being allocated. It used to be you would submit to a request, they would verify it, and the funding would come on the front end. And for us, that was really important because it allowed us then to staff the growth for our distance education programs and oftentimes create those courses to enroll by the spring semester to realize those numbers. And this year they changed and you have to now submit your numbers of growth before they'll allocate the funding. So that's made it a little bit challenging for us, but our deep folks and academic programs have really worked to figure out how we can still realize some of our enrollment growth for this first fall semester and then our planning for the spring semester where we can then verify. So it is a little bit different model for us and a little bit more difficult I think for us than a lot of the university schools because we don't have the resources to kind of front the funding to establish those courses. Assuming the money coming in on the back end, we're trying to do that as best we can now with some vacancies that we have to realize that the funding that we want to bring in so that we can do more of that next year are in our funding in capital. There are, over the past number of years, very few capital projects have been funded. Our and our funding comes to the university which was 60 million for our system and of that 60 million, about 20 million was pulled out and for specially identified projects like 10 million for a new business school at UNC Pembroke. So not really 60 million is being allocated out to the system as a whole. They have a formula. Our portion of that is a little over a million dollars. As you can see, what we're hoping to try to do in relationship to the Morgansson campus project that we just talked about is that to have that be one of those special projects that gets pulled out on the front end for this next year so that we can get that additional 15 million dollars that we were talking about earlier. We talked about salary increases a little while ago and then the tuition grant was the other big item that was added in really at the last minute. It was a priority of the university system. It didn't appear in the house budget. It didn't appear in the Senate budget, but it appeared in the final budget. And so what it did was allocate $1.5 million in funding for the class of 2018 for one year. So right now it's not recurring. So the class of 2018, which the University of North Carolina system schools would get tuition up to $6,000 funded for that one year, 18, 19. And we do expect and are hoping that it will be recurring in this upcoming short session budget. This is still a priority for the UNC system and I know they're still working on it. So we're hopeful that in June, it would be added in so that the class of 2019 would get it in, 20 would get it and then the class of 18 it would be recurring on. So just like it was in previous years when we had it. So that's where that's sort of our scorecard for this past session. And as we talked about a little while ago, one of our big needs coming into the short session is not only the funding that we talked about for the campus in Morganton, but the funding for the campus in Durham as well. And it was alluded to the $40 million of backlog of R&R work in the Durham campus. We have been making some progress on that in the 2015, 17 years. As you can see, we've done about 4.6 million and that's a combination of a one time, $4 million allocation that helps support the new fiber optic network that has been installed, as well as some of the IBC studio upgrades and some of the other things that you see right here, plus some R&R money. But we submitted, as you recall, maybe for the budget session that we just, I gave you the scorecard on, we had asked for 20 million, $5 million in R&R and 15 in capital project money, which we got $1 million as you saw. So going forward, we're still working on some with some funds that we have. We're in the process of building about 4.2 million in renovations when it's right now, our 44 physics labs and classrooms has been offline since the summer. We have to, if you've not been to the campus since last May, we have two portable classrooms now in the middle of campus that are there for us to house physics classes and others because they are totally out of their space until the third trimester because it's been totally 100% renovated, just like our engineering class and lab was last year. We're replacing the roof on hot dorm. We're gonna be replacing our HVAC systems through a performance contract, which means essentially that we get front of the money by, in this case, Brady Train who will do the work and upgrade our systems and then we pay it back over time from the savings that we'll realize from the input deficiency. So it's a way for us at School of Custody to, it's about, that's about close to $4 million worth of improvements through our HVAC systems, not only the mechanical systems but the control systems as well. And so a way for, we can do that without having to put out $4 million up front that we don't have to pay it off over time. And then once we pay it off, all the savings accrue back to us from operating standpoint. And then this summer we'll be totally renovating one of our three labs on the chemistry floor, one of our three labs on the biology floor, the organic chemistry lab and the biology dissection lab. Part of that is to do, some of what's to do with safety is ventilation. You know, Ashley can probably tell you about the biology dissection lab space but the chemistry as well. So not only replace the ventilation in those but also replacing the lab benches and all of that as well. So that'll be great improvements to that space. So we are making progress on some of the $40 million worth of backlog but we're hoping as we've had these conversations as well and I had some of the legislators here yesterday about by 2021 when we opened the campus in Morganton that's the one that we ideal version of that of the option two version that we saw today. We also want at the same time have dealt with some of the, most of the improvements we need on the Durham campus which are our next areas of need are the ones we listed and asked for money this past time you see up here. They're the living space renovations. So we wanna renovate the dorm spaces, the flooring. We've been really fortunate thanks to Terry Lynch's work to get about $500,000 worth of quote unquote new furniture from Duke University. It's great furniture for our dorms and rooms and it's new to us, really new to us compared to what we have but to continue to replace that furniture either through Duke or Purchase but also to totally renovate our bathrooms. I mean they're long overdue in our dorms and so to make the living space is better. And also to replace windows. As you can see the middle picture there is a sample of the breezeway windows and they're way, way, way overdue for being refurbished or replaced but we need to do it all over campus and we've seen the difference when we replaced the windows in the engineering suite last year when we renovated it. It's a 90 day difference from an efficiency standpoint as well as the aesthetics of it all. And then also to do some of the renovations to these other areas and some safety and security upgrades on the campus. So nothing that is as exciting as building a brand new building necessarily but really important to the school environment. So we're along the same line of pursuing the funding for the additional funding needed for Wellington. We're going along that same line really trying to pursue an equal amount of funding for our campus at that same time. And also as we move into the capital campaign that may end up being something that we are also looking to raise pilot money for as well. So we're working in the goal being 2021. We got to shining new campuses that everybody's really excited about. And then enrollment growth, I just hit on that so I won't spend any more time on that one in particular. Rob hit on this a little bit in some of the goals for admissions. But the university system completed a strategic plan really last January and they're in the implementation phase. And I'll say just based on the conversation thus far and at the board of government means they are going to be very metric driven in their strategic plan and what they're accomplishing. They're really looking at improving completion, access and affordability as well as economic development. It's hard to see appear but if you wanna read the UNC plan this is a link that you have available in your materials online. And then this is our full sort of response to the plan. Each campus was asked to look at the system plan and come up with those things that we see as goals for improvement that will tie to the system meeting its goals. So essentially each campus doing their part to help drive those improvements system wide. And so I'm just gonna hit on Rob touched on some of these but we're not, but this is one of those areas that we're not exactly perfect fit for the university system and we don't have the same goals around completion that they do in terms of those types of things but there are things that we can do. And one of those is what Rob just touched on is around enrollment for us and focusing in on rural and low wealth counties and enrolling students and our underrepresented minority students at the school. And so these were, as Rob said, goals we were working on but now we've put very specific metrics to that that annually we'll be asked to provide information to the system on how well we're doing in accomplishing these metrics. And so again this helps to drive in the UNC system plan when you look at it they have a large focus on rural and low wealth and underrepresented minority students too and particularly a relic related to completion and ours is on the front end getting them in because when we get them in, almost all complete they do very well and so it's a positive thing Rob. Yeah and one thing to add is our database manager Lee Butler has actually put it in so that we can track our presentations and how these students we've seen in each of the tier one tier two and tier counties within our admissions database. So like any time we go out we fill in the numbers and then that's something we can track and help you know keep count of as we're out there visiting schools and visiting different areas of the state. When you look at the demographics and try to increase are those people consistent or are they pretty consistent? How is it consistent? I didn't know I'd give you demographics since we're underrepresented minorities or geographically. Yeah unfortunately the one thing we find is some of our strongest under rubbers minority students are in some of those most competitive, that was exactly what you said. But there are populations within those low tier counties too, especially in those schools that like sell off a young service that we're doubling our efforts in that's where we really hit those populations and I think not only building relationships with those counselors and those teachers when we're there too so then they're trying to get those students and they're helping those students get to us. We invite a lot of those teachers and counselors to come to campus, whether it's on selection committee or through other programs. So I think, I don't think they're really up against each other. I think there's room and mode for us to invite a lot of people from Wake County and knowing minorities to come to Wake County and it's hard to tell them to get excited about applying what the number of the reality is going to happen. I feel like we need to please children when they're really young. You do, yeah, absolutely. Because there's certainly a disparity between what rural high schools are doing for various children versus the larger urban schools. And if anything, I've become far more aware of that in the last four years since being on this board. I think the other challenge I would put forward though is that it's great to enroll them but can we look at the data of actually keeping these children? Because when Rob was up earlier, if we look at the fact that we're enrolling 365 juniors, that would imply a school enrollment of 730 children. However, we have 680, therefore, just anecdotally, we're losing 50 kids. So how does that work? No, that's not, how do you do it? We got somewhere along the line in the history of the school that got off, Rob can tell you that, and so it's not that we lost that many students. This is the past year, somewhere along with history. The class previous to that was a low enroll, a low number of students, and it's just a cycle that started somewhere down the line for whatever reason, and so you can't. Yeah, no, you can't, you can't. We got to 1988, actually, because that's when they go online. The class at home made it really different. Well, it hasn't even been out for literally two thousand, and then when we went in the first year from 590 kids, so this is in 180, we know that they renovated some of the spaces and that's where the classes were used to be. We can see what we're actually able to retain here with demographics because it would be really interesting when you look, I mean, we're working so hard to get these children there and we want to cultivate them. We know how many we lost. It's around five or six percent as our attrition rate in any given class, and Terry tracks this information, so I think what you'll see is that the students that end up leaving the school are often, you know, five or six percent is a lower attrition rate relative to schools like us in the country, and a lot of those students end up leaving more so than not because they make a bad decision and then maybe something that causes them to leave, but Terry could probably add a little color to that. My three years plus at the school, I think we said that they'd have someone between 15 and 20 students who would drop from the school. A subset of that students who would drop from the school would hire a student who would see it as a discipline issue, but then there's another subset that is saving the lives of the children. At home high school, they're managed to some level back in the day. Difficulty of the school in all places, from academic postures, right, they're developed, but what I found is that there's not a larger trend in regards to male versus female geographic breakdowns in this discipline. I think that's about three plus years about seeing it, and then we've actually tried that data within our division for the last six or seven years, and I think it's spread out for a variety of different. And really, if you look at the percentage of students who leave the school who are underrepresented minority, it's a lower percentage than other students at the school, so we can pull the numbers and share that information with them. As an example, in a year like last year, where perhaps you can have two or three Native American students who've dropped it, it feels like it's a significant number, but it's a higher percentage of the Native American population, but that's a short year, but if you go back for a five-year name, it perhaps has to take. So I think some bigger values of the data are just on why things read, but just how they flourish at the school, too, through those students who get a chance to take up a level in that, which is what's going on in the area, and the percentage of Native mentorship at the same level as the Native American backgrounds. I think we have some of that data that's out there, what we may sort of get, we'll have to collect it on the candidate end, but those are things that are just as important as why we'll have to add on to that, and keep in mind that right now, our school is set up to have students come in and these sit out at the three and then we'll move on, and even as Rob was saying, the successes that they had this year in being students that were more diverse, more of the came, and as we expand by another 300 students, we gotta deal with the students from where they come from, academically, as well as culturally, where they come from, and so that will take some time, and math is doing things like having an out-of-the-three course that is taught alongside a pre-cow course, or still puts an additional burden on students as far as courses they take, but it gets them caught up to open up access to other courses by the time they reach their senior year, that's an advance they've done, but that isn't necessarily the only solution, but how to make sure that we have enough staff to either be able to treat all the, or teach all the courses we need to, or to reinvent the curriculum in both spaces to really accommodate who is the student population bringing in, because you can't just be expanding the students that have already come in so well prepared, because that's not exactly our mission, it's the students that are gonna be, that serve and are gonna really achieve here, and so finding that mix is gonna be interesting in three or four years. And one thing that never really numbers is, it's not only skewed size, but it's skewed gender. This year, it's a girl year in our process. We have a female that faces a share in studies. Last year, it was a male year, and that gives an actual level of oil, but it doesn't warrant, and when Hoss was right, it is a male year. And so there may be an opportunity when we bring Morgan to campus online to equalize those, and to take that opportunity to look at that, because it does, from year to year. If you know when you're applying, and if you're applying in a year where there's more male spaces, it's tough to be a female after two years, versus the other, so it would be good to get it back on track. So it's hard to do now, because we would never say, okay, we're gonna enroll 20 less kids this year, but when you open up a new campus, there presents an opportunity to look at that, so we'll take that opportunity. Economic impact and community engagement, this is another one that we felt like we could contribute to this system-wide plan. This is in our strategic plan already. We have, as one of our goals, to increase the number of STEM graduates. This is a goal of the system as well. That's really why the UNC system was supportive of the tuition grant, was they know that we graduate a higher percentage of our students with STEM undergrad degrees, and then the system as a whole, or the nation, and so this is kind of a lagging indicator, because the students are so, we're also looking at metrics that would determine interest in STEM when they come into the school, and they survey them when they leave and see how that has changed along the way and as a way that we can measure our annual basis, but the longer-term goal is that, we track this through the National Student Clearinghouse. How many of our graduates graduate with what degrees when they graduate with their undergraduate and their graduate degrees? So that's a goal that's tied that we can do. And the student success is one that, they may or may not look at this as it was, they have a student success goal in there, but it's not exactly this, but these are things that we are working on as a part of our strategic plan, improving advising, increasing opportunities for students to have real-world learning experiences, and as we mentioned earlier, the campus climate, culture, diversity, and mental health activities that are happening on campus as a part of our plan, and so those all three are, if you look at the literature, reasons why students persevere and succeed is they have those experiences that they are engaging and your internships and internships, the research supports that those keep students persevering in STEM in particular, and then obviously advising and wellness on campus are two big pieces of that as well. So those are the goals that we submitted, each campus had to submit and what we were gonna do. So this is sort of our metrics that we'll be measured on by the system as we are tying to their strategic plan. And I mentioned ours, these tie, I won't spend much time on these, we've already talked about this some today, but it ties into the system plan, our goals around mental health and that work, which our counseling department has been working really close with student government on this around mental health, and then we talked a little bit earlier about the campus, culture, climate, and diversity committee, which is a really important work right now. I think every campus, whether it's a high school campus or a university campus in the country, now there's just a real need to think about how you create the climate on campus that students, all students feel welcome in an open environment and you can have conversations amongst the folks on campus and there's not a day that goes by, there was, I was looking at the news this morning and there was an incident on UNC Charlotte's campus just this yesterday and there's, so you see what happens in the larger community in the world that's going out in the country that we're living in and so, we have an opportunity to do our part with 680 students and our online students every day and each year to help try to create the kind of climate environment that they can be a part of, where they can then hopefully not only enjoy and benefit from that while they're two years in Durham, but also when they go to the college campus, they can be a part of the leadership and helping to bring about change in the larger communities that they go off to as well. So it's sort of two different reasons, both trying to address our own campus climate, making sure it's what we want it to be, but also preparing students for what they're gonna be seeing and being a part of when they head off to university. And then one thing just to mention, just wanted to put this out there, we are in the accreditation process this year, it's more than a year, but every five years a team from Advanced Ed, which is our version of the SACS group that come to visit the school and accredit that and there's been a lot of work that's been done over the past six months and a whole group of people just went to Greensboro to hear more about it. And Dr. O'Connor and a large group of people are involved in this on campus and gathering feedback and information from parents, from students, writing a report and a visiting team will be coming in March to spend two days on campus to see if what we submitted is true or not. You know, they come and say, you know, verify that what we told them is happening is happening on campus. And so we're looking forward to that visit. Eddie or Angie, anything to say on that? Yeah, he's got back from Greensboro and because of the five year cycle, our school happens to land always in year one where they change the process. And so we, a year before that happens, we're always waiting to see what the new standards are, the new surveys, and so we have to, you know, we're good to have our act together really quickly and the team, our group has done an excellent job. We did a lot of work over the summer as well. So one thing that I really love about the new changes this time is that it's an improvement journey instead of an event-based journey. And so they're really looking at what we do already with our strategic plan, which is like advising, I'll give you as an example. You know, we've had collected data about the advising, we've tried some new things to collect the data about that and we've changed things again and that's what they're looking for. Like, are we constantly trying to improve? And so I think that will fit with what we do really well and so we are looking forward to our visit. Six people from their team visiting our campus over those two days. Because we are, this year is like I said, it's the first cycle of the new way, they typically have 120 schools that are being accredited during a year and this year it's only 40 and they're, they've been very, very helpful. Like they want us to call the district office with every question we have, because it is the first year so we are going to be a pioneer through this process and they've been very accommodating to our school. They certainly know who we are, so yeah. I would say, you know, the last visitation, I think was kind of underwhelming to the board and their understanding, the visiting team's understanding of really what our school was, maybe their continuous improvement model will be helpful but it probably wouldn't hurt for the board to be able to read the last report from the last cycle and kind of see what was in there and review that, so. Yeah, and one thing too, we brought a team to the conference last year and then the director of this, Donna James, she actually came to visit with us a couple months ago just so we could give them a view since our school is so neat and we wanted to make sure that the online and IDC piece was being looked at too because I think I wouldn't hear it the last visit but my understanding is maybe they didn't look at the online piece as much and that's just a part of our school as well so they will be doing that this time. That's great. And so we definitely have made some strides in helping them understand how unique our situation is to the point where I think they're going to pick carefully the six people they're sending us because we have the residential piece along with that. Our team includes student life, deep and academic programs. Yeah, I think this process is a better process altogether but I think we'll be more closely aligned with our school for sure. I've been through that process with we're kind of central and NC State. Are you guys going to have some of the first students to meet with them? That's typically what they request. Yeah, they'll, it's similar to the processes at the university with the SACs process. It's a little different but they will want to meet with, they will request who they want to speak with and I'm sure they'll be, yeah, yeah. So that whole, they'll visit a lot of classrooms, they'll meet with different groups of stakeholders and so that's all part of the process. That was sort of the process last time. Then they'll come actually give a report to, they report out to the whole school. They have a session where they report out to whoever wants to come to a session about what they found and so forth and then they submit a written report as well. Thank you, Katie, for that. And then one of the last couple of things is, and I just brought this to your attention because it is the first time ever, we're 38 years old and as best as anybody can tell there's nothing archived when the music's focused on the only thing about it. The school's never had an alma mater. And so last year, yeah, last year a student from our student government took it at, said, okay, we want an alma mater. And so student government met with our music folks in September and put forth a competition and communicated it out and anybody could submit alumni, students, parents, random folks could submit for the alma mater and they had that and then they finished up with their work and they will be debuting this at Alumni Weekend at the concert on Friday night and then again at the meetings. I'm gonna share with you, you can see the committee, there were students involved, there was our music, our whole fine arts team was involved in the selection and so all of the submissions were blindly judged so no names were attached, the committee judged those. I think we had about nine or 10 submissions and lyrics and the melody to go along with it as well. And so the lyrics are here as you can see and as I did, I guess I should have known this, I've heard these things a lot, like sort of the national anthem, you don't, in the performance is never really the whole thing. There's like six verses or something like that and so usually there's a verse that's the one that's the one when they perform and so I believe that they've settled on the first verse will be the one, and there's a link, I'm gonna hopefully it'll work, it's you'll be actually the very first people to ever hear it, but we have a real treat here because it just so happens that the one of the authors of the Alma Mater happens to be in the room. Oh wow. Emily Marti, so Emily can tell you the story but this was a family affair and she's a family of unicorns over there and even an extended unicorn family participated in this and again it was blindly judged and it just so happens, it's a perfect time and it's also perfect because her husband Michael, who's also an alumni, just happens to be his reunion weekend so it'll be pretty cool for him. So Emily, what would you like to hear about? Thank you, Todd. We really enjoyed writing this, it was a multi-generational martin family endeavor. My husband and I are both alums, we're parents of a senior at the school this year and none of us are composers but we knew we had something to say about our school. It's very difficult to get the name of the school in a song. So we kind of knew early on we wanted it to be about what accepting the greater challenge means kind of at different stages of life when you're first coming to NCSSM upon graduation and then later looking back. And actually one of my favorite lyrics is whatever we have to give was home within that brief time. I don't think we can hear all that. So my 13 year old son wrote the melody. I kind of helped it with the chord progression. My mother, Janet Fox, who's a, she used to be an education reporter but she's written a lot of stuff, really did most of the lyrics. I kind of had the structure, I gave her the syllables and she wrote it out. So I think none of us could have done it alone. We all worked on it together and my son who I think is watching this on live stream cannot wait to hear it performed by actual musicians. So here we go. And I think that there'll be a full orchestral version and the chorale doing this on Friday and on the weekend but hopefully this will work. This is a smaller sample. And you will send those of you are not going to make it feel and know we can link so we can stream it. Yes, we will, I hope they're. Email. I don't know if they'll be streaming it but they'll be videoing for sure. You should re-tent. That's a good one. I love that re-tent for sure. You may have to hear from my machine here. Hopefully. You can't see it here. The YouTube video wouldn't project on the screen but it's in the presentation that Alma Mater is the... Yeah, I can handle it. Can I view it? No. I can't put it back. The Alma Mater is the link where it says Alma Mater is the link and you can actually watch the YouTube video of the performance. And then lastly, this past Friday we had a great NC SSM, NC STEM Hall of Fame Gala. This was the first time Gala event for us and the sort of inauguration of the NC STEM Hall of Fame. And you can see the four honorees up there. The Burroughs Welcome Fund on your left that's John Burroughs, the president. And they are more honored for their amazing contribution to STEM education in the state as well as early career scientists and they are the largest single private supporter of NC SSM in our history with more than $3 million given to support the school. Maya Esmeral, who's class of 85 is on the top right, as you can see. You all know Maya, she's an important member and finished her term last year and has had an amazing, very career. The bottom left is Jody Simone who's coming up to accept the award. And Joe was on our foundation board for a period of time but he is an amazing scientist, chemist, imminent professor, something something at State and Carolina and also a very successful entrepreneur as well and so he was honored. And I learned something here the first time I heard this about him and his first PhD student is Valerie Ashby who's now the dean of Trinity College at Duke University. And she said that he's one of only 20 people in the history that have been elected to all three societies that I don't know them off the top of my head but there's this society for science, medicine and whatever, I don't know, in the name of... Chemistry, yeah. National Academies, we're all three different national academies and he's the only person in one of 20 people in history that have been selected to all three of those academies so it's pretty amazing. And then lastly in the far right as you know, that's Governor Hunt who has done a lot for STEM and certainly our school and they all were, gave very gracious and unbelievably great acceptance speeches particularly as it related to NCSSM and this event was really the idea of Brad and Deborah Ives who are Brad's an alumnus who's a member of the Foundation Board, actually Paige's brother and they did an unbelievable job along with Brock and the institutional advancement team of pulling this together. The first time you do something is you never know how it's gonna turn out and you never know how much work it actually is to do it and so Brock can, at this point Brock can really tell you how much work it was to do this but it was exceeded expectations in every way I mean we were hoping when we first did this to plan this to have 200 people attend we had 300 people attend we were hoping that we might raise $100,000 from sponsors we raised more than $150,000 from sponsors and for those of you many folks in the room were at the event, it was a really fantastic evening. Again it exceeded all of our expectations. Brock I don't know if you wanna say anything to this but again Brock and Debra in particular did an amazing amount of work to make this event a really huge, huge success. They still recovered. But it really was a fabulous, fabulous event with great energy in the room and any matter so thanks for all of you who came and sponsored the event and we had a lot of old friends there and then we had a lot of new friends as well which was great. So that really concludes my report and I wanna again thank all of you for your work for our school and the new members who were just joining. I hope today was educational for you and also hope it was an opportunity to see the quality of folks that you're working with on the board here and we're happy to have all of our new members. As is the case, the diversity on the board brings a lot of perspective to help us out and we appreciate your willingness to serve and again in particular thanks for helping make the first meeting here in Morganton a huge success. Again as was mentioned earlier by Stephanie Amberlin this is the first meeting here in Morganton, many more to come and I think it was again a transformational day for the school in many ways and I think you're serving on this board at a time really over the next four years between what's happening in Morganton and the capital campaign that's gonna be launching has, you know, will really change the trajectory of this institution and we appreciate your leadership and support in helping us make sure we do it well and that, I know we will. So thank you again for your time and your service. Thank you Chancellor, on behalf of the Board of Trustees I think we wanna give the Chancellor, the staff, all of our constituent groups, the Alumni Association Foundation Board, parent advisory group, student government association. Let's give them a round of applause for that. And to our community hosts that have been just phenomenal really since the very beginning of the way they've embraced the school, embraced our current students and staff in the future. They've just been tremendous and great things to come. Marjorie, we're not saying goodbye, we're saying we'll see you soon. We appreciate Tom Looney stepping into complete your term as vice chairman and he'll do a fabulous job. And I think from the trustees' perspective the new opportunity, the new challenges of what was approved today with the academic vision, the site development, the infrastructure, the facility, committee chairs. It's important for us to assess our policy responsibilities. We need to be thinking about what are the opportunities within our policies that can be more innovative, more supportive, more aligned with what's becoming an institution with one school, two campuses, as well as our deep program and our IBC program and outreach. So keep in mind the policy side of that as you see things so that when we come back to our next quarterly meetings and our committee work in between, we're prepared to help support what the school needs from a policy perspective as well as helping them secure the kind of resources that we're gonna need to make it a great experience for all of our students now and for years to come. Delighted to see everybody here today. Other than that, Mr. Chancellor, I would be ready to entertain a motion to adjourn unless there are comments from other folks. I would allow the latency. Marjorie, have our making the last clarification. Am I cracked? I'm making motion that we interpret. Seconded. Seconded by Allen. All those in favor say aye. Please travel safely. Thank you. Not too far.