Good morning, and welcome to the spring forum, this is kind of a very strange situation we're doing a bit of a hybrid model this morning and, of course, many of the faculty is saying we've been doing that all year so I have some select folks in the audience right here, I don't recognize all of them, but I presume they're all legitimate and should be here and I can tell that some of them haven't worn pants and in a while, I'm not going to take any names so you know what I'm talking about so very good, well it's really good to see some light at the end of the tunnel and really start opening up the campus community and being able to have some of these interactions that we've sorely missed over the last one year or so I want to just take yet another opportunity to say how incredibly proud I am of the work that the NKU campus community has done over the last now almost 15 months it was last March. When we had to make the sudden change and pivot to online remote operations and everything else and you know who really could forecast how long this will take, but as vaccination levels are up as cases go down. It's still we're not out of the woods yet as I keep getting reminded still there's still ways in which we have to keep Making sure we stay safe and healthy and continue the Norse nine principles, I think that that will probably be with us for a very long time. And so, but any case in the middle of all this, just incredible work that has happened across the campus and we'll talk a little bit about that, during the presentation today. The plan today is to spend about an hour, maybe 15 minutes, beyond that, on various topics, I want to certainly go over the highlights of this past semester, so that we typically do that every semester, as we do it in the forum. And then spend some time on sort of budget enrollment questions and then looking ahead to FY22 and perhaps even a little bit beyond that as well. So that's the goal I've told Bill here, give me a heads up when we cross the hour so that we can start wrapping it down, and we will have an opportunity for folks who are joining us. through the virtual environment to ask questions and, of course, certainly the audience can do that as well, and if you have questions, they'll it's I believe through the Q and A or the chat feature, and we will have will get some time at the end to address those questions as well, Bonita Brown has kindly agreed to facilitate and monitor those and she'll be working behind the scenes on that as well, so let me, let me get started, then with a couple of key things but before we do that, I would be remiss by not mentioning that we have in our audience Lauren Goodwin, who is the outgoing SGA President Lauren, thank you for joining us this morning, your service to the university, on behalf of all the students is greatly appreciated and I've come to really appreciate and admire the work that you've done under very difficult circumstances, this past year, being a virtual SGA President is not an easy thing, as you, as you have clearly learned as well, so thank you again and I'm glad to. You still haven't you know given up your student region duties so hang on to that for a few moments we're counting on that as well. We have, we will have a new SGA president in a couple of weeks, I believe, as President Aliya Cannon and Vice President, Chris Roat will be taking over I want to congratulate them and looking forward to working with them as well. All right let's switch to some of the highlights then of this past semester, maybe even will have overlap, a little bit with the fall next slide please and the next slide yeah well, I'm really excited. To announce, then I think all of you have seen the announcements and some of you may already have had a chance to interact with Eddie Howard our new Vice President for student affairs, he is here with us, so I just wanted to make sure he shows up and he's actually here so that's good. Back in November, I announced that he was joining our team, I was really excited about that for those of you that searched on the search committee and we're part of the process, I want to thank you again. For doing that Eddie began his role on in January, of course, you know, right in the middle of the pandemic and but has really hit the ground running and I'm excited to have him on the team, we also have matt Cecil who will be joining us in a couple of months as the provost and executive Vice President for academic affairs and we announced that a couple of months ago as well. He has been also very active and engaged with the institution already taking part in cabinet meetings and others, and I know he'll be meeting with several individuals on the campus he wants to hit the ground running as well and wants to take full advantage of the time, but by the time he joins us in July I would also like to take this opportunity and bittersweet as it is to thank Andy dory Jaya, for his service as the interim provost an executive Vice President for academic affairs he has chosen not the wisest move, I would say to further his career at other institutions, but certainly all jokes apart, I wish him the best he has been a wonderful addition to NKU, and we will certainly miss him, so thank you Andy next slide please so let me start off with some of the key work that's going on this past year, with respect to our diversity equity and inclusion work Earlier this morning I think many of you probably may not have had a chance to see, but I did put out an email message to the campus. Based on last evenings news on the on the verdict in the twin cities, and this, with everything that was happening, the global pandemic notwithstanding the challenges of racial justice and structural racism have been with us for a very long-time. Certainly, all eyes, not just in the twin cities but around the nation frankly around the world we're on this trial and in one level, this is, this is a move to the next chapter it's not the end of the journey that we have, and I think you will see in my message the work that we do on this campus to advance diversity equity inclusion and to prepare the next generation of leaders Lauren among them, and many of the others to build more equitable and just communities is vital to the work that we have ahead of us. Having said all that, we have some really great work that has been happening over the last Year in fact many of you know we instituted a new diversity online training module this semester this follows on the footsteps of the sexual harassment and discrimination training that was taking place last fall I'm very happy to announce that 70% of our students and nearly 70% of our faculty and staff completed that sexual harassment and discrimination prevention training last fall and now we're in the middle of the diversity training as well throughout the month of February we celebrate black history month. Even though it was mainly virtual as all of you know, but there was some really, really great activities that we have I'm not quite sure why have we have Toni Morrison's picture up there, because it was Angela Davis, who was our and I should have picked it up earlier but, but she was our keynote speaker and what I would have treated was to have her as part of the events that we had we had actually over 610 attendees for that particular virtual event as well the office of inclusive excellence, under the leadership of Darryl Peal has been also very busy they partner with the marketing and communications folks to share social media icons of historic African American leaders who have made contributions to social justice and civil rights and that continued in the month of March. As we celebrated women icons as well, and it was great to see all that happening, a great deal of activity through social media as well. Next slide please of course success by design is our strategic framework our guiding sort of framework as we go forward, it has been the core of what we do we have been actually very busy all of you have been extremely busy with them so much attention to student success but I will just point out a couple of important things one is, we had the student success summit in January again virtual, of course this was our second annual one and I'm really glad to see that, despite the environment we didn't skip a beat we had a wonderful keynote panel moderated by Andy Durojaiye as well. And we also acknowledged and celebrate examples of care, if you remember care stands for creativity appreciation resiliency and engagement and it was really great to see all the different examples from around campus highlighted by the work that the staff Congress continues to do and if you go to nku.edu slash NKU care you'll see more examples of how we continue doing some of that. During this year, of course, all the great work that's been going on campus continues, but there were some very notable student's success innovations, many of them funded by the innovation fund as well, for example, the steely library extended its popular textbook affordability program into the spring semester. They identified 19 digital textbooks to add to the online catalog. Over 1000 NKU students took advantage of that would save them over $74,000 since the launch of the program last fall. We've had 6000 students that have saved over $350,000 through this affordable program the library is also extended its research help services by joining a national consortium of academic library, so our students now can get personalized support from a librarian any time of day of night, while via online chat. And last fall, they were over 600 I'm told we have even more than 200 virtual interactions this semester and going up North advising also move to virtual advising appointments. Which many of the students have really enjoyed and embraced and they have been fewer no shows for many of those crucial interactions, and so the idea is this is going to be part of our ongoing work as we go through next year as well. So all the kinds of things that we're doing meeting students, where they are is actually going on and certainly last but certainly not least, you saw the unveiling if you will of our student success metrics the success by design metrics. You must have seen the video and I'm really excited about the work. The metrics work was something that was very critical to this process, as we say, if we don't know what we are valuing, and we don't measure it. We're not going to be able to establish targets and goals by which we achieve those superior student success outcomes. So please keep up to date with all the good things happening with success by design you'll certainly be hearing more about that as the as the as the year and falls and, of course, we look forward to next year as well, so kudos to all the folks involved in these innovations next slide please. In January, we also announced that we celebrated the reaffirmation of our tenure credit re accreditation with CRC our national accrediting body. A year ago, a little over a year ago, the creditors had placed NKU on warning for not meeting the requirements, the core requirement 11.1. Which covers library and learning information resources and a standard eight point to be which covers students learning outcomes in general education. Since that time, we've submitted a monitoring report we implemented a plan to address those issues and concerns, and at the December 2020 meeting the SACS. CFC Board of Trustees reviewed our report and reaffirmed the 10-year re-accreditation without any additional requirements There note said they were very impressed with the progress we've made and our next reaffirmation will take place in 2029, of course, the work continues. As we of course have to keep making sure that we stay on top of the different standards so again, I want to thank everybody for their work and effort and congratulations to all those involved as well next slide please. We do have some other accreditation that we should be extremely proud of as well, and we have a sampling of what you see up there, the hill foundation college of business was re-accredited by a CSV this is again a very important milestone and achievement, we are only a select group of business schools, my understanding is less than 25% of Schools around the country have this accreditation, so it is very important it's a hallmark of the quality that our college of business has, and therefore this is very important as well, it was, and I want to congratulate Dean has on his lobby, as well as the rest of the faculty and staff in the college of business for their work, as well the College of health and human services received accreditation. for the Center for simulation education which earned an accreditation for by the society of simulation and healthcare, as you can see, on the on the slide as well we are the only University in the Commonwealth to see full accreditation and only one of 183 other simulation centers Internationally, so extremely important that we do this, our MPA program was NASA accredited for another six years without any need for further review. So, which means again they were extremely impressed or MPA program is ranked 140 sixth in the US news and world report rankings 20 spot increase from previous years incremental nations to the program as well. we also have our in the data science bachelor's program was selected by a bet to be part of the inaugural data science accreditation review cohort. Which is again a big deal showing that we are kind of at the forefront of some of these were the only program in the tri-state area to have been selected. A bed is the national computing and engineering accrediting organization, and this is the first one for our data science program as well, and our chemistry and biochemistry program we have been ACS, which is the chemical society accreditation as well, so congratulations to all these this is again a quality hallmark of NKU every academic program that can credit be nationally accredited is in fact accredited we take this work extremely seriously. Just this past week, I met with the reviewers from the from NASA, which is the National Association of schools and music and of course we're hoping we get some good news on that front as well, so next slide please. Some of the other honors that I want to make sure I've shared these previously but NKU was ranked By 24-seven Wall Street Journal, as the most affordable college, with the best outcome in the state of Kentucky so that's a that's a nice little highlight to have as well also back to the College of business thus news and world report rankings has our MBA program as the best and online program as 120 third in the nation, this was ranked 191 in in last year's ranking. And it was unranked in 2019 so in just a couple of years we've made a dramatic improvement and talks about the quality of our program as well it was also ranked number 72 as one of the best online programs for veterans, so this is extremely helpful for us as well, and I want to make sure that we, we congratulate our folks in the college of business for that wonderful recognition next slide please this this year we had our third annual MLK day of service and again it’s something we've had to do this past year it was done virtually to honor the legacy of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. we even though we've done the in-person community service, the last couple of years, this was not possible. But nonetheless this virtual celebration was critical, and I'm really blown away by the creativity that our folks have done. This was a program that you can see there a program that had folks do notes for high schools and seniors working with students to achieve success that we had a keynote address as well our Scripps Howard Center for Civic engagement lead many of the efforts as well, we have a major focus on the teaching of history of race in K through 12 schools so some tremendous work and we found really unusual ways in which we could actually help celebrate MLK day of service, even in a virtual environment so so again, I think, just speaks to them to the amazing innovation that our that our folks have and continue to demonstrate as well next slide please so I think last fall, many of you heard the news we launched our collaborative for economic engagement in downtown Covington this was a one stop sort of innovation hub for businesses and entrepreneurs to accelerate economic growth in the region, we wanted to have a place in innovation alley that's where a lot of the entrepreneurs are seeking help and advice, we launched this in the fall and then, of course, earlier this month we learned that the collaborative received a $750,000 grant from the US economic development administration to support regional partnerships to accelerate economic recovery in northern Kentucky so again kudos and congratulations to the entire team that made that possible this is another way that we demonstrate regional stewardship by making sure that we have our that we are in the community serving the needs of business and entrepreneurs Is some of you will know that the different organizations that are part of the collaborative include folks like aba accelerators mortar square one blue North and Highland high school as well, and in fact the chase last law clinic for small business and nonprofits the top Program from the College of business and the so CAP accelerate program are also involved so again, I want to congratulate the work that's going on over there. Again, most of it has been virtual up to this point we're seeing some things opening up and we're excited about that as well next slide please well speaking of the collaborative Valerie Hardcastle had a big role to play in that as well, but it was great to see her being recognized as a local healthcare hero finalist this was selected by the Cincinnati Business Courier’s 2021 panel and so really excited about that as many of you know she, of course, heads up our Institute for Health, innovation, I jokingly referred to as our as our health bizarre she keeps us on the you know, providing the guardrails for what we can and cannot do but she has been a really a great leader in the COVID preparedness team, and I want to also give a shout out to the rest of the team. Led by Dora Jaya, but so many others that have done some tremendous work, I will say this without any qualification are and I know we're not completely out of the woods yet, but the way that NKU has managed the pandemic, both on campus has been a case study that should be in fact nationally recognized you know, we have done an incredible job of keeping the campus community safe and I know there were always some rumblings about you know, are we doing too much or whatever we're never going to get this completely right, but when we compare our rates of infections and everything else, and if you want, you can go check out the New York Times, they have they have a whole listing of all the colleges and universities that show where they are on cases and so on, you will see us as being one of the one of the best institutions around the country that has kept things in check, and that has been largely to the work of the entire campus agreeing to you know to uphold the principles of the north nine but also the COVID preparedness team that has been meeting relentlessly this past year, to ensure that we stay safe and healthy as well, so it is great to see Valerie's being recognized appear the honors the finalists will be honored I think it's is it tomorrow. I'm not sure sometime this week, whether you should know but it's just but again, thank you for the work that you do and again it's great to have her recognized in the community as well next slide please. Well here's another interesting way that we celebrated homecoming this year 21. Homecoming and the alumni weekend again a little bit different but they planned the alumni team planned a successful homecoming weekend, it was called at home, you can see a little bit they had the swag bags, they could send to your home They could you could celebrate doing that, as well, they had lots of virtual gatherings not just by the alumni association, but many other groups involved as well, so it was wonderful to see some great celebration, and that we and we'll talk a little bit about athletics, in just a second, and of course we continue to see our basketball program continue their season this semester as well. Next slide please. I'm really excited to share with you and I know that you've seen this we had our inaugural day of giving on founders day this year in in March and we, the advancement team with everybody's help around, especially the colleges and others decided to make a bit of a competitive spirit going up there, and we had we said we would open it up, we had challenge competitions, we had matching gifts, we had all kinds of fun things going on, but really you know, whenever you do something for the first time you don't quite know what's going to happen and we decided we're going to make this our annual day of giving, and this is the first time we're going to do this, and you know it makes it makes a lot of sense to have it on us on the Founder's Day itself, I think there was a modest expectation that we would have about 200 or so donors and raised about 100,200 50,000 if I'm not mistaken Eric. I don't know what the original numbers were where we blew that out of the water 600 plus donors. More than 300,000 raised in 24 hours so that's really remarkable and I want to congratulate you know, several of you, many of you in the room itself that played a major role but the best part I think was the fact that our faculty and staff also with such integrity parts of providing gifts and investments into NKU just been so much when our own faculty and staff say you know what I'm going to I'm going to invest in this university, so it really means a lot, you could see the retro NKU T shirt was part of the incentive there if you made a donation so certainly that was a wonderful thing to see as well. Next slide please and we continue with our other tradition it's now for the third time we're doing this, making teaching public occurred right around the homecoming time as well, and something that we've done as well. This was again something we began a couple of years ago, as part of the inauguration festivities the idea of opening up the classroom to show the community our alumni and others the great work that our faculty do across the spectrum, I want to especially thank Dean Diana McGill, who took the initiative back, three years ago and continued to be the facilitator of this of this work, even in this virtual environment we had over 170 people attend classes virtually. Which is more than we've had in the previous couple of years as well 13 classes were made available you know anybody could sign in and register and come in and there were such wonderful subjects. I sat in on a class myself. And, and I will say it is, it is always so wonderful to see and to be able to share with the community, because sometimes they don't quite know the world that happens, and especially in a virtual environment it was just fascinating to see and I'm really glad that this has become another one of our wonderful traditions, because it is something that we value greatly. And, and of course I would never miss an opportunity to show off the work of us of our faculty, so I want to thank those faculty involved in opening up their classes, I know a lot of folks that offered, which is wonderful we're learning every year about how to make this a more meaningful way and again I'm Just so delighted that we could continue this this tradition, even in a pandemic here and frankly it seems to have been able to become more accessible, as a result of the virtual environment as well next slide please. I want to just make a couple of other comments about this past year, we have our mental health advisory group that's hard at work, many of you are involved in that work as well but this was announced back in August, and they have been completely very much engrossed in this work that we had a campus conversation earlier this semester on mental health, and you, you heard certainly some wonderful perspectives there as well we have also received some funding from the Kentucky Council and post-secondary education to actually launch something called TAO you can see, this on the slide there it's called therapy assistance online which will be a suite of online tools for both education awareness, as well as building a greater resiliency for our students, so this is really a wonderful opportunity and I want to thank CP for that investment, the mental health Advisory Group will be submitting a plan to me in later this this month and, perhaps, before the end of the semester that will give us some principles in which we can move forward with ways to help our this is our this has been one of the single most important concerns for our students and, frankly, all of us have had to deal with these challenges this past year as well, so I'm excited about the work that's happening and more of that information will be forthcoming next slide please we also had a new proposal a program this this semester based on what we heard from the students and you know, there was certainly some challenges, when the students felt they couldn't actually come together and have even safe programs on campus and they certainly appreciated all the virtual things we were doing, but what they missed with some of the social interaction and so we, we decided to launch a program called pitcher program student affairs took the lead on that we had some you can see some of the examples, we had a paint night a wellness Wednesday certification programs and a trivia night and I think the next round of program submissions is underway, so we might still see a couple more programs before the semester is done as well. Next slide please and then we also have the fuel NKU has been doing some tremendous work this past year, despite the pandemic it hasn't slowed down recently received a grant of $70,000 from the Kroger foundation to support its continuing operations, they also have an online ordering system this is a kind of a quick pick option which allows for the students to get some of these fresh produce and other things while still maintaining social distancing and safety standards, so they have provided over 5500 pounds of food and toiletries Throughout the spring semester so it's truly incredible what they have done this is of course a wonderful national model and it's great to see the world continue as well next slide please we will also be excited to launch the sandbox in late March, we had a ribbon cutting event in the new SKU sandbox arena for our esports program that program has really taken off like no other program that we've seen in recent years it was launched very quickly after the announcement was made it was also funded by the innovation challenge grant was one of our early innovation challenge successes and we've had some really great work on that we've had some leading experts on collegiate esports which joined us for a for a workshop about academic programming internships and research. Related to this industry so it's not just going to be something for us for our students to engage in, but it actually can be integrated very much on the academic side of the House so The world of esports is just something I have to admit I don't know a lot about, but it is, it certainly is very exciting, and I want to, I want to give kudos to Jim buss and the rest of the folks there, who did a tremendous job of moving that we are, we are continuing, as you know, in the fall our varsity team had some great success as well, but if you haven't checked it out it's in the founders Hall, the the arena, or the sandbox as we call it is going to be fully open for students in this in this fall as well, so it's a great way in which we can continue this trend of responding to what is what is needed by students and in fact the region as well next slide please and then, of course, our IT folks have been well, to put it mildly, very busy with them so many things going on, but they continue their digital transformation journey with the implementation of chat box Software applications and again, this was a success by design proposal made possible by some of that funding The chat box uses artificial intelligence to provide 24 seven access to information to better serve students. Some of us have used that if you've gone on to some of the other sites, now they don't doesn't always give you. The response that you want right because there are always some challenges there, but it is something that can learn over time and I think allows us to sort of focus the questions and then lead to maybe some better ways of engaging students and the support that we need, so this is this is another way in which we can provide. After hours support improve resolution times and continuously improve our service orientation to our students as well student account services and financial assistance will also go live with the chat box software pretty soon. Next slide please Those of you that are big followers of American idol will be very pleased to know that our very own Alyssa Wray is now in the top 10 in American idol, so it is truly tremendous she is a first-year musical theatre BFA student and has joined she is from I think she's from Pikeville, Kentucky if I'm not mistaken. No American idol fans here in this audience, I can tell you that so but, again, it is great to see her journey, she is on social media I love this picture, because it, you know, has the has the certainly the gold of NKU in there, so it's really wonderful to see so we're touring around, and of course excited that she has made it this far, in that tremendous talent, of course, on their next slide please, and then we want to sort of close up with some of the issues on athletics, as I said it was it's been a challenging year for so many, but even for a student athlete there's no question but again I'm really proud of the fact that we made it possible for our student athletes to have A season this year it was without fans, it was in fact without family members and things like that which was not an easy thing to do, but again, we really said How can we create protocol that can still allow them to do that they had multiple days of testing on a regular basis? it has not been an easy time for our student athletes to do what they continue to do, but I hope that they feel that being able to compete and be part of that has been somewhat A good experience for them as well, obviously, our basketball programs did incredibly well we didn't quite make it to the tournament this year, but I know that the future looks really bright for that men's and women's soccer teams won the regular season horizon league championship, unfortunately Had a heartbreaking loss to Milwaukee in the tournament finals, but it was again great to see the wonderful work that they're doing. A women's volleyball team did some wonderful work as well, so really, really glad that we have done some wonderful work, but last but not least, our next slide please One of our very own student athletes Kayla Thompson was announced as the horizon league 2021 Bobby Fong award winner The Bobby Fong award has been in for the name for President, the former President of Butler university from 2001 to 2011 and it's given to the student athlete that best represents the League and its core values of integrity respect and stewardship and it really is great to see. One of our own recognize this way so congratulations to Kayla for a great win and it just shows that our student athletes excel in tremendous ways so that was a very quick look at so many highlights and, of course, this was just a sampling of so many of the others that we have done, let me move on, then to some of the important updates on enrollment and budget will spend a little bit of time on that before we look at what's going on next year as well, so next slide please I know there's a lot of information there and will be certainly posting the PowerPoint later on, so folks can take a less. Okay, look at this but wanted to share with you some of the both the highs and some of the lows with respect to enrollment this past year, and you can see that I'm not going to read out Each of these we did see some growth, what I can say broadly is, of course, our growth continues to come from our accelerated online programs and that's a really good thing because we need to have a diversified base of students, however, we still see some challenges with respect to our undergraduate enrollment non-AOL, if you will, and we're also seeing some challenges this year, with respect to retention again, this is not surprising in some ways, given the challenges of the pandemic but I say this because we have to pay close attention to some of these trends that we are seeing there, they are in line and very consistent with what nationally we're, seeing as well but at the same time, I want to, I want to give kudos to all the work that's happened over the last few years Because we reached one of our highest levels of first year retention at close to 75% this past fall that's a growth of two and a half percentage points from the previous year and is very, very close to the 75% target we've set up for ourselves for the Commonwealth of Kentucky's strategic agenda, we also realized a 48% 60 or graduation rate for the first time in our history and again, while there's tremendous room for improvement, this is the highest graduation rate we've achieved, and it represents a 10-percentage point increase over the last five years as well, so I love the trend the direction we're going again speaks volumes, so the work that we're all doing as well. And, and we do have to pay some attention to that what is have some concern to all of us is the fact that our diversity retention gaps have grown this past year for you around students for first Generation Students, as well as for low-income students, and so we know we have to really work hard at making sure that we continue to focus on our students and their success going forward so again next slide please you'll see a little bit of ours of our headcount numbers there over the last few years, as I said, our numbers have been increasing we crossed 16,000 students, for the first time in our in our history as well, but, as you can see, by the segmentation there I know the bottom seems to be cut off on my screen here, but you can see that most of that growth is coming from our graduate enrollment itself, and while that is very good, we have to continue to focus on some of our undergraduate enrollment issues that we have as well next slide please this this slide there's a lot of information here and I'm not going to go into great detail, but the reason I wanted to just put this on your radar is because while the headcount is very important because it talks about the numbers of students, we actually serve our budgets are actually driven by the full-time equivalent students, that we have and that typically means when a student takes 15 undergraduate student takes 15 credit hours that counts for one full time equivalent student that is how our budget numbers and tuition numbers are driven tuition revenue is all of you know, is our biggest component of our revenue source, and so we have to pay very close attention to some of that as well, and what this slide shows really is it tells you kind of how much we expect it to get from our tuition in fall and spring, what is the expectation for the annual tuition so if you just look at the first column in the fall of 20 in the first fiscal year 20 last year, we in fact had a about 165 million in tuition dollars Across the two across the two semesters and then of course this year's budget we are we projected about 162 we actually ended up with about 158 so we're a little bit off of where we were. Where we were expecting to be and again that explains some of the attrition that we did see so the idea of tracking F T. Because it ties into budget is something that is that is going to be critical, now it give given the strength of our AOL revenues we actually are going to be coming out just about even this year so that is the good news but again, what we are seeing is that that part of the revenue is, in fact, helping us manage the gaps that we have seen, because they have been rising and a bit exceeding the expectations, we have put for ourselves going forward so again, we can discuss some of this more in detail if folks have questions, I'll be sharing this a little bit more in detail on the on the website as well next slide please so let me switch then to the update for this year, as we wrap up this fiscal year As we as we, as you can see there the COVID impact to our revenues actually ended up being more significant than initially projected in fact the spring semester numbers were particularly concerning we did see, as I said, AOL gross revenues was strong and upsetting many of the shortfalls, we saw in our non-AOL programs but of course AOL also means we have other expenses, we have a revenue share model, as you know, with academic partnerships, we also have to invest in faculty and we also have to provide some scholarship discounts with the AOL revenue that we get so the gross revenue goes up the net revenue has to take into consideration, some of these investments, we do have to make the good news is, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit later on, we received additional stimulus funding if you if you know we've actually received now three rounds of federal stimulus funding the first one came last year and then the second one came late December, and then the third one was just that was just passed in in February, so I'll give you a little bit more information about that in just a second but one of the things I want to really highlight and again extremely proud of the work that we've done is, we had an emphasis on making sure that we kept things affordable for our students this past year As many of you knew we held undergraduate tuition flat for this fiscal year we dispersed a great amount of over $4 million and cares funding in student grants and emergency funding we postponed our online course fees, we made parking free and all the garages and, of course, it has been doing a lot of work, so we've made wave many of the scholarship renewal fees and other kinds of application fees so just want to give you a sense that A lot of this work you know, try to address the issues of the fiscal and financial challenges our students and their families are facing as well next slide please so this is just a summary of where we expect to end and this fiscal year 21 Typically you've probably seen my kales a shed this type of a spreadsheet and, of course If there are other groups that want to do this, whether it's in the Senate or staff Congress he's more than happy to come in here. Just a couple of highlights, I want to show from this, you will see in the revenue category on the top, we have the revenues of the bottom, we have expenditures in the revenue category, you can see the auxiliary revenue was the one was the place where we took a big significant hit right there right, you can see that we had nearly $6 8 million hit that we were expecting about 11 and a half and we only had about six and then you can see some of the other areas, we did so we did see a small decline in state appropriations it's because the State actually did is kind of a swap between giving us some one time federal stimulus money and then taking away state appropriations that has been rectified going forward because we didn't want this to be a permanent challenge as well, you can see the impact on some of ours tuition revenue, as well the AOL revenue I've mentioned a couple of times as well, and in some of the other areas, but the stimulus funds is that's the last one there that you can see, on the revenue that that really is, we received about $8 millions of stimulus funds, this was from the second cares act that came this year and in fact was a major reason why we will be able to come and stay within budget this year as well on the expenditure side, you can see, we had to make some very painful sacrifices this past year, with respect to Nonrecurring salary reductions furloughs and even reductions in our retirement benefits we saw tremendous savings and operating through a variety of mechanisms computing utilities. Obviously, travel and so on and so forth, but all that, notwithstanding, given the impact on revenue all the work that we had to do in managing and expenditures. Once again, tremendous kudos to the entire campus community for the fact that we are actually going to be coming in, on budget with respect to this particular fiscal year it's a fiscal year again, we could not have focused on all, not knowing what was going to happen, how things were going to change. Talk about trying to drive in in fog or you know flying a plane and forgo whatever we just had no clue we had to make several contingencies and so again want to thank and congratulate all of us, for doing some tremendous heavy lifting throughout this year in in keeping the financial situation as stable as we possibly could so again some really great work that has happened again a reminder, we received about 4 million of institutional funds from the cares one act we used most of that in the previous fiscal year to address many of the issues that we faced with housing dining refunds and technology costs and then, of course, this year we received close to 8 million, as you can see, as well next slide please so a couple of quick pension and legislative updates next slide please and I'm not going to spend too much time on this, because a lot of this detail some of you have seen before, but this was an important legislative cycle for us and one that I would say, has been extremely successful under very challenging circumstances three important points I want to know, two of them have to do with our pension resolution senate bill to 14 and house bill eight both have to do with our ability to exit the current system which has been proceeding extremely well and but most importantly I'm going to spend a little bit of time On the fact that house bill eight which changed the method for allocation contributions actually ended up being a big benefit to us as a result of an amendment that was filed which change there's a discounted rate On our cessation from three and a half percent to five and a quarter percent this actually reduced our liability by approximately $73 million dollars and it reduced so annual debt payments by nearly 4 million and that's a huge win for the institution That, I think, and again there are so many folks involved in the process Mike and his team, but there was just so many folks that have been done work that have enabled us to get this thing our government relations staff. Just again I am incredibly proud of the work that we did because, again, this was a major challenge for us a little bit of good news on the base allocations are base allocations for next year, unchanged and, in fact There was a 2% increase in performance funding by the legislative. General Assembly, this is the first time in nearly a decade that we have seen increases in state appropriations and our estimates, is that we will see about a 2 9 million increase in NKU US State appropriations, because once again after student success outcomes, we have achieved so the performance funding model was still has some tweaks that I would like to see going forward has enabled us to continue to receive some additional funding as well next slide please this just shows you kind of the impact of the discount rate that that I mentioned a few minutes ago, and again I want to emphasize that if you if you recall the first column that shows you how much we currently pay into curse, and this was a difficult decision is leading up to the December Recommendation and decision by the board, as you know, the original HP eight which we had previously advocated for would have actually reduced our payments to 15 2 million, so we were a little miffed by the fact that they were actually doing this now when we'd already made the decision to exit the system, however, we had adapted to go with the soft freeze, as you know, in column C, you can see what would have happened with the soft freeze option with the discount rate at three and a half percent roughly pretty similar to what we're paying now, although of course we take on a great deal of debt service As you can see, and of course you can see what the average net present value and the cessation cost if you look at the bottom row there the secession cost was over 276 million with that original discounted rate with the discount rate and, of course, the reason you have column D is because the bond interest rates that actually crept up a little bit from December, so we saw some slight upward trend in the payments going forward but with the discount rate, having been adjusted to 5 25% you can see, the big difference that goes in our annual debt payments are cessation cast and on our debt service over the lifespan of the next 30 years and again this is a big benefit for us, as well as you can see, really was something that was helpful to us, and I want to publicly, of course, acknowledged the Tremendous advocacy of Senator Chris McDaniel that enabled this this to happen as well, so moving on next slide please so a little bit more on the stimulus update that I wanted to make sure we shared with you, as I mentioned, we, there are two different After the first Kazakh from last year we had two more one came at the end of December and one came just when the American rescue plan Act was there, you can see the first one had about 20 billion to higher education for that, and can you received about 13.74 million of that has to go to students and the remaining about 8 million or so approximately 9 million is what will stay with the university, as you see from the previous slide, we had seen that nearly 8 million of that had to be used to close gaps we faced this year as well the second, the third I should say the third federal stimulus plan, the American rescue plan provided actually nearly twice the amount to higher education NKU’s estimate is about $24 million again half of that has to be used for financial aid to students so the 4 million from the previous one, plus the 12 million from here, which means we will have about 16 million for students to first two needs that those resources will be available until September 23 to use those funds as well and there'll be some more guidance that will come on how we can actually use these funds, the second of cares act that you see on the top there provided a greater FLEX degree of flexibility and this one, perhaps, is going to be less flexible so we're still keeping an eye out On exactly how will be able to use some of this but, nonetheless, this was an important element and higher education, I will say all the national organizations were very you know came together in a very good way to strongly advocate for the funding and I'm really pleased that we could see some benefit of that next slide please so I want to switch now to just looking ahead to enrollment and budget for FY22 so let's begin with enrollment that's always the big topic, and if you can recall I mentioned this in my email message about a couple of months ago about you know that we have some positive financial outlook short term pastor financial outlook. Going forward, but we also have some headwinds and, and these are sort of outlined here in in a very general way Again, the enrollment picture, while it's probably going to be hopefully continue to stay strong in the hill AOL portion of it, we still have some concerns about our non AOL and returning student numbers, and so the model shows that we will continue to see a decline there, we can of course make some adjustments on that front of weekend we are seeing some historic lows for first year spring retention this is again not surprising it's very much consistent with national trends, but it is a challenge that we have to pay attention to where our demographic declines, that we have to address as well and, and we cannot, we cannot take light of the fact that the economic impact on many families, especially the families that we have the privilege to serve will see some continue to see some growing financial insecurity as well. Student satisfaction again no surprise, this, these are national data survey results has been kind of kind of low people have not been happy with the way that things have been now so much of this has to do with the pandemic, but there have been challenges that our students have continue to face as well, and the interesting thing is, we are seeing that there are selective institutions elite institutions, if you will, are actually seeing applications and enrollment increases because they're going test optional, which means that we would be Somewhat adversely affected as well, so, while we are seeing some increased activity and applications, we continue to see flat rates and the admission rates of, especially on your end students stem students and we will keep focusing on some of that as well transfer Number skill still continue to be down and so that's been that's been one of our challenges as well, we of course working very closely with our transfer institutions and making sure that we, we can do to focus On some of that work as well, and then I also want to mention that we have things like free community College as a as a proposal that's being proposed in the new infrastructure plan in the Biden administration and we're taking a close look at what that will do for us as well next slide please On the budget side, you can see, we also have some challenges, we should be aware of, as I mentioned about enrollments as well as auxiliaries we don't quite know if activities will bounce back fully or not I know that Eddie Howard is thinking about housing and what's going to happen over there, but it has so many implications for us across the spectrum, so we just have to be careful about some of those and, frankly, many of the underlying challenges that public education, public education is faced these were pre pandemic if anything. They've only accelerated the urgency of the need to do this, and by that we go back to the familiar challenges, you know student completion rates equity gaps enrollment pressures competition from nontraditional forces the inquiry is fully aware, what is it grow with Google, the new sort of suite of certificate programs that are offered at a very minimal cost in which they're saying you don't even need a college degree, if you complete these certifications you know, Google, will I don't know they'll offer you a job offer an interview or whatever it is, but Again we're being we're being challenged like no other time in our history, and I think it's something that we have to pay attention to and we've mentioned this a couple of times before, but the need for more mental health and other academic and social support for our students And, of course, rising health and safety costs that we continue to see so these aren't new challenges, but ones that I wanted to make sure that we continue to keep at the forefront of our thinking as we go forward next slide please, so we are in the process right now, of developing our recommendation to the board in May, the main board meeting for the FY22 budget and I'm going to just give you .A couple of items that I will be sharing with you right now we're still firming up all the implications of that a lot of people again behind the scenes, are working hard on that, but I just wanted to give you a quick status update First and foremost, as you saw from mike's email, a few months ago, the salary reductions and TIAA match will be restored as of July, one we are continuing to use stimulus funds and they will be needed to offset any of the costs and revenue impacts that we can that we can see we have, I think this is this is really tremendous that we've removed the uncertainty of the pension issue and we've lowered the annual payments and we have seen some increased funding from state due to the performance funding so some challenges up there, but some good news that I want to make sure that we put at the center of our thinking as well. Next slide please so here are some of the draft recommendations we're working on and not everything is cast in stone we're still going to be doing a lot of reading and consultation before we are finally put some of these things in place, the first one, of course, is the critical one about undergraduate tuition we are still debating about whether we should keep tuition flat or whether they should be any increases If that is the case will also waiting for some guidance from the counselor post-secondary education to tell us what the ceilings are likely to be, they'll be they'll be doing a two year ceilings CAP for us and we're going to be paying attention to that as well, I will share with you that we are looking very much at a compensation increase As well as a performance bonus pool that will be considered in this coming year as well, and I know our folks are Thinking about how we can do this in a way that will be important we've said this from the very beginning, investing in our people is a critical part of us guiding principle and that's something that we certainly want to make sure we consider we also considering creating a recurring strategic investment, innovation fund If you remember a couple years ago, we had a one-time fund for 2 million that we allocated for advancing success by design you saw some of the great work that has happened as a result of that, and some of the successes, I am so pleased with how this has been able to do this, I want to try and make this as a recurring part of our budget so we are working closely with Mike and his team to see how we can create a recurring strategic investment, innovation fund that will go forward, I think so far, we've made the recommendation that we will have no parking increases. Going forward, I know, the question that may come up is it going to be free, again, I can remind you that as an economist we there is no such thing as free lunch so but on the good news, no parking increases how about that there will be some meal plan adjustments and housing rate. Based on the board approved five-year plan and our chart wells contract that we have as well, so you'll see some of that in the budget recommendations so again, still a lot of good work that will be that will be happening going forward some of this, as I said, would be firmed up in the next few weeks, as we take our recommendation at the May Board of regents meeting itself next slide please so looking ahead, then not only to next year, but a little bit beyond All of you recall that I shared with you just last month that NKU will be going back to the future, to reimagine University in the fall of 2021 the expectation is our students will enjoy really an enhanced experience in person learning. Residence halls hopefully add capacity campus events and activities that we have long missed and, of course, all the social interactions that are so vital to our community as well we want to return to that level of vibrancy and it's not just simply going back to the way things were pre pandemic, we all know that that's not something that we want to do we want to learn from what we have learned about this experience and, in fact, creating even more enhanced experience for ours for our students, so one of the most important lessons was adapting to the students wherever they meet, and you can see that, in the way we've designed our fall courses by the middle of next month will come out with a more detailed message about each of these different elements that will relate to not only the schedule events travel and so on and so forth, so please be on the lookout for that the corporate preparedness team, along with many folks are working on some of these things as well, but we will have a renewed focus on making sure that we come back to a much better way of supporting our students, so that we can continue to boost retention persistence and graduation rates next slide please. Again, this was a quote from one of the webinars that I think we have many of us have been part of this is something we've all been seeing that you know, the fact is that higher education has had challenges even pre pandemic and most institutions will find themselves in reality, by default, rather than by design Obviously, the nice thing about this quote was we have success by design as our strategic framework and NKU’s philosophy, has always been we don't just you know sit back and be reactive we're actually proactive. We're always thinking a little bit ahead of the curve and again so excited that we could do some of these things next slide please so I want to kind of wrap up with just a few more comments. Before we move on to the question-and-answer session and want to give plenty of time for folks to engage with that I wanted to share with you some of these back to the future opportunities again none of these should be surprising but they are something that we should be keeping in mind and something that we've actually been talking about throughout the process that we created success by design and of move forward with the implementation. Some of our new folks may not be fully aware, but many of us who've been around know this that we talked about the three-box solution to strategic innovation and I want to Come back and remind us about the important work that needs to happen within those three boxes itself If we are to achieve the goals of success by design, then we have to really focused and double down on our efforts with respect to each of these boxes box one, of course, are improving modifying our current or scaling up our current activities to improve to improve performance and alignment box two is strategically evaluating and forgetting quote unquote the past which is programs and services, even attitudes and cultures that will prevent us from realizing our vision of becoming student ready and regionally engaged and then of course box three are those innovations for the future that NKU does so remarkably well so here I've outlined a few of the things that we are focused on and that we need to be continued to be looking at very carefully. Success by Design campus wide initiatives you've seen these before that's going to be a major focus for us going forward There are these initiatives, again, improving the pipeline, the talent pipeline, so to speak, and we'll talk a lot about that we have various ways in which we should be thinking about the improving the talent pipeline from high schools and beyond degree and co-curricular mapping are another one of those campus wide initiatives that will involve all the academic programs we've talked a great deal about advising and coordinated care and we've talked about a first experiential learning and high impact practices; these are all box one items that were either trying to scale up or improve or modify as appropriate, based on what we've learned, so this is going to be a major focus and you'll certainly be hearing more from Bonita and the rest of the SACS team and the implementation teams around that as well, but the next two items are box two items and you saw yesterday, a message from Andy and Mike about providing a little bit more information about how we are looking at all of university operations programs and services in a holistic way. We have to be able to do the hard work of refocusing repositioning the academic portfolio, I borrowed this from William Massey's book reengineering the university he talks about being mission centered market smart and margin conscious All the three elements have to be taken into account when we examine our academic portfolio quite often and thankfully NKU you know it's not egregious in this way, but most of higher education gets legitimately blamed for simply adding new programs without taking a look at the current portfolio programs, we have and that's one of the things we have to make sure that we're doing, but this lens I think will be important, I know Andy George is assembled a team of individuals that are looking at this in a much more holistic way and I, like the approach of saying, many of our programs are mission centered. They have to be market smart as well, and we must be conscious of our margins, which is the difference between the cost and the revenue it's not just one thing you can't just say oh if it doesn't generate enough revenue, the program has gone that doesn't make a lot of sense, we have to think about it holistically and that's what I'm hoping, a lot of this work will result in this is not going to happen overnight, it will involve a great deal of interaction with all the campus constituents, but it is work that we cannot shy away from. Second part of it is to evaluate and streamline administrative operations and services for effectiveness and efficiencies and that's another box to again the pandemic has taught us some things that we can do differently, a lot of the transactional activities can be automated A lot of the things can happen virtually so a lot of this will be things that will have to be doing you heard from the email that Andy and Mike sent I believe, just yesterday about the work that will be getting from ABC insights they're doing a benchmarking to give us a sense of how much we spend. On administrative operations and are there ways in which we should be realigning or refocusing some of that work and so that work will be something that will be ongoing as well and the reason we have to do the important work of box to is because that allows us and frees up resources to invest in both box one but equally important in box three, what are the new growth opportunities Which are, for instance, just a couple of examples here lifelong learners from high school to adults just the way that we think about Just yesterday we had a banquet to celebrate our adult learners' programs and I talked about the fact that it is great to see that segment of the population growing at NKU. I said 25 and above as adults and we have nearly 38% of our total students who are adult students, right now, and that that number has been growing steadily over the years, we have 36 million Americans with some college and no degree, and we know that that's a major market, we have to be thinking about the pandemic has also taught us that people will always need new skills rescaling upscaling on a regular basis so we should be thinking about extended education models and, of course, all the new programs and services adventures that we're excited to think about but in order for us to do, successful box one box three, we cannot ignore sometimes the difficult and delicate work of box to as well, so next slide please so I I'm really excited about kind of where we have, we have come so far in in this in this time period. Looking back this past year, we all have a moment of reflection, it has been a difficult challenge, I can see that more and more of IQ campus community is getting ready to resume the work and I'm really excited about coming back to the future, to becoming a nationally recognized student ready regionally engaged institution this was our vision, from the beginning, in fact, the pandemic made it even clear that this is a vision that stands the test of time, and certainly the crisis we have seen so on that note, I want to thank all of you again for the tremendous work that you have done. I've joked often with many people that April tends to be the crankiest month in the academy, because it is got so many things going on and I get that, and I hope during all this that that many of you that have taken some time to get some rest and re-energize it it's not easy to do that we've sprinkled a few days of campus wide holidays throughout this semester, I know, hopefully, those have come in some good use as well, but I'm just so energized and inspired by the resiliency and the grid of the campus community that I have the privilege of serving so I want to thank you all for that and for wrapping up the spring forum bill how we are doing on time. Very good 10 oh wait, so I think the next slide is simply questions. Oh, we have a few more save the dates I'm sorry before I was quick to wrap it up very excited about commencement in a few weeks we are doing in person commencement, by the way we were the first institution in the Tri state area to announce it. And, and I believe some of the others have decided to follow our lead Which is, which is fine, but we are doing it, and as the things have changed, we're doing in a BB and T arena, it will be kind of modified I've told the students and firstly I'm not going to be able to shake hands but Will still be able to celebrate in person was very important we've added a fifth commencement ceremony on Sunday afternoon to celebrate the 2020 graduates as well, so I'm really delighted we could do that it was important for us to do that and help many of them come back and take part in that as well next slide please we also have a couple of other things coming up that I wanted to make sure you're aware of. Next week is experiential learning week I believe it's in the inaugural week if I'm not mistaken, we haven't looking at the DNC are we done this before we haven't we go another first, so this is wonderful again just highlight some of the great work that our faculty have done with our students and we also have now the governance school of entrepreneurs we're going to have two cohorts this year, which is tremendous. it's double the size from previous years, they received some extra funding from the Commonwealth of Kentucky so that's good news, and of course orientation work is going to begin in earnest right away in June as well, so Those are some of the dates that we should be looking at, and I believe that should wrap it up if I'm not mistaken, wonderful. Thank you so much again for being here Bonita are your kind of in the background, somewhere, there you are I am here just want to remind everyone to put questions in the Q and A box and you might want to take questions in the audience fires, as people are putting their questions into the Q and A box, if there are any in the audience yeah, we can start with that, again I want to try and see if I can recognize the folks who are here, some of them are wearing ties, for the first time, too, so that's good news. Any questions from here, and if you're getting any questions to the chat box, we can do those as well I can start with a couple of the questions in the chat box, of course, they have to do with the compensation increase in bonus pools, will they apply to part time faculty and staff as well, or is it just for full time faculty and staff you know that's a that's a really great question and I want to hesitate before I answer those questions and Lori, we're still in the process of trying to put that together we are looking at a couple of different ways in which we are looking at compensation increases for next year; I can just share with you the first component is that every so often HR will evaluate ours ranges of salaries for our different employees at different salary at different levels of staffing levels and we'll see if we are still our aim is to always be in the midpoint of the range based on national averages, and of course the regional needs and so part of it is to ensure that, if we fallen off below the average, we want to boost those employees to the midpoint range and so that's going to be one element of the compensation increase. We're looking for the second piece is what I would call the merit pay increase the percentage increase that applies for employee's faculty and staff based on performance and then some new thing that I want to institute and actually I mentioned this kind of at the beginning, when I first arrived. About a performance bonus pool that would be one-time bonus that would be applied based on certain criteria that third element is the is the least developed at this point so we're going to keep we're going to keep looking at that we're going to get some more input on how we can do this that probably won't go into effect in June and July, it will probably be something we will end up in doing in in January of next year, the bonus pool, that is, but the other piece will actually happen, beginning with that, with our July. Without July thing, so I don't know Lori did you have anything that I could add here to share with the with the question so what I can share with you is that we will follow the normal process and, but I can what HR will probably give out some more guidance in the next few months about some of that work we haven't filmed it up yet. Something that I want to make sure we include in the budget for the budget presentation for the board. Okay, great the next question is about hybrid you people have heard you talk about that for a little bit, what does that mean for our campus you know it's a good question and I would actually love to have a good conversation with folks around about what that means I will actually submit in many ways we have been a hybrid you without even knowing it right to me a hybrid you mean we offer our programs and services in a in a couple of different modalities you know back in the day when I started teaching, which was a while ago, so we won't go into that but you know, there was no real course management software, I remember back in the day, I was one of the excited to start with something called web CT and if you've ever you don't even some of you are nodding that's good so I'm not dating myself, but that was kind of the original thing, and I was saying wow this is great, I can now put my syllabus online and then you know web CT grew and became blackboard and there were discussions, and you could do all kinds of neat things you could do quizzes well, that was a hybrid class without knowing it. Right, because not all the learning took place in the confines of the Monday Wednesday Friday 9am to 10am class a lot of that was happening outside that so in some ways, I think, hybrid you are frankly not a new concept for NKU at all we offer courses in class we offer courses online we offer hybrid courses and almost every course I would submit probably has some online component, that is being that is being pursued, right now, the same thing would probably happened with many of our services as well so the hybrid university concept may see new to a lot of people just because it's been called that way and it really became elevated during the pandemic right, we went to remote operations, we went to that but there are some elements of hybrid you that we're going to have to pay attention to the ability to do work remotely you know now we have to really evaluate that and that's something that our folks are thinking about as well you know how much of this work can happen remotely can being as productive if you do it at home we are seeing businesses and organizations around the country talking about a three to model three days at work in two days remotely and stuff like that, so there is this is this has opened up a whole new chapter in in our ability to deliver our value proposition in unique ways and the digital transformation journey, I made reference to a few minutes ago that it is already engaged in there, making it easier and simpler to find ways that that you can do this, there was an article I read about hybrid you and a report that had come out and I've shared it with many individuals, and I know the deans have it, and perhaps many other folks have talked about it. I know there was a reference to retail, which is a little bit odd but nonetheless I think it's a bit some ways, you can think about it right, just because everything closes down it doesn't mean you can't still quote unquote shop online. What is the experience that students want that they can get in person versus virtually? and what I think what we're trying to say is, we have to work, perhaps at making sure the experience that students have when they experienced NKU in all its facets is something that seamless and rich, no matter if they come into campus or they experience it from their laptops or iPad or phones or Apps or whatever the case may be and that's what I mean it means it's a continuous stream of operation that doesn't and one thing that the pandemic, if not and its part of our enterprise risk management plan is what happens when our operations get stymied by something like this, how will be better prepared for that and some of this will be ways in which we do this so bit of a long-winded thing, but I mean I think it's a great opportunity to have a discussion around what is it that we do really well and it forces the question of what the value of is place based education versus something that you can get online everywhere else, and we have to make sure we define that in clear terms for our students, not just current but future students as well. Great questions are coming in now so that's great and that's questions about our enrollment challenges we're seeing our enrollment challenges at the undergraduate level, how should we all be thinking about recruiting students differently, what does that look like for us yeah, I think that's it, this is it's an important question it's a topic we've all grappled with you know this is where I think the ideas that stem from the campus have been so critical in thinking about unique ways, and I know Kim she's unfortunately couldn't be here in person with us today, but the deans and Kim and others have been really working hard. At evaluating all kinds of options to think about recruiting I'll give you a couple of examples that we've done more recently, so I want to, I want to just give a little bit of context, on the one side we have the challenges with just the demographic changes that we are seeing in the Midwest and in our region right high school going population is declining that's a given, in fact, some of the recent stuff that talks about how the pandemic is only going to make that worse Is something that we have to be paying attention to so while we have these demographic challenges that we have to deal with we must also pay attention to some of the other elements, and by that, I mean that our region and the Commonwealth of Kentucky in general needs to boost its college going greats Right, we have put ourselves in a position where, in order for us to compete globally and nationally we have to have more college educated individuals than before. That's part of the CP strategic agenda it's part of what the Commonwealth of Kentucky is asking for its part of what I keep hearing from our business and industry partners in terms of talent and workforce needs so what we have to do is boost those college going rates One example that was instituted just this past year was a river city promise we saw from our six high schools There are there are others, but the six high schools as part of the River city promise we saw very, very low levels of college going rates both to gateway and to NKU so why the demographic changes may be a challenge, well, we can do is make sure more of the students that are in the pipeline actually come and choose NKU, Cincinnati state Cincinnati public schools, these are opportunities that we have to build on and I know we've been doing some we've doubled the number of students from Cincinnati public schools in this past year that number only went up from about 30 or so to 70 Ryan is that about right that's one of the largest school districts in the country. Right, we have more to do with overcoming the perception, perhaps for many of the students there about NKU are a great option for them so I think one final thing I would say on building unique ways to establish these relationships and, by the way, we know that we've already had a great relationship with gateway we're working on a renewed you with Cincinnati state we have a great partnership with Cincinnati public schools, I think there are elements we can be doing here, but the one thing I would share that we all can do on a regular basis is to be absolutely strong unabashed advocates for NKU, no matter where we are and what we are saying and doing we should be very proud of saying what NKU has done incredibly well, including what we have done this past year How we've continued to take care of students how we've been mindful of the needs of the region and how we have responded and reacted to all these adversities so you know I throw this statistic out to so many students so many groups when I meet them 82% of our graduates stay in this region and that means that we add to the economic, social and cultural vitality of this region and that's a big part of us of our story as well, so you know, working closely with K through 12 with community colleges and then I mentioned a little bit about the adult learner population Many of them, as I said, have some college, but no degree has to think very broadly about our post traditional students as well that's great the next question kind of follows up to that as we diversify or increase our number of minority students, how are we going to also increase our minority faculty and staff and further, how are we going to retain those diverse faculty and staff yeah, I think that's an important element last fall I think many of us were part of the campus conversation in which we had the climate survey results that we showed with all this stock of how the racial climate is challenging around the country, we can begin at home, we must begin at home and making sure that we are creating a welcoming environment for all our students and all our faculty and staff in particular it's not enough that we take extra efforts at retaining at recruiting talented faculty and staff across the spectrum, and I know we've done some good work on that we continue to work on that itself so a couple of just examples I'll share with you that I know Darryl Peal has been involved in very active and engaged in the bias training for our search committees it starts with how we put the word out to build a strong deep and diverse pool, it can be done it has been done and it must be done right, I mean I've set the stage by saying, if the pool is not diverse and Marina knows this as being one of the co-chairs of one of the searches right don't give me names if we don't have a deep and diverse pool, we're not going to we're not going to settle we're going to make sure that we have this and do this, and it can happen at every level of the institution doesn't mean extra work absolutely but it is, it is work that we must do, we must find multiple avenues in the in the last couple of years I've had conversations with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, with the African American Chamber of Commerce and saying you need to help us be partners to create the narrative that this is an important region that can attract people and make it more welcoming we have connections with other organizations now with refugee connect the Chamber is doing work on new immigrants to make sure that this space is welcoming it's not just coming to campus but it's being part of this larger community that people have to think about and then the point about retaining them is critical, making sure we have our incentives reward structures aligned with that I know the Senate is doing some important work around our top there's a lot of good work that's happening across the campus, so I want to make sure that folks understand that we're not just sitting around this campus community understands the urgency of this work across the spectrum, and this is a priority that will take place Both in terms of recruitment the faculty staff retaining them and making sure that we pay attention to the growing numbers of students of color that we have the privilege to serve right in your presentation, you mentioned strategic investment funding are there plans for a second innovation challenge and, if so, or if not, is there a chance for current projects to get funding again I think that question is for you Bonita I want to vote on that yeah I'd like to talk about that I definitely would love to do a second innovation challenge with because there really was a lot of great interest people really worked hard, and the current projects really are advancing shortly, you will be seeing an update on the impact that those projects have had and so we absolutely will be considering a second one, and we will be assessing the current projects to see which ones could be elevated and scaled across the campus did not intend to answer that but yes the next one is about the cares and the a RP funding, what is the timeline for us receiving that and for processing and utilizing those funds yeah so, the second cares funding, we have received right Mike is shaking his head, so we have received the second cares funding that was about 13.7 million for the university 4 million of that has to be used for student aid and we're in the in fact, Kim just informed me earlier this week that we've started dispersing those funds already there's always a lag and I know that can be frustrating at times successfully, we have spent all of the 4 million that was given in the first Cares that has already been done, we had a stipulation we had to in fact submit a report in February that showed this, so this is a lot of again I want to I don't want to minimize the amount of background work that has to be done Because every dollar we get from the Federal Government means more scrutiny more regulation, more audits, make sure, everything has been done tightly that we haven't broken any rules that we follow the extent so we've already dispense with the first Cares we have started dispensing with the second one, as you saw from my presentation. A big portion of the institutional funds will glow will go to closing the gaps we faced this year and in some of the revenue losses and costs that we've had to bear and then the next round is forthcoming pretty soon the 24 million that we expect to see. I don't know Mike is that our timeline so we are still we are still waiting for one those funds will be transferred, at the same time that we're doing that we're getting some better guidance on what the money is can be spent for and they haven't been quite consistent, the first one was very rigid the second one was more flexible my understanding is the third one, will be a little bit sort of in between in terms of what we can with doing this and that's the other challenge we can start spending any of the other monies until we know the guidance, because otherwise it will be. Oh, we give this money out and we now have to find a way of reclaiming it which becomes a real headache, so we will know, certainly what I will share, though, is we do know that this the third federal stimulus money we have until September of 23 so we have we have you know, two full years so not only this coming year, but the year after to provide to be able to spend that money, so we have some flexibility on that right we probably have time for one last question, and there are a couple about mental health, when will we see the plans from the mental health group and as also as a part of that um, how is the NKU going to pay attention from mental health for African American students. Yeah, so very important work that has happened this past year, and again I want to give kudos to the mental health advisory group for the work that they have done. They are, as I think some of you saw some of the ideas of the campus conversation that occurred, I think, just about a couple of months ago. They gave a very good preview of all the work that's happened all the ideas that they are supporting I mentioned that we have received funding from CP for the TAO online platform, and that should be initiated very soon, it should be ready for our fall semester for our students is coming in, but we also received a campus wide grant that will be getting very shortly from CP Most of that money is going to go into providing support for training for a Norse support Council is my understanding, and I see both Andy and nodding their heads, this is a peer support group that will help our students most students feel very comfortable when they talk to their own peers, as opposed to their counselors. We have hired one of our counselors from a community of color so we have at least made some progress on that front and we're going to evaluate to see how we continue to focus on mental health resources, this is a, this is a major priority my expectation is that we should receive the report, a draft plan from the group certainly by the end of this semester so I'm hoping to get that and be able to share some of the recommendations that they're making and so we're looking forward to that work and it's something that we will be investing in for sure it is 10:30 there were several questions more about payroll and salary increases, but I think we can get those to Lori to get responses back for those.. Absolutely will be happy to do that, but either, thank you for facilitating the Q and A I want to thank these folks who decided to come in and be part of this it's I tell you it certainly feels good for me to see faces here and be able to interact with you, even though all you're doing is nodding and I can't tell if you're frowning or not, but that's okay and I want to thank all the folks who joined us of the spring forum, I want to wish all of you have a good rest of the semester a few more weeks before the end of the semester and commencement. Please continue to take care of yourselves and stay safe, thank you.
