Author: cnepstad

Today, I had the honor of being awarded the “Distinguished Full-Time Faculty of 2015-2016” award. Below is my speech:

Thank you very much for this honor.

I’d like to dedicate this award to my colleagues in the Applied Science department.

I have been fortunate to work on many interesting and important projects over the years and any good work that I have done at HWC in terms of Assessment or accreditation work, any good work that I have done with students – it is all because of the solid foundation I have had based on relationships with colleagues within my department. They have taught me well and this is what I’ve learned: it’s all about the daily interactions with others – that’s what matters most.

Dr. Sammie Dortch designed this department to be interconnected. She challenged all of the instructors to think about how our fields fit together and how we can work together to serve the students. And, that’s what we do best.

Dr. Heathfield, is an internationally recognized practitioner and published author in the field of Youth Work and what I have learned from Michael is that whenever I’m stuck on something it’s always best bring it back to asking the question, “how will this help our students”?

Professor Nix, is a lawyer and Criminal Justice Professor and what I have learned from Brian is how to be patient but also firm with students to help them to be successful.

Professor Ealey, is an Addictions Studies professor. I have literally been sitting next to Anthony for thirteen years. What I have learned from him is that the details matter and that students learn a lot from focusing on specific skills in addition to the big ideas. I’ve also learned how to be helpful. In 13 years whenever I’ve asked for help on something Anthony has always been there to help until the problem is solved.

The adjunct faculty of our department are all leaders in the profession, and what I’ve learned from them is the importance of giving back to the field because if we teach our students well, they will serve the young children and families of Chicago well.

Professor Eason-Montgomery, is professor of Criminal Justice and also Child Development, and what I have learned from Ellen is how to do everything with loving kindness; everything.

Professor Jones is a Child Development professor and what I’ve learned from Janvier is how to stay eternally curious about the teaching and learning process. I’ve learned how to be deeply reflective about pedagogy and how to laugh, a lot. And eat chocolate. I’ve learned a lot about the powers of chocolate.

Professor Asimow is a Child Development professor and longtime coordinator of the program and what I’ve learned from Jen is – basically, everything I know! She has been my mentor since the moment I was hired and I have learned from her every single day. There are too many things to list here, but overall she has taught me to be diligent – to keep pushing myself to learn more in order to be of service to our students and to the community. The greatest compliment I receive is when people confuse me for Jen.

All of this work has been anchored by a calm presence in the Applied Science office that was established for many years by then Department Secretary Latonya Henley who continues to be a massive support to our department even after being promoted, and that has been carried over by our current Department Secretary Sherri Hayden. The Secretary is the first person students often meet in the department and the quality of their interactions with students and with faculty is like the social and emotional glue that holds everything together!

These people in this department have influenced my life and the lives of so many students. It’s impossible to measure, but if I try to understand how this has worked over the years I have to say that it has to do with all of those everyday interactions – the many small moments between people. Put together, this is what makes a life.

So, thank you Applied Science Department for enriching my life and for providing a trusting, welcoming space, which has allowed us to do our best for students.

In the end, that is what matters most.

Posted on behalf of Michael Heathfield

I couldn’t help but throw my hat into the ring, so to speak.  Who could have imagined that Soviet-style management would come back into fashion?  Deeds of dismissal continue to increase at an alarming rate as those who sit at the elite table are pulled even closer to the flame and given a big pay raise to help ease the discomfort they must surely feel at the parade of disastrous decisions from leadership.  As most of us know, the mortgage will not pay itself and metaphors don’t mix themselves.

Administrators must tread with care to negotiate the daily offerings from Campus Zero giving you the opportunity to thrive, survive or take the dive. As with many empires, the leadership is immune from a more ordinary sense of awareness. This may explain why in our most recent CCC budget District simply calls itself a campus. Of course, it is the most expensive campus of all – serving no students. Campus Zero.

The deeds of dismissal are varied and frequent and I sense that impetus for change will not come from within the politburo. I will begin by sharing at the personal and move outward from there. I have learned that leading with a poignant personal story is a good way to serve up dumb decisions.

I have been full-time faculty since 2006 and for eight solid years my paystub has noted that I work in the Foreign Languages department.  Now I know I am English, and that for my first few years in the U.S. I was officially an alien, but I have never taught a foreign language in my life. Thank goodness, especially since sometime ago we realized the inherent racism of “foreign” languages.  But not to worry about petty labels, all is good. Since fall 2014, I apparently work in the Social Services Department.  Now, I have very briefly worked in that department, but only when someone from Campus Zero decided to rename the Applied Science Department.  I guess a wiser head pointed out that Child Development, Criminal Justice and Mental Health did not fit under a social service label. Thank goodness for wiser heads.  Of course, no one in the department was involved in this temporary decision. I suppose it is a moot point, since the whole department will be gone in a year from now, so why fuss about labels?

But surely our students don’t suffer with these petty dysfunctions? You all know the answer. Every spring semester I have to sign waivers for youth work students to graduate from their program without a mythical second Mental Health course.  The course in question, is not now, nor has never been, part of the youth work degree program.  Someone at Campus Zero must have slipped it in there and no one has ever managed to get it back out again.  Believe me, many have tried. So every spring I spend my time subduing the panic that ensues when students are miss-advised they are short a course for graduation. So when the youth work and social work programs close at HWC at the end of this semester, Campus Zero will have found a solution to this persistent lack of care for our students.

If you have ever been brave enough to take a program change through the PAC process you may not be surprised to know that Campus Zero has no policy or procedure for ensuring approved changes actually get registered in any of their systems that face students or advisors.  Catalogues, degree program advising materials, and completion databases exist in a parallel universe that are very resistant to change and are fundamentally disconnected from the academic approval process up to and after ICCB approval.  These information accuracy concerns have consistently been presented to senior leadership.  Sometimes at Campus Zero the lights are on but no one is home.

Desperate empires always seek to control their message, which I guess is why not one student in the social work or youth work programs has been officially told that at the end of this semester their programs are closed.  Not “consolidated” but closed. Maybe at this specific time in Chicago, the Mayor doesn’t care for noise about small social work and youth work programs.  Nor does he appear to care about a Campus Zero citywide map of programs that will shortly say to Chicago taxpayers that for Child Development or Teaching you must go far north. While if you are interested in Social Work or Addictions Studies, you must go far south.  This is Campus Zero’s vision of “One Chicago”.  Oh, wait that’s NBC’s branding phrase for all the Chicago-based TV offerings where Rahm can play a Mayor opening things.

If you are interested in a vocation, contributing to Chicago communities through care or service to others, go elsewhere.  Dismissed.  If you need to be a part-time student, dismissed.  If you are an international student, dismissed. If you are a student who has no interest in dodgy workforce data projections about jobs available for community college graduates in ten years time, dismissed.

Perhaps, I write with the privilege of being old enough to see the exit sign. My own lovely gulag beckons. Now whether I make it through the door by my own volition or whether someone helps me through it, who knows!  But that’s what happens when your hat is in the ring.

Mike Heathfield

Written by Michael Heathfield

Only a fool would look to the future without serious regard for the past.  So while I look forward to my reinvented future at HWC, it is impossible to not look back. Especially as I am teaching courses this semester I will not teach again as social work and youth work programs close at HWC in the spring.  I work hard in my classes to get students to make diverse connections and pull past narratives into their futures. We public educators don’t have to reach too far back for narratives to be informative.

The stories of two women keep resonating in my head and my heart is continuously trying to learn from both. The first is Mary Parker-Follet (1868-1933) who was very much an innovator and management guru way ahead of her time.  Indeed, many of today’s famous male stars of management theory owe a debt to the writing, theories and principles originating from Parker-Follet.  Peter Drucker acknowledged her important contributions to business administration that is ethical and grounded in the human interactions and connections that bind us together.

She was a social worker who studied at Radcliffe and spent a year at Cambridge University. She established community centers in Boston and wrote about how important community interactions and relationships were for success.  She was an innovator in establishing group work as an important method for social change. In her 1924 essay “Power” she differentiated between coercive power and coactive power.  Power “over” was very clearly about control, manipulation and setting up win/lose dynamics.  Power “with” provided mutual growth and opportunities that would now be framed as win/win. She was very clear which kind of power contributed to community and democracy. One of my favorite quotes from her body of work is, “life and education must never be separated”.  Democracy was about something we do together.

She was an early advocate for opening up schools as community resources, extending them from their traditional schooling roles and functions in the communities that they serve.  She was a very early advocate of youth work and of conflict resolution strategies in which all parties could participate in negotiated settlements in which “reframing” the dispute was the means to helping all parties move forward to successful outcomes.  She also wrote persuasively about what we now call “life-long learning” and how the world of work should always be connected to learning.

The second woman was more recently lauded as an education innovator and looked upon by politicians, from both parties, as someone who would be a game changer for public education.  Her name is Michelle Rhee, who for a very brief time (2007-2010) was the Chancellor of the D.C. public school system.  She was a bold political choice who was proud of her lack of experience in any public education system and she rapidly surrounded herself with friends and colleagues who also lacked both experience and expertise in public education.  Her oft-repeated mantra was that she was driven solely by the vital needs of D.C. school children.  She was appointed because of her connections to clout-heavy politicians and billionaires. She got to sit on Oprah’s couch.

Her one driving goal, above all else, was to lift up the test scores of D.C. school children.  In her very short tenure she created a culture of fear and retribution within both schools and their administration.  She presented a public persona unafraid of taking difficult decisions. One of the most demeaning examples of this was the firing of a public school principal in front of television cameras.

She received inordinate levels of publicity as the new face of school reform but abruptly left D.C. public schools surrounded by evidence of test score cheating on a systemic scale.  She continued her education reform goals through leading her own advocacy organization “StudentsFirst” which was publically committed to raising a billion dollars to support the election of political candidates equally committed to the kind of reforms she espoused.

StudentsFirst high profile tool is the “State Policy Score Card” that judges a state’s progress made against the group’s education reform goals.  The reality of StudentsFirst is that it has repeatedly missed its funding targets and has begun withdrawing paid staff from a number of states.  It has distributed a mere $5.3 million to political campaigns and has significantly underperformed on its own targets.  Rhee, a declared Democrat, has now stepped down from leading this organization too. She has recently been appointed to the board of Scotts Miracle Grow Company and has dedicated herself to supporting her husband’s career and her own children.

A belief in the central role of teachers in the education process was the hallmark of one of these memorable women.  The other clearly identified them as the enemy to be dismissed and disrespected at every opportunity.  I hope our ever-growing business and management students get to study both women and think critically about their contributions to education, management and leadership.

Please see the statement below which was presented to the Board by Benita Hunter:

Dear Board of Trustees

My name is Benita Hunter. I am a former Director of the Malcolm X College Child Care Center, full-time Faculty at Kennedy-King College, former Dean of Career Programs at Daley College,

and currently, Assistant Professor of Child Development, at Richard J. Daley College.

More important than all these titles, is the fact that my career path in education began as a Child Development AAS graduate from Malcolm X College; therefore, I am ideally qualified to address the proposed consolidation of the Child Development Program to a single college location.

I am here to speak on behalf of the future and current students not only enrolled at Daley College, but for the five other nationally accredited sister colleges, and over one hundred child care facilities and schools that provide teacher practice, internships and full-time jobs to our graduates.
For years, students have had the opportunity to earn a degree and provide quality instruction and care to children and their families, who reside in their own communities. Their own children attend school in the community and they do it in blighted neighborhoods that desperately need the conscientious care, knowledgeable instruction, and insight of this community – bound workforce of child development educators.

When students enroll in courses at each of the south and south west side campuses, it is because they welcome and embrace the core concept of the community college mission – – that they can receive an affordable, quality education and career in their own communities! 

Effectively, Fall 2016 there will be; NO Child Development Programs offered by CCC on the South and South west sides of Chicago or in the

Black and Brown communities!
Are we now telling them that their communities are no longer capable of providing them with a quality education? That in order to receive an education in child development, they will have to travel across town to an area in which they are unfamiliar, have no stake or investment, and will take several hours to commute? Alternatively, that the most crucial components of early childhood practice, which are direct instruction, program management are to be relegated to a distant-learning, and impersonal on-line coursework process?

If we take away the Child Development Programs from the colleges on the south and south west sides of the city, then we are not only doing our students a grave disservice and injustice, but our communities as well! These are the locations wherein our students and the area stakeholders require our most comprehensive services, monetary expenditures, and humane considerations – – not the least. We are dealing with human capital, not impersonal data, dollars, and cents.

Please rethink this collaboration and consider the adverse effect such a thoughtless decision will have… on our students, young children and their families, the community stakeholders

And the colleges.

Thank you for your consideration

Benita Hunter

The following speech was presented by Carrie Nepstad as a public statement to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees during the August 2015 Board meeting:

Good morning. I am Carrie Nepstad, Associate Professor of Child Development at Harold Washington College. This is my 13th and, as I understand it, my final year serving that institution. According to a recent announcement from City Colleges’ upper Administration, of the six Colleges that offer degrees in Child Development, five of the programs will be shut down, and all will be consolidated to the far north side campus of Truman College.

I disagree with this decision for two reasons:

1) it limits equitable access to high quality educational programs in Child Development for Chicago citizens on the south and west sides; communities that have been traditionally underserved.

2) it was made without input from the faculty who are the content experts in the discipline as well as in the field.

As a consequence of these closures, the commute for south and west side students is too long and adds undue burden to an already taxed student body. The CCC shuttle/busing program as well as the CTA are an inadequate solution to this problem. Expecting that students will be willing or even able to do this commute on a regular basis, demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the time it actually takes to travel across the city. It also shows a lack of empathy for real people who are trying to improve their professional and academic lives. This additional burden on students will negatively impact completion rates, but it will also negatively impact enrollment as students will either go elsewhere, or they will give up.

This decision represents a departure from the definition of a community college as community based. Students choose community college programs based on proximity to their homes and jobs. We will lose south and west side students to our competitors. In addition, we will also lose partnerships with four-year institutions that have been working with Child Development faculty to develop pathways from Associate to Baccalaureate degrees; partnerships funded through Race to the Top dollars and based on geographical locations between West and South side CCC campuses and four-year institutions nearby.

The Board may not be aware that on several occasions the Child Development faculty team has requested information regarding the C2C plan for Child Development programs. In addition to requesting information, the team has offered to provide administration with relevant content expertise, but these offers were not accepted.

Instead, we were invited to a meeting with less than 24 hours notice, during the summer, where we were given 15 minutes to listen to the announcement that 5 nationally recognized programs are closing. We were told explicitly that upper administration would not answer questions regarding the rationale for this decision, and that the decision is final.

This was a missed opportunity to participate in an informed decision-making process, to engage in shared governance, and to benefit from the extensive knowledge of the faculty and their connections to the field.

And because of this missed opportunity, we all lose. We lose students, and the students lose out on a high quality education from various accredited programs within their communities, which means the field will lose an educated workforce prepared and assessed by national standards of the profession. That loss eventually trickles down to vulnerable young children and their families on the south and west sides who will also lose.

But, I want you to know, that this institution will lose too. Each college will lose a team of faculty who have built 5 accredited programs, who are highly credentialed with extensive knowledge of the field, and who serve additional leadership roles at each of the colleges. But, most of all, the colleges will lose Child Development students who, despite the bone-crushing odds against them, work hard to better themselves so they can give back to their communities by teaching our youngest children under often very difficult circumstances.

Child Development is a humble program serving a humble field, but it has far-reaching benefits, and without it Malcolm X, Kennedy-King, Olive-Harvey, Daley, and Harold Washington Colleges will all lose.

I urge you to reconsider this decision, and to work with the Child Development faculty team, which has been willing and is most able to meet the C2C vision without losing so much.

Thank you.