SouthArk to use data to promote retention
EL DORADO — South Arkansas Community College information technology staff announced that it will train staff to use data to promote retention at the institution at a Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday.
Chief Information Officer Dr. Tim Kirk said that Student Services staff will be trained on its Retention Module, something he thinks will benefit the institution.
“We will actually have predictive modeling to judge which students are
at greatest risk of not being successful at SouthArk,” Kirk said. “This is another effort where we’re trying to apply analytics to our student population … so we can take more effective early action and retain students because that’s all part of trying to deal with some of the other issues we’ve talked about.”
Vice President for Learning Dr. Mickey Best said that staff participated in a free 15-day trial of Ilos, a cloudbased service for video capturing, editing, hosting and captioning.
“This also addresses Title IX issues … special needs and accommodations,” Best said. “It’s a great tool. Ten fulltime faculty are using that now. They show great interest in this.”
Best also said that the career and technical education division continues to target 10th graders, recruiting them for its secondary technical center’s programs. The college’s Upward Bound grant program “reaches back” further to promote college going among middle school students, Student Services Vice President Dr. Jim Bullock said.
“Preparing for that they made a presentation to 160 students at Barton and they currently have 59 students in the El Dorado School District involved in their program, which is 93.65 percent of their annual goal already,” Bullock said.
The corporate education division is working with Southwest Arkansas Planning & Development District and Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to provide work experience training for Certified Production Technician students, chief effectiveness officer Dr. Stephanie Tully-Dartez said.
“(They’ve) partnered in an idea that would allow WIOA to pay for wages for individuals for 90 days so they can participate in a training experience at a facility,” Tully- Dartez said. “This, in our case, five of our students in the certified production technician program have applied for it and have been accepted in this program.”
SouthArk’s excess year-todate revenue over expenditures total over $1.4 million and the El Dorado Conference Center’s off to a great start this year, finance and administration vice president Carey Tucker said.
“We’re still doing extremely well comparing here to last year,” he said. “We’re twothirds way through the year so we should be sitting right at 66 percent with our expenditures and we’re sitting at 59.”
Contractors are fixing a leak at Heritage Plaza, near the fountain on west campus. He said that the troubleshooting “is a learning process for us all.”
“It started spewing out from the side of the fountain instead of the fountain itself so we thought the leak was underneath,” Tucker said. “Troubleshooting is always tedious at best and it ended up being outside of the fountain but we had to bust up the fountain to figure out the leak wasn’t there.”
SouthArk President Dr. Barbara Jones presented SouthArk Foundation Director Cynthia Reyna’s administrative report on her behalf. She said that the foundation has established by former trustee Charlie Thomas and the SouthArk Employee Club.
The SouthArk Board of Trustees’ next scheduled meeting is scheduled for 3:45 pm Tuesday, Apr. 18 in the administration building board room on the west campus.