Weekly Update, May 22

The LBCC Board of Education heard a presentation on the capital facilities improvement package at its May 21 meeting. The board will decide in June whether to ask for voter support of placing a general obligation bond measure on the November 2014 ballot to make the capital improvements to meet community needs and support the economy by expanding student capacity in program areas where there is workforce demand. Projects include instructional and parking capacity improvements at the Benton Center, completion of the final phases of the Advanced Transportation Technology Center in Lebanon, construction of a new Health Occupations Teaching and Learning Center in Lebanon, and major repurposing of career and technical, general instruction and student support services spaces on the Albany campus. 

College Advancement Marketing office has created a program spotlight promotional web site designed to provide support for recruiting efforts in programs that have enrollment capacity. The accounting program is the first program to be spotlighted (http://www.linnbenton.edu/future-students/get-to-know-us/progam-spotlight), with a new program featured monthly as the need arises. This new support effort will be evaluated through tracking page visits using web analytics and tracking the number of inquiries to the contact person listed on the page.

Three LBCC students will be attending a NASA Rocket conference in Florida this June. Hazel Betz, Ariel Stroh and Ashley Trout will spend a week at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast, June 21-26, at a RockOn workshop where they will build and launch (sub-orbital) a microcontroller-based instrumentation on a NASA rocket. Parker Swanson, computer science instructor, will accompany the team as "mentor." All expenses are paid by NASA's educational outreach program through the Oregon Space Grant Consortium (OSGC), of which LBCC is an affiliated higher-ed institution. Ashley graduates in June with her AAS in Mechatronics. Hazel is working on a physics degree, and Ariel is working on an industrial manufacturing and engineering degree.