Academics and Student Success Committee
Ohio University Board of Trustees met Monday to discuss first-year students' experiences and welcome week events.
Five students spoke to the board, each having different perspectives on their first-year experience.
The first speaker was Casey Rilling, a sophomore majoring in Spanish education. She spoke about her experience with Bobcat Student Orientation, or BSO, and her initiative to become a BSO leader.
Rilling recalled her favorite memory from her BSO experience at lunch with her orientation group.
“There was a big group of us, and we were all passing around our phones connecting on social media,” Rilling said. “I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Wow, I finally feel like I'm belonging to a new community.’”
A large part of the first-year experience, according to the committee, is Welcome Week events.
Currently, there are more than a dozen activities planned for Welcome Week, taking place from Aug.24 to Sept. 2. Some returning events include a class photo, a party at Ping and the involvement fair.
Another main aspect the committee focused on was how students' engagement with their peers related to their first-year experiences. After Welcome Week, the next step in feeling a sense of belonging on campus is with learning communities.
Dasia Dewberry, a senior studying political science pre-law, Spanish and international studies, spoke about her experience being a learning community leader and being able to give first-year students experiences inside and outside of the classroom.
“My personal favorite event as a learning community leader was when I took them to the Passion Works Studio last October,” Dewberry said. “We did arts and crafts and bonded, and it was a really, really fun experience for me to see all of my students interacting with each other.”
Aside from Welcome Week and BSO, Candace Boeninger, vice president for enrollment management, discussed 2023 enrollment trends with the board.
“We're going to see over the next week or so a lot of volatility in our numbers because, remember that last year at this time, we were starting classes,” Boeninger said. “There's a lot of late enrollment, enrollment activity that happens for graduate students and for our regional campus students.”
Resources, Facilities, and Affordability Committee
The Resources, Facilities and Affordability Committee met to discuss five active projects each with a total budget of $500,000 or more for the capital projects update.
At the end of July, OU had 158 active projects that total about $540 million Jonathon Cozad, interim associate vice president of design and construction, said. He said the largest projects include a translational research facility in the College of Medicine and a new 600-bed residential facility.
Cozad listed all five projects on the agenda. The first includes a chilled water plant expansion project, with a budget of $6.8 million, which will be funded by state capital appropriations and departmental and the Department of Housing and Residence Life.
The construction of these projects will start in late FY24, with the hopes of finishing in late 2025.
Projects two and three on the agenda include the 31 S. Court roof replacement project and the Copland Hall HVAC and controls project.
Project four is the Ping Center fire alarm replacement project, Cozad said, while the building was opened in 1996, the fire systems are getting near the end of their life.
Finally, the fifth project on the agenda is the annual campus steam repairs project, which is done every year, to evaluate the utility distribution across OU’s main campus.
“The heavy focus on construction during the two weeks' steam outage in May, and some of the work may bleed into the rest of the summer, but it will be complete by the end of summer,” Cozad said.
The committee approved a motion to send the projects to the full board with a recommendation of approval.
Audit and Risk Management Committee
The Audit and Risk Management Committee discussed OU’s internal audit charter. The audit's goal is to ensure it gets reviewed, revised and approved as standards evolve, Marion Candrea, chief audit executive, said.
Ashlee Bevan, audit manager, updated the committee on the office’s work with cash counts. She said there is a significant decrease from FY18 to FY23 in the petty cash funds primarily due to COVID-19. The funds were much higher before the pandemic and decreased from 64 to 25 between FY20 and FY21 and have decreased since.
Candrea said she is encouraged by a lowering trend of petty cash funds. She said doing annual check-ins on these accounts will continue to bring education and awareness to the funds to demonstrate to people who aren’t using the accounts that it may be a good idea to close them.
“The silver lining of COVID-19 was that it highlighted a lot of departments that had (petty cash funds) just because this is what we've always had,” Candrea said. “I don't want to get rid of it (for them yet) to really demonstrate that they don't need it.
To conclude the committee meeting, Joshua Gonzalez, chief privacy officer, focused on revising privacy programs; he is working toward finding new ways to connect training and standards across the university, create more outreach discussions to engage in ethical considerations around the use of personal information and monitoring new and existing laws.
He hopes the privacy protection policy will open up a healthy dialogue between faculty and staff on what responsible data handling should look like.
“What I found is that the culture here at OU is there's a willingness to talk about privacy, how we handle student data, employee data, which has been the most encouraging thing coming on board,” Gonzalez said.
Governance and Compensation Committee
Lorrie Platt, chair of the governance and compensation committee, suggested to the committee the idea of using board-specific software to help organize materials needed for board meetings. Over the next few months, Platt said she wants the committee to evaluate a few products and see if they may add sufficient value for their costs.
She confessed that board portal software is not cheap, and there is typically an annual user fee, which can be worth thousands of dollars. However, if the committee agrees to make the change, she said David Moore, executive secretary of the board of trustees, will set up demos and pricing options for the committee to consider.
Many board members have materials saved on the Microsoft SharePoint software and use simple emails to access agendas and other meeting materials, so it would determine if the committee can agree on making the change to a different software for the right price, Platt said.
President’s Report and Resolutions
President Lori Stewart Gonzalez delivered her first report to the board and discussed the several activities she has partaken in since fully taking on the role as OU’s newest president on July 1.
Gonzalez said it was only her eighth week on campus but she has already had the opportunity to talk with student leaders, meet with faculty and staff, visit laboratories, attend alumni events and learn more about several programs. GonzalesShe said OU has programs that diligently showcase its excellence in research and creative activity.
She plans to meet with students, faculty and staff in the coming weeks and months to discuss her plans to continue to move the university forward.
“As I meet students and alumni I think, what I think is there is some alchemy here about what students do when you’re on campus,” Gonzales said. “It’s more than going to class, it’s more than being in a club. There is some other special feeling here we need to capitalize on.”
Madalyn Blair and Paige Fisher contributed to this report.
