'Foundations' director visits Chadron State

Chadron State College was one of 12 institutions in the United States selected last year to participate in Foundations of Excellence in the First College Year, a project jointly sponsored by the Policy Center and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Chadron State Dean of Students Dr. Rex Cogdill, who is chairman of CSC’s Foundations of Excellence task force, said Gardner helped build support for the project and provided answers for questions from committee members.He met with Chadron State faculty, staff, administration, students and community members Monday night and Tuesday.

Gardner, who has experience in various educational endeavors, said he has spent the past 35 years working on one issue: “What are colleges and universities doing to ensure that their new students are going to be successful?”

Since being selected to the national effort last fall, Cogdill said the task force has identified and listed Chadron State programs now in place for first-year students.

“We found that we (Chadron State) are doing a lot more than we think we do, but we also know we can do better,” Cogdill said.

Included is CSC’s many such programs is “Week of Welcome,” which features activities the first week of fall semester each year to help students have fun and become acclimated to college. One of the Week of Welcome activities is Jump Start, a day of sessions designed to be informational and fun for freshmen.

Gardner’s visit already has spurred an effort for the task force to develop a mission statement for its efforts in ensuring first-year student success.

Chadron State faculty and students also are in the process of taking the National Survey of Student Engagement, which is intended to measure student engagement and faculty involvement with students in the first year. The results of that survey will be reported this fall.

“We will be able to look at those results and see if there are areas that we can improve upon and indicate our areas of success,” Cogdill said.

Information will be compiled from all 12 participating colleges and universities to be used by AASCU members as a model for providing students a quality first-year experience. A teleconference to report the project’s findings is planned in December.

Gardner said he visited Chadron State about 25 years ago by the invitation of Walt Scholl, a former CSC English professor who was seeking input for a CSC program for freshmen. He said he jumped on the chance to visit Chadron State again to see how it has progressed.