By Jesus Figueroa
The Men’s and Women’s Physical Education Departments looks at the viability of combining departments to become one Kinesiology Department, as recommended by the Enrollment Management Committee.
In combining the two P.E. Departments, the dance discipline, which is part of the Women’s PE Department, is recommended to separate from the Kinesiology Department and either become their own department or join another department.
“The committee struggled in trying to find a reason to keep the departments separate because that seemed to be where the faculty wanted to be,” Associate Dean of Research Ryan Cornner, Ph.D., said.
The decision to become one department will be decided by a vote by both departments faculty before the beginning of the 2014-15 school year.
The merge of departments will bring up issues that will affect students and faculty.
The major change, after the merge, affecting students at ELAC would be the ability to repeat courses. Under the new discipline, there would be no repeating of courses allowed instead leveling courses to keep students advancing.
“Because we move to the Kinesiology discipline will mean all our students get restarted,” Cornner said, “even if they took physical education 1 and 2, they can still take the kinesiology version because it’s seen as a new course by the state,” he said.
Students would have a chance to repeat courses they have already completed.
The repeatability of a course will be affected immediately.
“The other thing is the leveling of courses, which the women did a lot of and the men didn’t do any of, will save the students by allowing them to repeat as long as they are moving along the level progression,” Cornner said.
The new department would have to set up a course schedule that would keep students moving forward with each course progressing in level, as satisfactory completion of each course is achieved.
Instructors might be affected in a negative way as they would have to choose one subject in the department to have seniority.
“There could be issues if you have somebody who has seniority in both departments because the contract does not allow them to have two seniority classes unless they were grandfathered in a long time ago,” Cornner said, “technically speaking within a department you have to choose the discipline you want to have seniority in,” he said.
The newly formed Kinesiology Department will need to vote on a new dean, each department has a dean, at the moment, it would go down to one dean for the new department.
The merge would also eliminate overlapping courses.
“Over the past three years, Men’s (PE Department) has offered 46 different courses and the Women’s (PE Department) has offered 106 different courses. Together the departments have offered 123 different courses,” Cornner said.“You’ll notice that 46 and 106 do not add up to 123. That’s because of the overlap,” he said.
There are 29 of the courses that overlap representing 23.6 percent, with men having a large amount of overlap courses and women’s having less because of the dance discipline being part of their department.