Tag Archive for: pandemic

CVHEC Director’s Message: Re-imagining  the social and economic landscape of our region

Greetings and welcome to our June CVHEC e-newsletter,

Welcome to the end of the semester and to the first summer in two years when we are not shut down.  As we emerge from the pandemic, faculty and staff at our Central Valley Higher Education Consortium member colleges and universities have been engaged in providing a great education to our students.

In this issue, please look at this month’s blog that , in light of a recent article regarding University of Californian, speaks to the Central Valley Program Pathways Mapper project that improves transfer of valley students to UC Merced as well as our three California State University campuses, Bakersfield, Fresno and Stanislaus.

We are also delighted to congratulate the Central San Joaquin Valley K16 Partnership (Fresno-Madera Collaborative & Tulare-Kings Collaborative) and the Kern Regional K16 Education Collaborative (Kern County Superintendent of Schools) on receiving $18.1 million in funding each from the state for a four-year effort to improve the educational and economic well-being of the Central Valley.  Merced, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin County are pursuing a similar grant opportunity and should hear in early fall.  These K16 Collaboratives that will include our CVHEC member institutions can change the very social and economic landscape of our region.

Last year, the Fresno-based K16 Collaborative served as a model for the funding that would eventually be allotted to create similar collaboratives throughout the state.

One of the initiatives funded by Fresno K16 Collaborative was the CVHEC MA Upskilling project which provided funding to support high school English and math teachers in earning their master’s degrees to allow them to teach dual enrollment college courses on their high school campuses to high school students.  Dual enrollment is one of the strategies CVHEC is supporting to help move students into and through higher education.  By the end of December 2022, there will be 118 new high school teachers in Fresno County holding MA degrees to facilitate the delivery of dual enrollment in our region.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the issue.  We wish you a restful and safe summer.

CVHEC Director’s Message: Consortium Summit ’22 Wrap – Recapturing the Magic

CVHEC board members and May 6 summit participants enjoyed the music of Las Hermanas Medina at the Cinco de Mayo reception the day before more than 130 higher education leaders and advocates convened for the Higher Education Policy and Legislative Summit in downtown Fresno.

 

Greetings and welcome to our May CVHEC e-newsletter,

As the spring semester ends, there is so much to talk about.  For the first time in two years, students and their families are enjoying attendance at live commencement ceremonies at colleges and universities throughout the Central Valley – you can feel the magic in the air.

Also, in a very generous gesture, institutions are honoring those graduates in 2020 and 2021 who were deprived of their commencement events by the pandemic by providing opportunities for them to participate in this year’s ceremonies as well.  We know the graduates would also want to thank the staff and faculty on their campuses for helping them achieve their educational goals.  Congratulations to ALL graduates and to your respective support systems!

As we celebrate our graduates, we hope you enjoy our May issue of the CVHEC Newsletter.  You will see this was an exciting month for us as well.  On May 5 and 6, CVHEC held its spring Board of Directors meeting and our first CVHEC Legislative and Policy Summit since 2019 live in Fresno.  Participants were appreciative of the opportunity to reconnect in-person with colleagues and make new connections.

At the board meeting, the CVHEC Board of Directors was happy to welcome the University of California, San Francisco – Fresno campus as the 30th member institution of the Consortium.  CVHEC also invited six newly-appointed CEOs as members of the Board.

This summit marked the 20th Anniversary of CVHEC with over 150 participants celebrating two decades worth of success by our member institutions in increasing the college-going rate for Valley residents. Please view the Summit photo gallery blog for the visual story of this very successful Summit.

Highlights of the summit include a conversation with Dr. John Welty, President Emeritus of Fresno State and founder of CVHEC, in addition to a panel of students from the region sharing how they navigated the pandemic.  The annual visit and legislative update by Congressman Jim Costa also added to the day.

These highlights, the information that was shared with attendees about the initiatives in the Central Valley to improve student success, and the ability to network in a live setting were invaluable and welcome.

Enjoy our newsletter and enjoy your summer.

See: PHOTO BLOG

CVHEC Director’s Message: Turning the Corner

 Greetings colleagues,

I am happy to present our February CVHEC e-Newsletter amidst recent encouraging news showing our country may be turning the corner on this historic pandemic that has transformed the way we deliver instruction and services to our students in the region.

With that in mind, we are pleased to announce that this spring CVHEC will return to in-person convenings with two major events for the Valley’s education community, pandemic conditions permitting.

The first event March 17 will bring the Central Valley Dual Enrollment for Equity and Prosperity (CVDEEP) Task Force together with regional and statewide partners.  See details in this issue.

For our second event, CVHEC leaders are excited about the return of our annual Legislative and Policy Summit in the late spring – details to follow in next month’s issue.  The Summit has been on “pandemic hiatus” since 2019 and many are anxious to come together in person to follow up on much progress that our Valley higher education community has been pursuing.

Additionally, CVHEC will hold other professional development and regional meetings in-person when campus COVID regulations allow.

Also in this issue, we announce a new round of mini-grants launching this spring throughout the Central Valley. For the last three years, CVHEC has been able to offer this funding to member colleges and universities in the Central Valley providing opportunities for faculty and staff to target areas on their campuses that have been identified by the Consortium as regional strategies and priorities. We invite our member institutions to utilize this opportunity for services that can help your students.

Finally, we are especially pleased to publish the fourth installment of our “What the CV-HEC is Happening Blog”  that features an entry by former CVHEC team member Virginia Madrid-Salazar, Esq. regarding dual enrollment from the personalized perspective of a parent of a high school student benefiting from taking college courses at his local high school. Dual enrollment is one of the equity strategies CVHEC is pursuing throughout the region and Virginia’s blog is a great warm-up for the CVDEEP Convening next month. I am proud to note that Virginia was instrumental in developing our CVDEEP Task Force while she was with us. We appreciate her taking some time from her busy law practice that she began last summer.

We hope you enjoy our newsletter for the month and we welcome your feedback

A NEW YEAR: Recharged for a Dynamic 2022

Hello friends and colleagues of the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium (CVHEC)!

With 2022 well underway, we are pleased to share with you our first e-newsletter of the year.  We at CVHEC wish you a dynamic start to the spring 2022 semester with hopes of reaching some sort of a new normal that will lead us to working, meeting our students and convening in-person in the near future.

Though 2021 was a challenging and unprecedented year for us all, CVHEC members and partners were fully engaged in working to deliver productive educational programs for our students and valuable professional development opportunities for our faculty and staff in the region.  This  month’s newsletter provides a brief summary and reminder of the good work that was done in the Central Valley this past year.

Among these are our  Dual Enrollment Upskilling Teachers Master’s Program; announcement of our  CVHEC Equity, Race and Social Justice Taskforce; success stories about our dual enrollment efforts featuring some of our Central Valley students as well as innovative initiatives undertaken with our popular CVHEC Mini-Grant Program; our communications initiatives resulting in ongoing development of this e-newsletter including  a new blog feature, development of our public information officers/communications committee and a video on broadband disparity, one of three videos we are producing; our historic  CVHEC/UC Merced Transfer Project and the appointment of several new chief executives for member campuses.

This newsletter will also provide a preview of higher education efforts to come in the valley this year.

Be on the lookout for a continuation of the work around equity and inclusion in member institutions through our Equity Task Force, the pursuit of dual enrollment as an equity strategy in rural parts of the Valley and the Consortium providing assistance in creating K16 collaboratives in the north and south counties of the region.

CVHEC is also partnering with state and regional advocates to work to bring broadband to rural parts of the Central Valley to ensure that internet connectivity and bandwidth are no longer a barrier for our students and residents.

Also, the CVHEC Board of Directors is considering conditions that will allow for delivering our annual Legislative and Policy Summit in an in-person setting later in the spring, for the first time since 2019.

Needless to say, while the pandemic has put the squeeze on all of us the past two years, we are more determined than ever to conquer that challenge as we have so many others. To that end, we look forward to continued partnerships with you all in the coming year.

Historic CHSU College of Osteopathic Medicine White Coat Ceremonies

California Health Science University recorded institutional history when the CVHEC-member campus held White Coat Ceremonies for its 199 medical students in the College of Osteopathic Medicine  Classes of 2024 and 2025 Oct. 2.

Like many campuses, the CHSU inaugural class of 2024 ceremony last year was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our first and second-year medical students participated in a time-honored tradition of receiving their short white coat signifying the beginning of their medical education journey,” reported CHSU spokesperson Richelle Kleiser. “Students invited fully COVID-vaccinated family and friends to attend in-person on a limited basis; all other guests could view the ceremonies via online live stream.”

See full story and videos.

Spring – a renewal of our resiliency and celebrations

Benjamin T. Duran, Ed.D. CVHEC Executive Director

Greetings Colleagues and Friends of CVHEC,

There is plenty to celebrate this Spring. As the celebration is underway, Central Valley’s resiliency during this pandemic is on full display. We are delighted to highlight some of those efforts in this month’s issue of the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium’s newsletter.

Please join us in congratulating two CVHEC board members who have been selected to serve their districts as chancellor. Dr. Kristin Clark has been selected as the third West Hills Community College District Chancellor and Dr. Sonya Christian was selected as Kern Community College District Chancellor. Congratulations!

University officials and family party-planners alike have been busy preparing for Spring commencements. Although the pandemic is impacting traditional commencement celebrations, our region is bustling to honor student success. With fewer restrictions than last year, creativity abounds as campuses are finding new ways to commemorate student success. We are highlighting the variations and look forward to a joyous commencement season. Congratulations graduates and everyone who helped them get to that next step in their lives.

Finally, in this issue, we look at how our member campuses have stepped up to support vaccine distribution to help our economy come back, and eventually, assist in face-to-face learning on campuses. Our Central Valley campuses are serving as strong partners.

Benjamin T. Duran, Ed.D.
Executive Director – Central Valley Higher Education Consortium (CVHEC)

COS student featured in Lumina photojournalist project

Miguel Contreras, a 22-year old student majoring in nursing at College of the Sequoias (COS), was featured in a special year-long project by photojournalist Rachel Bujalski for The Lumina Foundation (Lumina), a partner of the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium.

For the past year, Bujalski has followed and documented the lives of a handful of California students whose lives reflect that of many of today’s students. Her work, including compelling photos and narrative that depict a candid, close up look at the lives of five low-income students and the immense college challenge they face during the COVID-19 pandemic, was recently published on Lumina’s website.

“Rachel is an accomplished photojournalist that has worked with Time, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, National Geographic and more,” said Dakota Pawlicki, Lumina’s strategy officer for Community College and Workforce Education. “She recently was part of a team that earned an Emmy for their undercover reporting.”

CVHEC, a Lumina-designated Talent Hub, and other California Talent Hubs hosted Bujalski and connected her to the students she featured including Miguel, a cancer survivor and an amputee who grew up in foster care.

He works full time as a hospital aide at Kaweah Delta Medical Center while attending CVHEC-member institution COS in Visalia full-time in search of a nursing career — all while preparing for fatherhood.

Miguel’s right leg was amputated below the knee after a cancer diagnosis at age 18 and the care he received from his nurses inspired him to become a nurse himself. But his classes have moved online because of COVID-19 and he says the work has become much harder without in-person help.

View his and the other photo stories here: https://www.luminafoundation.org/news-and-views/photo-essay-the-college-climb-steepens/ )

See Guardian.com story: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/07/college-students-coronavirus-pandemic-california

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