LOCH SHELDRAKE – Ahead of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools visiting SUNY Sullivan this past Monday, the SUNY Sullivan Board of Trustees heard an update on their Middle States report at their latest meeting on Thursday, September 19. 

Tammy Porter, Associate Dean of Assessment & Instruction at the college provided a report on Middle States Standard V, Educational Effectiveness Assessment, while Trustee and Vice President for Administrative Service, Sean Welsh, provided an update on Middle States Standard VI - Planning, Resources and Institutional Improvement Standard. 

Porter said that this is the 14th edition of the Middle States report and that they are doing the monitoring report and program assessment for that edition. She said that in the 13th edition, five of the seven standards were met while Standard V and Standard VI did not do well. 

One of the things that Porter said they didn’t do well on for Standard V was a lack of documentation of curriculum maps at the degree and program levels.

“I have since led every faculty area to do whatever it took to get a curriculum map for every single program,” Porter said. “In the Middle States report, there is a document scan of every single curriculum map on top of each other, so they have them all. So that is a huge accomplishment and I am pretty proud of that.”

The second thing that Porter talked about was the documentation of an implemented systematic and sustained process. 

“I believe when they come on Monday, that’s what they’re really going to be looking for,” she said. “Yes we did the program reviews, but do we have the systematic and can we sustain it. I believe that I have proof through our five programs that are going to get reviewed this year, that I have all the documents ready to go and it will happen.”

Porter said that there is also a scan of all five programs with all the documents ready for review.

“I’m hoping that they have already looked at that and they’re going to come in and say [we did] a great job and we’ve got it all,” she stated. 

Porter mentioned that data on the student completion of educational goals was a little tricky. 

“It’s the desegregated data that we’re trying to do this time with the 14th edition and we tried to tie our data to our Brightspace classes [SUNY Sullivan’s online learning management system],” she said, “so we could just push a couple of buttons and it would spit the data out. That did not work, so we were scrambling a bit at the end right before our assessment day.”

Porter said that they scrapped the idea of running the data with Brightspace and calculated the data themselves but also said that they could eventually get it tied together.

“That’s going to have to be figured out and we will do that,” she said. “But we do have data and it’s all in the monitoring report.”

Porter noted that they are in year two of the current assessment schedule, which includes their academic programs whose program reviews are ready to go. They also have their nonprogram reviews which include admissions, financial aid, the learning center, buildings and grounds and the EMT program. 

“I’m pretty confident that they’re going to like what we’ve done,” she concluded. “We have to show that we’re going to keep it going. That’s the sustainability part.”

Welsh talked about three main priorities for Standard VI that they need to focus on and talked about the college’s five-year strategic plan which can be found on their website at https://sunysullivan.edu/strategic-planning.

The three main priorities for them right now are student enrollment success, financial stability and analysis and academic success, specifically in nursing. 

“Just thinking in the sense of where we’re getting information from to make up this through 2023 to 2028,” said Welsh, “we have the human resources five-year plan, the academic master plan, workforce information locally in the region, our county needs data that we scraped together, SUNY data that we can cherrypick, union data, transfer opportunities, our facility management plan, our technology plan and enrollment management plan. They all flow into a long-range five-year kind of approach and then we come up with the strategic plan, which we will be looking at as we go forward and adjusting it as needed.”

Welsh talked about the Department of Annual Planning and Institutional Improvement Form (DAPII), which within it they asked the different units to look at priority areas to meet the three goals mentioned. 

“We are really kind of trying to open the door for that unit to come up with some metrics and outcomes that could be translated to budget requests,” Welsh said. “Requests that are supported by data and evidence. So we want to make that under measurable things that we can realistically achieve.”

Welsh said that they also have a three-year budget worksheet in which they are looking forward and having horizon expectations that they can start to build on and plan more effectively with. He noted that they ask the departments to fill out the worksheet with a wishlist of needs. 

“We ask folks to submit one of these [worksheets] and they deal with capital, staffing, equipment and so forth,” said Welsh.