LEARNING, STEWARDSHIP AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Foothill-De Anza Opening Day
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Remarks of Chancellor Martha J. Kanter
Thank you, President Swenson. Trustee Swenson came to Foothill College as a professor of mathematics in 1967 and from there, served as the dean of physical science, math and engineering and then vice president of educational resources until he retired in 1999. In 2005, Trustee Swenson was overwhelmingly elected by the voters in our community to serve on Foothill-De Anza’s governing board. We are most fortunate to have him leading our district forward as our board president this year. Thank you again.
Let me now introduce you to Sue Gatlin and Rich Schroeder, who will take this year’s theme of “Learning, Stewardship and the Environment” to a level they call “personal sustainability.” Sue and Rich are the deans of Foothill and De Anza’s physical education, human performance and athletics programs, which offer classes and team sports to more than 27,000 students a year. They sponsor many other programs and services for the community year-round, like the Special Olympics, the annual Children’s Holiday Gift Drive, the Silicon Valley Heart Walk, the Silicon Valley Kids Triathlon, and many more.
Please join me in thanking the deans, faculty and staff of Foothill and De Anza’s physical education, human performance and athletics divisions for the great work that you do. We look forward to seeing you on the track, in the fitness centers, at the Big Game on Oct. 4 at 7 p.m., and on campus in the months ahead. Thanks so much.
As we begin the new year and think about the responsibilities we have that are directly related to our theme of “Learning, Stewardship and the Environment,” we all recognize a simple truth: We cannot do our best to educate and take care of our students without taking care of ourselves - individually and together as a community. If we wake up in the morning and feel great, it carries us through the day as if the day itself sailed by us into the sunset. Some people sail through life feeling great most every day, but it’s not the case for everyone.
What if it were? What if our own stewardship of ourselves and our students were at optimal levels? Would we then create a more perfect environment for teaching and learning than is now the case? Or is it the other way around? Does our environment enhance our desire to have a great day or a series of great days both here and at home?
It probably goes both ways. When we take care of ourselves, I think we would agree that we all do a better job of educating our students, and being good stewards of our families, our friends and the world around us.
Our new Vice Chancellor of Human Resources Dorene Novotny, and her colleagues Kim Chief-Elk and Christine Vo recently reviewed how our employees and retired faculty and staff use our Kaiser and United Healthcare plans.
They found that our biggest chronic health problems are heart disease, diabetes, asthma, backs and joints, cancer and mental health. And, further, that about 40 percent of our active and retired employees who have chronic health problems account for 70 percent of our health care costs. They also learned that a surprising number of us do not get our health check-ups every year.
What this means to our Foothill-De Anza family is that we must do a better job for ourselves in disease prevention. Just like the early-alert system we have in place for our students, we need to take advantage of prevention methods like annual check-ups, especially since recent medical reports tell us we’re going to be on earth for a longer time and that 60 is the new 40!
Seriously, we want the Foothill-De Anza family to be in good health. To stay well, we need to become better at prevention, detecting health problems as early as possible, and managing them better.
In May, human resources launched our new Wellness Initiative with a free health screening. We’ll be working with our employee groups to form a Foothill-De Anza Wellness Committee to help us plan and better educate ourselves with training and activities that are responsive to our health and wellness needs.
We want our faculty, staff, administrators and retirees to have the information and tools they need to achieve optimal health. We also hope to have some fun with this and you’ll be hearing more about it as fall quarter gets rolling, or, should I say, running!
Let’s all do everything we can to help each other be healthy and serve as models of personal sustainability for our students and ourselves!
Let me now turn from personal sustainability to what I’ll call community sustainability. Our most immediate community is the intentional social network – the “greater professional learning community” - that holds the Foothill-De Anza family together and has done so since our founding in 1957. It’s the amazing network of educational colleagues who share in the knowledge that, because of what we do here every day, our students will, time and time again, exceed our expectations. We all share this special bond and it binds us together across our disciplines, divisions , departments and colleges. Sustaining and nurturing this sense of community is important to help us do our best in these challenging and changing times. For some of you, this is your first opening day and for others, one of many. What we do matters deeply for our students and the fabric of our community, probably more than we realize. Thank you for your many contributions to our mission and goals.
I’d like now to ask all of the new faculty, staff and administrators to please stand and be recognized with a warm welcome to the Foothill-De Anza family.
For the rest of us in the audience, please reach out to our new folks, welcome them and invite them to join you on campus, at Central Services and in the community as much as you can. Thanks very much.
Let me now honor our faculty, staff and administrators who have devoted 25 years or more of service to Foothill, De Anza and Central Services. Your names are shown on our program. Please stand and let us thank you for your dedicated service to our students and our community.
On the second page of your program you’ll see the names of Foothill-De Anza’s participatory governance leaders — your elected faculty, staff and administrators who carry your best ideas, your advice, your concerns and your criticisms to our many advisory boards and committees where decisions are made about what’s best to do for our students and our college community.
Please join me in acknowledging the leaders of our academic and classified senates, all of our employee associations and members of our college and district-wide committees, boards and commissions, with a special thanks to Dolores Davison, Dave Garrido, Jon O’Bergh, Becky Bartindale, Jose Menendez, the ETS team, Marty Kahn, our interpreters and all of our workshop presenters who developed today’s program for us all.
Please all stand and be recognized.
Let me now move from personal and community sustainability to environmental sustainability and our role as educators in the larger context in contributing to this year’s theme of “Learning, Stewardship and the Environment.”
On Monday, more than 44,000 students will enter our classrooms and participate in our many programs and student services. Enrollment is strong here and around the state at a challenging point in time for all of us and our economy. We are making progress to close the achievement gap and we have a huge list of accomplishments in which we can take pride, knowing that Foothill and De Anza are among the best – the very few best - community colleges in the nation because of what you do and the work that’s been done by you and many other faculty, staff and community leaders over the past five decades to bring us to this day.
When I take a step back from us as we are today and reflect on what brought Foothill-De Anza to this moment, I think its the consistent drive and achievement of our students, faculty and staff toward excellence and opportunity that has carried us forward and has enabled us to educate our students with tremendous creativity and tireless dedication. This has been the case since our founding and it is what will carry us forward through the decades ahead.
To do this, we have also benefited enormously from our environment, the places where we work - our grounds, our classrooms, our buildings, our lights, our heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, our offices, our technologies, our water, our food, our parking lots, our co-generation plants, our photovotaics and the long list of our natural and physical resources that enable the teaching and learning that takes place every day on our campuses, at a distance and in the community.
Our colleges exist in the larger environment that affects most everything we do as educators, so much so that for us to continue to be successful, we must also nurture and sustain the social, economic, political and fiscal environments that value excellence and opportunity in education for all of our students and for our ultimate success as a society.
So when I look back and reflect on what’s best to accomplish today and tomorrow for Foothill-De Anza, I think long and hard about the four goals of our Educational Master Plan - opportunity, quality, accountability and sustainability – and zero in on sustainability quite a bit more than I ever used to.
Why? Because the purpose of this goal is to ensure that what we do lasts for future generations as well as those who will come through our doors on Monday.
Sustainability is a very hard goal to achieve. Here’s one reason why.
Today our legislature and governor have not yet given us a state budget, a budget that makes up 97% of Foothill-De Anza’s revenue, a budget without a plan for ongoing funding of the state’s most important priorities – the education of our students and the health and welfare of our community. This cascades down to a lot of headache and uncertainty and makes us tighten our belts to get through the downturn until we can rebalance and stabilize.
This latest state fiscal crisis is the fifth I’ve been through since I came to California in the 1970s and we always rebound. We get through it, we educate more students, we hire more faculty and staff, and we do our best, despite the wild roller coaster rides we go through every few years.
Unfortunately as a state, we aren’t thinking ahead enough or are we planning for the future. The only meaningful California master plan for education that I can point to that made a major difference in the last 50 years is the 1960 Master Plan.
Here at Foothill-De Anza, we passed two local bonds, Measure E in 1999 and Measure C in 2006. These are examples about how we thought ahead and planned for the future together – across all groups, in concert with the residents of our cities. The trustees asked members of our community for all of the funding we could reasonably and prudently justify to them for the purpose of renovating and expanding our facilities, equipment and technology for the next 15 years to serve the growing number of students registering for classes.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach that lesson to the state of California–to think ahead and plan for the future? And maybe we will have that opportunity. We need to stabilize the funding for education and create sustainable fiscal resources for the education and welfare of our students, for California and for America, just as we must think ahead and do all that we can to sustain our natural and physical resources.
The latest national report “Diploma to Nowhere,” published by Strong American Schools, says that American high schools are failing to prepare students for college level work and that the problem is so widespread that most colleges and universities provide basic skills courses at a cost of more than $2 billion a year. At Foothill, De Anza and across the country, more than two-thirds of entering freshmen are not prepared for college-level work.
The report asks our colleges to do more to retain students who begin higher education needing developmental classes and to move them to obtain certificates and degrees at far higher rates than is now the case.
At Foothill and De Anza, we are doing more. A whole lot more. And we are realizing some remarkable results with new English, math and ESL curricula that our faculty have put in place; learning communities; freshman experience and summer bridge programs we’ve developed; and the new math, science and language labs that are overseen by our faculty and professional classified staff to help our students take significant steps forward in their lives. All of this is happening despite our unstable state budget situation and the fact that we are the lowest funded system of education in the state.
If you are a member of our faculty, classified staff or administration who are engaged in supporting the basic skills initiatives at our colleges, please stand and let us thank you for all the work you are doing to create a sustainable future for our students.
Our board of trustees, Presidents Brian Murphy and Judy Miner, and our vice chancellors are working closely with our governance leaders – people like Dolores Davison, Anne Argyriou, Rich Hansen, Leo Contreras, Javier Rueda, and others on the Chancellor’s Advisory Council - to advocate tirelessly for budget sustainability, for a state educational master plan that understands, recognizes and rewards the fine work that we do and that builds on our best practices and successes for the future.
Beyond what each of us do in the small part of our world inside the Foothill-De Anza family, we must all work together with our students and our community to sustain the environment if we plan to educate those future generations of students about whom I spoke.
Sustainability is all about the intersection of learning, stewardship and the environment to realize the promise of an educated society.
It is in this context that we have brought together a distinguished group of individuals shown on your program to help us look at the larger world and the environmental problems facing our region and our planet. They will tell us about what we’re doing to address our problems, and help us think about what more we can do together and individually to improve the quality of our lives and work to sustain our environment for the future.
Today, we are just 47 days away from an election that will change the direction of America. We have so much at stake that I hope you will not only vote, but make sure that you let our students know how important their voice is on November 4. The future of our country is at stake and many of us have never felt our votes to be so important or the future of our country at such a crossroads.
Let me end my opening remarks with a short story about a local family. Mr. Sandoval came to the opening of Foothill’s new campus center last fall and told me he had been in Foothill’s first graduating class when the college was located in the old highway school on El Camino Real in the late 1950s. He was joined by his daughter, Dolly Sandoval, who graduated from De Anza in 1985 and is now mayor of Cupertino, teaching mathematics at Los Gatos High School after graduating from UC-Santa Cruz and teaching middle school at San Lorenzo Valley Junior High. Dolly also graduated from MALDEF’s Leadership Development Program during that time, went onto serve on the Foothill-De Anza Board of Trustees for 11 years during which her mother received her associate’s degree. This summer, Mayor Sandoval finished another Leadership Development Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Our colleges have enabled hundreds of families, like the Sandovals, across generations, to receive an outstanding education.
If we anticipate the future and plan for it well by making a commitment to personal, community and environmental sustainability, we will ensure that our students and their families enjoy an unparalleled education for generations to come. Thank you.
I’d like now to ask Dolores Davison, president of Foothill’s Academic Senate and the district’s Academic Senate to introduce our keynote speaker. Dolores began teaching history and women’s studies at Foothill College as a part-time member of the faculty in 1996 and joined the full-time faculty in 2005.
Following our keynote speaker, Dave Garrido, past president of Foothill’s Classified Senate, will take the podium and introduce our panel. Dave joined the district in 1991 and has been the faculty and staff technology trainer at both colleges. He is now the instructional designer in Foothill’s Distance and Mediated Learning Department.
Please use the cards we’ve provided to jot down any questions, suggestions or comments you have following our keynote speaker and panelists. If we have enough time, we’ll pose some questions of your questions to the panelists. If not, we will have our sustainability committees post the questions and answers on our website. We’ve kept handouts to a minimum, but if you’d like to learn more about sustainability, our keynote speaker and panelists have compiled an inspired list of readings that we’ve put on the Opening Day website. (Just Google Foothill-De Anza and Opening Day.) At the end of this morning’s session, please drop your suggestions and comments into the suggestion box when you leave Flint Center. Thanks.
Now, please join me in welcoming Dolores Davison to the podium.
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