As the STEM@DRAKE buildings near completion, work will begin on the Robert D. and Billie Ray Promenade (formerly 27th Street) and parking lot.

Phase 1: The parking lot south of Opperman Hall will be resurfaced and a new entrance off of Forest Avenue will be built beginning around July 15. Completion is scheduled for Aug. 24. Please use the fine arts parking lot during the construction period.

Phase 2: Construction will begin on the new parking lot and the Robert D. and Billie Ray Promenade around Aug. 1. Phase 2 includes a new water main; a new grading plan for the area; and new, improved walkways along the 27th Street corridor. This project should be wrapped up on Dec. 1. Please use the fine arts parking lot or the parking lot located at 25th Street and Forest Avenue during the construction period.

Phase 3: Construction of a new turnaround at the corner of 25th Street and Carpenter Avenue will begin Aug. 29, with completion scheduled for Dec. 1. Phase 3 was added to the construction project to allow incoming students to move into Jewett Residence Hall.

To see where construction is taking place, refer to the 27th Street Logistics Plan.

The following message will be sent to new students moving into Jewett Hall next week:

The Fall 2017 academic term is just around the corner and we are preparing for your return to campus. There are a few bits of information we want to share with you to help with your return to campus. There has been significant progress on the new STEM building this summer. This includes the closing and planned removal of the Jewett Residence Hall parking lot, as well as the closing of 27th Street.
 
Please note that due to the 27th Street and Jewett parking lot closure, we have made arrangements to allow 30-minute vehicle unloading to occur on Painted Street in front of Jewett Residence Hall on Friday, August 25, and Saturday, August 26, between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.  Vehicles may enter from 25th Street onto Carpenter Avenue. Des Moines Police will be available to direct traffic. Cars may unload on the north side of painted street then circle and depart on the south side of painted street. 
 
If you are arriving at a time other than these designated times, you may park in the Olmsted parking lot to unload your vehicle. There will also be a small 15-minute unloading zone located at the corner of Carpenter Avenue and 27th Street.
 
Please note that the Olmsted parking lot is not an overnight parking lot. Students who need overnight parking will need to relocate their vehicles to lot 25A across University Avenue.

The new mailing address for Jewett Hall is 2700 Forest Avenue.

—Jolene Schmidt, Facilities Planning & Management

I’m so pleased to announce that Jenny Tran-Johnson has accepted our offer to serve as interim registrar from July 15 through Sept. 15, 2018.

The vision for the new registrar position is to support students with consistent processes that foster student retention and success. The registrar will work closely with faculty, deans, and other academic and administrative leaders to review academic policies and programs and serve as the official custodian of students’ records, among other duties.

For the coming year, Jenny will focus her efforts on two main projects:

• Developing consistency and cohesiveness in campus-wide policies and processes for student records, with technology solutions as appropriate
• Support advising and retention efforts

Jenny is a Drake alumna, receiving her BA in biology, and she is currently working to complete her PhD in education. She has worked at Drake since 2008, when she began as director of student programs. In 2013, she became the assistant dean, student support, in the College of Arts and Sciences. As assistant dean, she served as an academic adviser, helped create academic plans to support students’ goals and on-time graduation, oversaw orientation and retention programs for the college, and worked closely with Student Records to provide graduation clearance and manage degree audits.

Jenny has also been an active member of the Drake community beyond her day-to-day responsibilities, including serving on a variety of campus-wide committees, as a CREW Scholars faculty mentor, and most recently as chair of All Staff Council. She has also instructed several courses in the LEAD program, for which she also served as the interim director this past spring.

Clearly, Jenny is the right person for this interim position, having earned the respect of colleagues across campus for her intelligent, thoughtful, and reasoned approach to improving processes. I look forward to working with her to establish this new position on campus.

In addition, Kevin Moenkhaus’ title will change to associate registrar, and he will continue to focus on internal operations, including the catalog, implementation of Drake Online, and Banner XE installation.

—Sue Mattison, Provost

The next step in advancing the development between 25th and 27th Street along the south side of University Avenue is removal of the five Drake-owned rental homes. Since the beginning of this process, Drake neighborhood representatives, faculty, and staff prioritized the concept of moving one or more of these homes. The ideal outcome would be to transition some of the homes to another site, transforming them from rental units to affordable, single-family homes in or near the Drake Neighborhood. Interested buyers are working closely with moving experts and the City of Des Moines to finalize plans and their commitments to this project.

From a structural and safety standpoint, not all of the homes are good candidates for relocation and will instead be taken down. We are working with Habitat for Humanity to ensure as much repurposing of materials as possible is accomplished. The adjacent parking lots will continue to be available for Drake’s use—we don’t anticipate that changing until 2018. Watch OnCampus for updates and information, including project schedule.

—Venessa Macro, Chief Administration Officer

Drake is excited to announce its new master’s program in applied behavior analysis. This program will deliver a curriculum, including practicum experience, that prepares its graduates to sit for the Behavior Analyst Certification Board’s® (BACB®) exam so that they may become Board Certified Behavior Analysts® (BCBAs®). In addition to its master’s program, Drake will also have a certificate program for individuals who currently possess at least a master’s degree in psychology or education to complete in preparation for a career as a certified behavior analyst.

The master’s program will launch Fall 2017 and is a five-semester or two-year program (nine credit hours per semester or 45 hours total). Coursework will be offered nights to accommodate various work schedules. The certificate program is three semesters (nine credit hours per semester or 27 hours total).

The program’s vision and mission is to grow the number of behavior analysts within Iowa to meet the increasing demands for professionals within schools and clinical settings who can:

• Work with children and adults with autism and other developmental disabilities
• Treat challenging behavior in various populations
• Work with others to increase compliance with treatment strategies and recommendations
• Teach target audiences new skills and promote positive behavior

For more information, please see http://www.drake.edu/aba/ or contact Maria Valdovinos (maria.valdovinos@drake.edu).

—Maria Valdovinos, Department of Psychology

Earlier this year, an opening in Human Resources and a subsequent unsuccessful search for an associate director prompted us to carefully evaluate HR structure and operations. Three key strategies for advancing a more impactful HR organization emerged as a result of this review: (1) automation and streamlining of major processes; (2) building proactive collaborative partnerships between HR professionals and the campus community; and (3) greater focus on learning and development.

A new HR structure will support these strategies by focusing effort and expertise within two functional teams: HR Operations and HR Partners.

HR Operations Team—Compensation, Benefits, Technology
The HR Operations Team will be responsible for compensation, benefits, onboarding processes, and all HR technology systems. Gary Johnson will lead the HR Operations team as the director, HR operations, continuing his significant efforts in these areas. This team will advance the strategy of automating and streamlining major processes, such as benefits administration. The group will also be working to support efforts around compensation analysis, benefits design, and onboarding.

HR Partners Team—Recruitment, Engagement, Development & Employee Relations
The HR Partners team will be dedicated to issues of recruitment, employee engagement, professional development, performance management, employee relations, wellness/work-life programs, and employee recognition. This team will counsel managers and leaders on workplace trends and best people practices—with a focus on professional development and employee engagement. The team will also be responsible for policies and programs aimed at sustaining a positive, inclusive, fair, and supportive working environment.
The HR Partners team will be led by a director, HR partner services. This position was reconfigured from the prior associate director position and is currently posted. This position, as well as the director, HR operations, will report directly to the chief administration officer.

In the coming weeks, we will share more about these initiatives and the structure within Human Resources. The proposed HR organizational chart can be found on the Employee tab of blueView on the Human Resources channel. Watch for more details about the HR team roles in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact Venessa Macro at 271-3962 or venessa.macro@drake.edu.

—Venessa Macro, Chief Administration Officer

This summer, important work will begin on elevating and energizing the Drake University brand. A stronger branding effort is necessary in order to better tell the Drake story, and to help boost prospective student inquiries, alumni engagement, development efforts, and other facets essential to institutional growth and success, including campus pride.

University Communications, the Office of Admission, and the Office of the President partnered on a competitive review process during Spring semester. Within the past few weeks, the University selected and hired 160over90, a creative agency with extensive expertise in consumer branding and higher education. To learn more about how 160over90 will approach its work with our institution, watch this short video prepared by the firm following its pitch presentation.

In the coming weeks, the discovery phase will get underway, beginning with focus groups and involving diverse perspectives from across campus. That step will be followed by a blend of quantitative and qualitative research designed to better understand how key audiences in the metro and across the region perceive the Drake brand. These findings will inform how the Drake brand should evolve, and help shape the strategy for elevating the University’s brand heading into the next academic year and beyond.

Look to OnCampus in the months ahead for periodic updates on this initiative.

—Dave Remund, University Communications

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications voted unanimously at its spring meeting on April 29 to reaccredit the Drake School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The site visit team in February had recommended that SJMC be reaccredited, finding compliance on all nine standards related to such areas as curriculum, assessment, student services, and faculty scholarship. The team’s report cited “a hard-working, productive and dedicated faculty who are passionate about teaching;” “award-winning students who are professionally oriented;” “focus on diversity imbued throughout the curriculum;” and “the ” ‘Drake way’ system of advising, which focuses on lifelong mentorship between students/alumni and faculty.”

The reaccreditation process occurs at six-year intervals. There are currently 110 accredited JMC programs in the United States; only 15 of those programs are at private institutions.

—Kathleen Richardson, Dean, SJMC

On March 23, ITS held a town hall meeting to provide an update on what we accomplished last year, and what we’re focusing on for the year to come. It was a well-attended event, but for those of you who were unable to attend, I’m going to recap some of the highlights from that presentation.

ITS Organization
The realigned ITS organization comprises four primary areas.

Campus Relations—Led by Jerome Hilscher, Campus Relations is the face of ITS. The campus community is most likely to interact directly with their staff with personal computing issues, academic technology support, video production, and classroom support.

Infrastructure—Chris Mielke’s team manages and supports the University’s large-scale physical technology including more than 250 servers, 4,500 wired network ports, 500 wireless access points, 800 telephones, 2 data centers, and more than 340 terabytes of storage.

Professional Services—This team, managed by Keren Fiorenza, provides coordinated service and support for the University’s complex enterprise applications like Banner, business intelligence, and blueView, among others. It also ensures that ITS’ complex projects are well-executed.

Administration—The Administration team includes staff who manage the University’s IT budget (Alicia Mann), coordinate centralized technology purchasing (Monita Jackson), ensure effective campus communication (Carla Herling), and protect the University’s electronic information (Peter Lundstedt).

The goal of our reorganization efforts has been to maximize the value that ITS provides to the University.

This past year
Over the past year, we have been able to demonstrate ITS’ value in several ways:

• Nearly 1/3 of all ITS staff are now 100 percent dedicated to academic support.
• The campus wireless network now functions at the highest capacity available today.
• Approximately 80 percent of all malicious email sent to campus is blocked before reaching our inboxes.
• ITS invested $350,000 this year in replacement of faculty and staff computers.
• Over $30,000 has been saved due to print jobs that were sent to print queues but never released at printers.

This summer and beyond
ITS is working on projects that we think will continue to improve campus technology and further maximize the value that ITS provides to students, faculty, and staff.

• In the STEM buildings:
  —New telephones and network infrastructure
  —Instructional technology installation in 37 classrooms, labs, and other spaces
  —Electronic access to building doors
• Personal cloud file storage for everyone on campus
• An additional $100,000 in classroom improvements
• A pilot laptop checkout kiosk program
• Two large, multi-year projects:
  —Upgrading from Banner 8 to Banner 9 (a complete redesign along with significant changes to the user interface)
  —Replacing blueView with a new online communication and collaboration system

Finally, I want to reiterate ITS’ commitments to you. We will:

1. Reduce our backlog of service requests and maintain overall lower levels of open issues.
2. Focus on providing reliable enterprise technology services.
3. Ensure that we meet our promised response and resolution timeframes.
4. Partner with you to find reasonable and supportable long-term solutions.
5. Strive to understand issues and requests before we begin work.
6. Confirm that we have completed your request to your satisfaction.
7. Improve our communication related to support requests and technology changes.
8. Work as a team to provide technology-related services on behalf of Drake.

Regular status updates on these and other upcoming projects will be provided in future issues of OnCampus.

I hope you have a safe, happy, and productive summer.

—Chris Gill, Chief Information Technology Officer