Cabinet Meeting Minutes
23 March 2004

Present: Tony Macias, Duane Elms, Chris Farren, Christie Miller, Donna Rees, Kathy Ryan for Business Affairs, John Counts, Faye Vowell

• Sherri Bays will be gone Mar 27-31 to a conference in Philadelphia.
• Steve Pearce will be in Silver City the day after graduation, May 15.
• Donna Rees will be in Gallup Monday through Wednesday of next week. Rick O'Ryan will go with her to begin discussions about the best way to use Gallup technology money.
• Donna Rees has been appointed to a one year term as a member of the WIA Southwest Region Board.
• Evening GED classes are being explored in Deming.
• On May 18, we will host a Friends of Western meeting to recognize our graduates and scholarship recipients in Deming, and well as to thank our supporters..
• Harvielee Moore, one of our alums and an adjunct in Deming, has won the John W. Vaughn Excellence in Education Award from the North Central Association.
• Cabinet discussed the new Task Force on Higher Education appointed by the Governor. Donna Rees will find out who the members of the Task Force are.
• Donna Rees shared a diagram developed by Mary Billings and Rick O'Ryan in regard to online registration particularly for students at a distance. We are making progress in this area.
• A new president has been announced for NMSU. We do not know what his stance will be vis a vis NMSU in Deming. The Extended University campuses are where our growth has been for the last several years so we need to continue to be competitive.
• Our Las Cruces chapter would like to host a college night in a local hotel to help us with recruitment.
• Christie Miller shared an idea about recruiting that entailed alums and WNMU faculty and staff visiting small towns for Meet the Mustangs nights.
• The Great Race planning is proceeding nicely. Brochures are available.
• The Alumni bulletin should be out any day.
• The Indiana Alumni meeting has been scheduled for June 23.
• Summer Class Schedules have been sent to the printer. Graduate students in education are targeted for recruitment in summer school.
• The Document Imaging PMT is ongoing. We are trying to get costs nailed down. We will pilot document imaging in three offices: Registrar, Financial Aid, and Admissions.
• A job description for the Director of Academic Support Center has been written and the advertisement will go out soon.
• An RFP for the Ft. Bliss program has been completed.
• We are in the process of resetting the Compass cut off scores. A committee is being created to address this with representatives from Humanities and Mathematics and a faculty member appointed by Faculty Senate. We will ask a representative from ACT to assist us with this.
• We will do cafeteria renovations this summer. We will expand the service from 7 am to 7 pm and recreate a grill and a bakery. Upstairs will have a vending area.
• The only vacant apt in Muir Height is being renovated. We will renovate all of them as soon as they become vacant. But the apts are much in demand.
• We are in process of wiring Regents Row now.
• 6,000 invitations have been sent to El Paso high school seniors to recruit for Western.
• Multicultural Affairs has events for Women's History month and Native American month planned.
• Faye Vowell is reviewing promotion and tenure portfolios.
• Duane Elms was at the CHEKS meeting last week.
• CHEKS is offering video only pricing for CHEKS net that might help us in TorC.
• Next fall's conference will be on Oct 6, 7, 8 in Las Cruces; in 2006 WNMU will host the conference.
• CHEKS is starting to look at a K-20 mission instead of only a higher ed mission. Duane Elms is on the group created to examine the mission.
• Cognos has been adopted by NMSU as its standard software for doing reports out of Banner; we are also looking at a standard adoption.
• The schools in the state are looking at equipment replacement cycles.
• Clovis Community College is the only school in the state involved in an Acacia suit in regard to streaming video.
• Universities are looking at a deal with Banner on some additional modules; this should hopefully get us discounts.
• Next CHEKS meeting is in July in Las Vegas, NM.
• NM Tech (Bob Tacker) has given us a voice mail system; this will only be for people who want it. If you would like to have one of the 300 mailboxes, contact IT.
• Duane Elms will explore whether participating in the NM Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge is a good idea for us.
• Kudos to Jason Collet and Rick O'Ryan for addressing a problem in Juan Chacon in 1 hour that a couple of years ago took 2 days to resolve.
• Banner Web for Admissions is up.
• IT Strategic Planning meetings are proceeding.
• The training task force is meeting.
• A meeting has been set up review all the issues with residence hall computing.
• Tony Macias and Jerry Harmon met with administrators from the Technical Institute in Casas Grandes. They would like to partner with us. Tony Macias will travel to Casas Grandes to look at their offerings.
• Carry over monies for Carl Perkins will be dealt with this week.
• The governor has established an office to work with federal block grants like ABE and Welfare to Work. The community colleges have a proposal on the table to get most of the money. WNMU needs to be a player in these fields. Tony Macias needs to participate in these discussions. Frank Renz is the contact for the community college group. Tony Macias will get Dr. Counts and Donna Rees a copy of the proposal from the community colleges. He will also get the amount of dues to be a part of the community college association.
• The spring CHE census date report has been distributed on campus.
• We had a good pre-visit meeting with the state and national NCATE team chairs last week.
• Our first budget discussion will be on April 5 from 9:00 to noon.
• The new capital project request has to be at CHE by June 15.