President Dick Jay called the meeting to order promptly at 12:26, with the ring of the bell and welcomed everyone to today’s meeting. 

 

 

Greeters: Carley Applegate and Brett Johnson were our greeters today and Carley introduced the members who brought guests:

Our exchange student Francisco DeLeuca introduced himself to us today, he is from Argentina and a city about the size of Casper. He will be doing his Country presentation on December 3.

 

Gary Pehrson led us in singing “Cowboy Joe”

 

Dave Simonson announced that the host father from Italy who hosted his daughter when she went on her exchange was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Please keep him and his family in your thoughts and prayers.

Mike Ward announced that his grandson Dillon plays soccer for LCCC and on Saturday they won the soccer tournament.

 

John Griffith nominated Cori Cosner-Burton for the great fundraiser Saturday night with Dancing With The Stars of Casper. He also nominated Chad Nelson for being one of the dancers.

Cori in turn nominated all of the Rotarians that helped with the fundraiser in all of the different ways.

Larry King nominated Jim Anderson and Bill Mortimer for putting on the great Rotary Pheasant Hunt.

Kevin Murphy nominated Tom Thorson and Dave True for sponsoring Midget Football, Dave True was honored for being the longest running sponsor for 50 years. He thanked everyone who sponsors teams.

Gene Theriault nominated Jim Anderson for retrieving his pheasant for him at the hunt, since the dog wouldn’t do it.

Dave Simonson nominated John and Lauren Griffith for being characters at the masquerade murder Saturday Night.

Bill Schilling nominated Gene Theriault for removing the flatbed trailer back to Guy Dewitt along with Steve Domonkos, Guy Dewitt, and Rob and Monika Ratliff for helping with the watering of the new trees and plants over the summer up at Rotary Park.

 

Leah Reeb Varela and Liz Roth were welcomed as our newest members today.

Richard Schwahn introduced Gary Pehrson to be our auctioneer for today’s auction of items to support the Polio Awareness month. Great job with the auctions this month and thanks to everyone who participated.

 

President Elect John Griffith introduced our speaker today, President of the University of Wyoming, Dr. Laurie Nichols. Dr. Nichols started off by remembering that our club was her first Rotary Club presentation when she first took over her post at UW. She welcomed all of those in the room who are on the board and work with her at UW. She spoke to us about the strategic plan and talked about the annual report for year one of her tenure as President. They started with working through about a $43 million reduction in their budget and they put together their five year strategic plan and called it Breaking Through after the sculpture of the woman on her horse breaking through the wall that is at the gateway to Laramie. In July of 2017 the board of trustees approved the five year strategic plan they put together. They are now working diligently now to put it into action. She presented the plan and said that each college within the University has their own plan that falls beneath this plan for the entire University. She said that we can find all of those plans online if you would like to see them. Goal one is driving excellence which is their goal about teaching and research, this goal says that all that they do they want to do it well. Within these goals there are metrics to measure the performance in each area. She left a booklet with these goals on each table for us to take home and look over if we so desire. She noted that if there is results in red on her PowerPoint that means they did not improve that metric in year one so they now need to double down and focus more on that one for year two and if it is in green they did make progress. The first three metrics were for the research area and they are working harder on those this year to do better. The last three are about the academic programs, they have added 2 new programs and 4 were modified and they are working to modify and add more programs to help the state. One of them they added is already showing success with about 30 students joining that degree program already and it just started eight weeks ago. They also want to increase their International students and students going abroad. They also have several more degrees they are looking at to implement. They have also implemented academic advisors to help the students be better at completing their degrees at UW. They have also launched the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship which is an entity to help us provide Entrepreneurship education for the students but also to help the faculty move their innovations out into the marketplace. Goal Two is called Inspiring Students, which is what the University should be doing and so they have put the most focus on this area. They needed to get the enrollment up and get the University growing again because it had been declining in recent years, they have grown enrollment so that is looking good. They have been focusing on students from the Wind River and increasing numbers of Native American students. Retention is also up and they are working to get retention to over 80%. They are now wanting to get going on a plan for new housing since their housing is 50 years old and in need of new housing for the students as this is a barrier for reaching new students. They are also focusing on 4 year and 6 year graduation rates as they want to reach over 60% on their 6 year rate. They also are focusing on job placement for their graduates when they graduate and are entering the workforce and they especially would like to help place them in Wyoming jobs if possible. They are also trying to recruit strong academic students and so they started an honors college to give them a rigorous and challenging curriculum, much like a private college within the public University. They hired a new recruiter to bring in more and more unique students and they are focusing on retaining students and the pipeline is filling up so future years are looking good. Goal three is Impacting Communities, they are reaching out to communities around the State to help fill the needs for training and programs that will help employers to have trained workers. They are focusing on becoming a Carnegie Community Engagement Classified School or rather like being accredited in the community outreach. They are one of the few of their peer institutions without this accreditation so they feel that they need to pursue this. They also had a stellar increase in sports income and attendance thanks to having Josh Allen on the football team. Goal four is to become a higher performing University, they heard many times that they need to do a better job at running the University, through the processes and the interactions with students. So they put this as one of their goals to focus on being a good employer as well as taking care of the students in a better way. They have built a whole new budget on new software and a new system for finance and they are going live shortly with the HR department on the new system. They are also reviewing all regulations and policies to get them updated and more contemporary so they can do better and perform at a higher level. They were also able to give a raise to the employees which is the first time in years since anyone has had a raise in pay, they want to be competitive and retain good employees. They also just started the new campaign “The world needs more cowboys” which went live a little sooner than expected but it is going well. She invited us to come visit the campus and see everything that is going on there with new facilities that have been built and that are being built. In November they will start construction on a new Science initiative building that will house 35-40 interdisciplinary research labs which will take research to a new level at the University. She added that they are looking at more degree programs for UWCC to better help Casper and the employers here in town. There are also some degree programs that are possibly going to be closed down as they are not doing well.

 

President Dick Jay concluded the meeting at 1:22 letting us know that next week we will be back at the Ramkota. Our speaker will be Jim Epstein who is the district coordinator for the Rotary Foundation.

 

“Be the Inspiration”