Issue #
WHCCD Risk Management Committee:
1) The WHCCD Risk Management Committee met with consultant Ken Lake on January 24th for the kick-off meeting for preparation of the district and college’s Emergency Response Plan. Mr. Lake outlined what is involved in the preparation of plan documentation and preparation for a Multiple Casualty Incident event (MCI) we are planning at each college site in late September or early October. The district is required by both the Federal Office of Homeland Security (OHS) and State of California Office of Emergency Services (OES) to have an emergency response plan that is NIMS (National Incident Management System) and SIMS (State Incident Management System) compliant.
Mr. Lake will be conducting staff training sessions at both colleges for staff identified to be part of the Incident Command System Team (ICS). The ICS is made up of eight positions and each position needs at a minimum two to three people trained to account for absenteeism.
While Mr. Lake is meeting with and training the college ICS staff, the district’s Risk Management Committee members will take on a new role as the Drill Planning Committee. The Drill Planning Committee will work directly with Mr. Lake and each college campus emergency first responders in preparing the actual MCI to be held at each college campus. The MCI event will include a cast of students, staff and perhaps community members who will provide a realistic emergency scenario for the college’s ICS teams.
2) Recently Lemoore’s maintenance & operations staff participated in a safety training session called Lockout/Tagout “Lighting in a Bottle” presented by Vince Montoya, director of M & O Lemoore. They were the latest department to use the WHCCD Risk Management Committee library of safety training video-DVD’s. In 05-06 the WHCCD Risk Management Committee established a Safety Training DVD-Video library as part of the district’s continuing effort to have safety training readily available for our staff. The safety training library now includes topics such as:
- Bloodborne Pathogens “Know the Risk”
- Lab Safety “Under the Hood”
- First Aid for Schools
- Playground Safety “Supervising our Children”
- Handwashing for Schools
- MSDS “Read it before you need it”
- Stormwater Run Off
- Powered Hand Tool Safety “Handle with Care”
- Softball & Baseball Field Maintenance & Safety
- Safety Made Simple “Women’s Safety Awareness”
- Defensive Driving “15-Passenger Vans”
- Heat Stress “Don’t Lose your Cool”
- Food Service “Keeping it Clean”
- Groundskeeping “Be a Pro”
- Slips, Trips & Falls “Taking the Right Steps”
- Lockout/Tagout “Lightning in a Bottle”
All of the safety training videos and DVD’s have a training booklet and most have a short quiz available for participants to take at the end of each training session. They are available for check out through Anne Jorgens. Please email her your request and she will send the video-DVD, booklet and quiz out to you right away.
Coalinga CDC finally got their second infant room open and can now accommodate 21 infants. This was a much needed addition for the Coalinga CDC as the waiting list for the infant program is quite large. We also rubberized the infant and toddler play yards. This has prevented many injuries as our babies are pulling up and learning to walk.
We have remodeled the playgrounds in San Joaquin including rubberization of the Infant and Early Pre-K play areas and a garden area in the Pre-K yard.
With the passing of AB172, the state made the commitment to increase the availability of preschool for all 4-year old children living in an area with a Performance Improvement school. Most of our programs are located in Performance Improvement school areas. This gives us the opportunity to receive additional funding and to offer literacy activities to our families. We are looking forward to this wonderful opportunity as this will also increase our parent involvement.
State Chancellor Mark Drummond visited West Hills College Coalinga and the district office on Tuesday, Feb. 27th. A self-described "farm boy" who raises and trains mules, Chancellor Drummond was most impressed with our Farm of the Future operation noting that it's the most progressive ag program in any of California's community colleges.
Accompanying Chancellor Drummond were Scott Lay, president and CEO of the Community College League of California, which is primarily a trustee organization, and Ian Walton, president of the Academic Senate of California Community Colleges. In addition to touring the farm, they held a forum on the campus and attended a board of trustees meeting.
Their visit was featured on the front page of the Coalinga Record.
Darlene has announced registration dates for 2007-2008. They are:
Summer 2007 (5/29/07 - 08/08/2007)
Priority Registration 4/23/07 - 4/27/07
Open Registration 04/28/07 -Section 2nd Class meeting
Fall 2007 (08/13/07 - 12/14/07)
Priority Registration 04/23/07 - 04/27/07
Open Registration 04/28/07 - 08/19/07
Registration with Insructor Permission 08/20/07 - 08/26/07
Spring 2008 (1/14/08 - 5/23/08)
Priority Registration 10/22/07 - 10/26/07
Open Registration 10/27/07 - 1/20/08
Registration with Instructor Permission 1/21/08 - 1/27/08
Dr. Rathbun has announced his retirement effective at the end of the year. Dr. Gornick has commented that there are two people responsible for the Farm of the Future—Dorothy Allen, who donated the land, and Dr. Rathbun, who had the vision. Some shoes are impossible to fill. Larry’s are among them.
January’s Topcon newsletter has an article and photos of the ag training class at WHCC, and an article about the WHCC Field Day here at Topcon. http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/questex/topcon0107/ will get you to the article online.
Precision Ag students staffed a booth at the farm show in Tulare in February and more than 300 students visiting the show stopped by and expressed an interest in our program.
Students from Westminster High, Edison High (Long Beach) and Antelope Valley High have visited our farm recently.
Our students will be attending the State FFA convention in Fresno April 16th.
Students are pictured in a recent visit to Topcon’s facilities in Livermore.
It is that time of year again. The Financial Aid offices on both campuses are out at the high schools working with seniors to assist them with filling out the FAFSA. We are once again able to offer the chance for a $1,000 Cash for College scholarship to any senior who attends a FAFSA workshop.
The Financial Aid office is fully staffed. We just hired a full-time employee at NDC. Her name is Rebecca Bumpous and she is catching on to the regulations very quickly. Please join me in welcoming her to our financial aid team.
Golf Tournament Monday May 21st Kings Country Club
Annual audit of the Foundation now happening
Calendar of events for upcoming bus trips:
Jersey Boys theatre production in LA
Menopause production in San Francisco
Shopping LA Fashion District
Hearst Castle
Beach Blanket Babylon production SF
Reagan Library
Central Coast to see elephant seals and visit San Luis Farmers' Market
Getty Museum
Wine tour
SF Golden Gate Park-Japanese Garden, Botanical Garden
Sonora day trip
Las Vegas overnight trip
Shopping LA The Grove
Museum of Tolerance
Fall dinner and speaker for 75th Anniversary being planned
The last few months have brought grant rewards which include a $1.9 million dollar grant from the Department of Labor to assist six educational agencies and several Workforce Investment Boards in providing vocational training for Central California residents.
In a frenzy of activity, as usual, our schedule of grant application deadlines calls for a submission deadline every week or every other week, so smile and bring chocolate!
We want to thank our excellent grant collaborators for their input and assistance in writing the Teacher Preparation Grants for the California Chancellor’s Office. Thank you, Mr. David Reynolds, Mr. James Preston and Mr. Joel Ruble. As always our faithful assistant, Anna Silvestre, comes to the rescue in budgets.
Our office moved in February as Carole Goldsmith enthusiastically welcomed her new assistant, Penny Wilson. Many thanks go to Kathy Watts and Delia Padilla for trading office space with us to accommodate our growth.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT IS ILLEGAL
Per state code, all regular district employees are required to participate in
sexual harassment prevention training, available on-line. This ANNUAL training
provision is documented and monitored and the completion record is included in
individual training records. The training is very informative, interactive, and
fun. And the quiz at the end is challenging. You must score 93% or better, but
you may take the test more than once.
You can find the program and the test at the following website.
The change of daylight savings time this year has provided quite a challenge to the technology world. Companies have been scrambling to provide patches to update software and systems. We have installed all patches we have received. There are probably some unexpected issues that will arise after the time change of March 11. We will be standing by ready to address those issues.
And just a reminder:
Because of the daylight savings changes this year, the appointments in your
calendar that occur during the new extended weeks of daylight savings time may be off by an hour. We have applied the patches issued by Microsoft, but they did not fix all the issues with our Outlook calendars. Please check all your appointments which fall within the dates listed below. You will have to adjust them manually back to the appropriate time if they have been changed.
March 11, 2007 and April 1, 2007
October 28, 2007 and November 4, 2007
Some technical tidbits
SAN/blade server project – courtesy of Tony Garcia
It has indeed been an exciting time in the ITS department. We have taken our network from a windows 2000 domain to a 2003 domain. We moved most of our existing servers from 2000 to server 2003.
The domain upgrade was in part due to the upgrade of our corporate mail system to server 2003 and exchange 2003. We then got rid of our entire aging server infrastructure and consolidated the 40 or more servers and at least twice as many applications onto 23 virtualized servers on basically just 3 HP Blades!
In the process we transferred several terra bytes of information to our new Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) system (SAN) which currently has 3.8 Terabytes out of 5 Terabytes of disk space allocated for our servers, disaster recovery and backup strategies. We also adopted entirely new backup and disaster recovery strategies that include OVSM offsite data/server replication, virtual server clones, EVA disk snap clones and Data protector file and system backups.
Shortly after implementing our new virtualized infrastructure, Vmware esx 2.5 server, we had to upgrade to version esx 3.01 to fully utilize our cutting edge technology. This helped facilitate the decision to virtualize both Datatel and Black Board.
Also with esx 3’s new file system, we will have the capability to move several Terabytes of information on the fly with little to no down time. We are currently working on setting this process up.
Looking back, had someone told us that they expected us to do all this without melting down our entire infrastructure or our brains, I would have thought it impossible.
Datatel server change project –courtesy of John Wright
This Datatel porting project has been a very consuming effort for all of us. As far as I know, we are the first Datatel client to have converted to a “virtual” environment. We are already getting calls from other Datatel institutions asking questions about our experience. The bleeding edge is an interesting place to be from!
Porting by the numbers:
Port from a:
HP 9000 N class server running HP-UX 11.0 to a:
HP VL45 Virtual Server running Windows 2003 Enterprise Service Pack 1
In building the system we have three main software components, Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, IBM-Unidata database and the Datatel product.
Looking at JUST the Datatel product-
The port process caused us to:
Install the 2001 version (Release 17) of the Datatel product, and then we had to apply over 1,600 patches (five years worth) to the product.
Transfer 15.1 GB of stuff from one system to another
(219,145 files, 2,822 folders)
Of the over 15 GB of stuff
5.76 GB belong to Datatel applications
(173,493 files, 2,147 folders)
9.34 GB belong to our data environment
(45,652 files and 675 folders)
Our main PERSON file has over 120,000 entries.
We built 278 staff user accounts.
Created over 60 printer records and over 180 different printer personalities.
Given all of the above elements that go into making this application work here at WHCCD, it is a small miracle that we had only the minor issues we have fixed within two weeks.
Other ITS information
December and January were very busy months for ITS. We have successfully virtualized and moved all of our servers over to the new blade servers on the SAN. The next step of the process is to start configuring our recovery and fail-over features. We also migrated our Datatel system from the old HP Unix server to a Windows 2003 virtual server on the SAN. This will allow recovery and redundancy features we did not have before. The Datatel processes now run significantly faster. Click on the attached file to read more in-depth technical information about these two projects.
You have probably noticed that SPAM is dramatically on the rise again. I’m sure you have read about the latest epidemic. Our Barracuda spam filter currently has an extra 60-80K more spam messages hitting the box every day. During the month of Dec our exchange server received an average of 160K total mail message per day of which 140K per day were spam. January had a peak of 260K total emails on the 17th, 200K were Spam.
West Hills was represented at the 2007 Symposium for the College Council for Military Education (CCME).
Wouldn’t it be exciting to be more involved serving the educational needs of our military and their families? That’s what Susan Kincade thought when she headed to the symposium January 23rd through 25th. She began attending sessions first thing Tuesday morning bright-eyed and eager to be involved. Imagine her surprise to see the following on the PowerPoint’s:
PSD Issues for AF Vol Ed
Visit CoP for Vol Ed Centralization Projects
from OSD level down
Mil TA
O&M base-level for DTY & Training
Susan says, "I had no idea what they were talking about. And I thought education had a lot of abbreviations; the military has us beat!
"Susie Briones and Jan Young did a great job manning a college booth with terrific handouts for participants. We were a gold sponsor, and mentioned in print and over the microphone on several occasions.
"I attended sessions for three days solid, met many college and military representatives, and learned a lot (especially what all those initials stood for). It looks like we’ll be able to do a lot more for our military folks."
Congratulations to Tom Benedict on celebrating his 20th anniversary as a West Hills’ employee. Tom joined us on Jan. 31, 1987, when Ronald Reagan was President and the Dow Jones average topped 2,000 for the first time.
While those were exciting time in the world, these are exciting times in the Marketing Department. We launched a new television campaign right after the first of the year and are hearing lots of positive comments on the spots. We wanted something that stood out in the market since there are lots of spots running for the private vocational schools and in my mind, they all look the same.
Our spots feature Ernie G, a Los Angeles area comedian, who is popular on both the English and Spanish-language circuits. Ernie is a strong advocate for education and is anxious to come to the Central Valley and visit with students and potential students here. If you haven’t seen the commercials, you can take a look at them on our advertising_campaign page.
We’re also using Ernie in new radio spots and we did an e-Blast to a list of 4,000 former West Hills’ applicants and students. Ernie will be visiting our district March 27-29 to speak to a student leadership group in Lemoore and do performances in Coalinga and at NDC. Watch for details.
Even more exciting that our new television campaign are the results we’re getting from advertising on MySpace, the social networking site so popular with teenagers and young adults, and with banner ads on the Internet. We ran a six-week campaign starting in late August and the visits to our website went up from just over 150,000 to 200,000 in about a month. Pedro and Suzy constructed a campaign landing page for the MySpace ad that had 11,225 visits—including 1,177 to our application for admission page!
Last, and certainly not least, all who live in our service territory should have received a Dialogue in the mail at home in early January. We did two versions—one for Kings County and the other for the west side communities. The Lemoore class schedule was in one and a Coalinga/NDC class schedule was in the other. Both versions listed all online classes. They were mailed to about 80,000 homes in our region.
What’s next? We’re looking at uploading our videos to YouTube and exploring text messaging opportunities for communicating with our students by cell phone.
On a personal note, thanks to all my friends for their support and kind words of condolence on the loss of my brother in December. He was a quadriplegic for 43 years and yet earned a Ph.D. and became a clinical psychologist. There were a couple of wonderful articles done in The Fresno Bee and The Bakersfield Californian about his life. Here’s a link to the Bakersfield article written by my friend, Dianne Hardisty: http://www.bakersfield.com/166/story/95524.html
Pedro is working with the staff of West Hills College Lemoore as they prepare for their mid-term accredition report. He is also busy working to update the strategic plan goals.
Suzy is working on a redesign of the college home pages that will make them more student friendly. You may have noticed that she has also done a redesign of the template for this newsletter so it will be more Frances friendly. We're hoping it will streamline the process. Please let us know what you think.
West Hills has been very involved in several regional partnership initiatives – from the California Central Valley Partnership, Regional Jobs Initiative, San Joaquin Valley Nursing and Allied Health Education Consortium, and multiple local partnerships with business, industry and other community colleges.
The big news is that a $2 million Department of Labor grant has been awarded to West Hills Community College District along with four Workforce Investment Boards and five other community colleges. We know that the Central Valley has experienced a shift in the food processing, manufacturing and logistics community from labor intensive, manual processes to high tech automated systems. Employers are telling us that the existing workforce does not have the skill sets to support transition of industry to new technology. This grant will allow us and our partners to train over 1,000 workers for 80 different sectors of manufacturing and logistics over a three year period. West Hills College Coalinga will begin warehousing and West Hills College Lemoore will begin pre-industrial mechanics.
In Coalinga, our current U.S. Department of Labor grant is exceeding all enrollment and employment goals. It has allowed us to expand our training offerings to include security officer, welding and custodial. To date the project has exceeded enrollment goals by 17 percent and completion rates by 149 percent. Through this grant we have been able to provide additional assistance to several corrections, heavy equipment and agriculture students. Kudos to Leonard Bass and the crew at the Coalinga One Stop for assisting our students in their job search!
At WHC Lemoore, the other federal grant made possible by Senator Feinstein and Senator Boxer has allowed WHCL to expand its allied health offerings by offering EKG technician and sterile processing technician. These funds have allowed us to expand our partnership with Fresno City College to offer another cohort of LVN-to-RN students. Kudos to Marleen Smart for again providing excellence instruction to the West Hills LVN-to-RN student cohort – which had some of the highest GPAs in the group!
Update—WHCL has recently been awarded a new EDD grant to fund the upcoming nursing programs. The $600,000 over two years will help with costs of instruction, as well as providing additional services to nursing students.
Penny Wilson has joined the Workforce staff as assistant to Carole.
We welcome her to West Hills.