By Jasmine Nguyen
East Los Angeles College’s future is global education, President Marvin Martinez said. He recommended establishing a Center of Global Education and Engagement by fall of this year.
Norma Vega expanded on the idea of domestic an international academic initative.
The purpose of the presentation was for Martinez and the vice presidents to address and suggest future ideas for the campus and community for the upcoming year.
Attendees were also updated on the past achievements and statistical outcomes of the previous year. The theme of the presentation was: “moving forward in our changing context.”
Martinez addressed his plans for global education. They also suggested appoint two faculty members to set up the CGEE by summer and establish an Academic Senate Committee for CGEE by the fall. These recommendations still need to be approved by the Academic Senate.
Lynn Vogel-Zuiderweg and Norma Vega spoke further on recommendations for global education.
The goal of the CGEE office would help students understand the multicultural differences between cultures.
Vega explained that the office would be taking care of all activities regarding student mobility and would be informing students of all of the activities.
Student mobility refers to studying abroad, studying away or educational tours. Vogel-Zuiderweg said there are study abroad programs that take students to France, Japan and Spain.
With the recommendations that were made, she hopes to expand on the destinations that are offered and give students more options to choose from.
The idea is that faculty of ELAC and faculty of another school, either across the world or within the country, would collaborate with each other. It would allow students to get involved with programs and projects that take place on digital platforms.
Vega also said that these partnerships would allow ELAC students to converse and expand their knowledge with other students in different locations of their culture and language and vice versa.
The partnerships would have both options in traveling or digitally.
Armida Ornelas, vice president of Continuing Education and Workforce Development, talked briefly about Guided Pathways and how its meant to help with student success, graduation rates, transfer rates. Ornelas talked about how they are going to be improving meta-majors.
Meta-majors are a cluster of academic programs that are grouped together by common courses or occupations.
They allow students a guide to choosing what courses to take instead of just providing a sheet of all the classes offered at ELAC.
It helps students with deciding what classes to take even though they are undecided on their major.
Ornelas explained how there are seven new clusters that are being recommended, and that they are redesigning and bettering the infrastructure of the program of meta-majors.
Myeshia Armstrong, vice president of administrative services, talked about resources and showed a graph that presented ELAC’s revenues and expenditures over the years.
The graph showed that the gap between revenues and expenditures has closed this year. That means that ELAC does not have the resources that it did before.
“We have to consider additional resources at this point in time are not available,” Armstrong said. She said the budget is very tight for the campus. The resources are not as plentiful for students like before.
Armstrong talked about all the current projects and planned projects that would improve the campus. They are retiling the campus pool and she said there is an irrigation project to come.
They plan to beautify the campus by creating more green spaces and shade spots for students to lounge.
They also plan to create more shade structures for students or community members who are waiting for the bus to give them shelter from the sun.
She said there will also be a whole new web design look that they are currently working on.
They want it to be more engaging for anyone in the world who visits the web page.
Martinez added that the layout and design of the new web design would strongly resemble the web design of Long Beach State.
Julie Benavides, vice president of student services, introduced the plans made for student services.
She talked about how they want to increase student financial aid and wellness services. They also plan to expand on their current mental health services and peer mentoring.
Benavides said that student life is very important and they are constantly looking for ways to improve student life on campus. They are working toward consolidating all of the existing programs on campus.
All the recommendations are still in the process of being approved and are not yet certain.