Administration continues strategic planning
Chief Operating Officer Kara Kolomitz and Provost Richard Ice are co-leading the upcoming strategic planning process. Kolomitz and Ice will host focus groups after Easter break for faculty, students and staff to help determine the direction of the joint institutions.
As CSB+SJU students prepare for the end of spring semester, campus administration is focusing on the future with their strategic planning initiatives.
President Brian Bruess sent an email last week titled “Planning for Our Future,” outlining the timeline of the strategic planning process. By the end of the semester, Bruess said the team will begin taking the information they learn from various meetings they will hold in the coming weeks to begin formulating the plan this summer. In the fall, he said they will be ready to share the full plan and begin implementing it. The email also mentioned that Chief Operating Officer Kara Kolomitz and Provost Richard Ice are the co-leaders of the planning process and will be spearheading efforts going forward. Kolomitz said this new plan has been a long time coming, and it will serve as a way to give direction to CSB+SJU in the next few years.
“Most institutions establish a strategic plan that is anywhere from three years to five years long, and it really marks off all the goals and objectives they have for the university or college,” Kolomitz said. “We haven’t had one since 2015.”
Academic Affairs sent an announcement from Kolomitz and Ice on Monday inviting the CSB+SJU community to join multiple strategic planning sessions from April 11-12. Throughout both days, there are specific times set up for different groups of people on campus, such as faculty, leadership and students, among others. The email stated the focus groups are highly encouraged and the feedback from them is “essential” for going forward with the planning process.
“The next piece in our prep work is hearing from our most valuable community members,” Kolomitz said. “Hearing from them, in their real time lived experiences, is really important.”
Kolomitz said the full process of creating this plan will be a critical opportunity for students to have their specific ideas and concerns heard and responded to by administration.
“All those ideas that students say, ‘why don’t we do this,’ or ‘I always wished we did that,’ those things are what we want to hear,” Kolomitz said.
Wesley Kirchner, SJU junior, said he wants to learn more in the coming weeks about some clearer goalposts for the strategic planning process. He said he hopes that while administration continues to visit and gather information from alumni, the focus will also be on informing students on the specific progress that the planning team makes. Kirchner mentioned enrollment as an issue he hopes to see addressed next fall under the new plan.
“As they say in the email, ‘a common theme in these discussions have been of hope and promise,’ and part of that for me is I would really love to see more focus on boosting our enrollment numbers,” he said. “We want this school to exist in a couple years, and without students, we don’t do that.”
CSB junior Clair Moonen said she’ll also be on the lookout for more information shared from administration in the coming weeks, like what’s been recently released in announcements from the president and other campus officials.
“I commend the president for shedding light on issues that students haven’t traditionally been privy to, like trustee meetings and academic meetings, as well as this plan,” she said. “I know we can’t know a lot of things right now in the early stages of it, but it is nice to know something is happening.”
Moonen went on to say that one of her hopes for this plan is that it will include ways for students to be more involved in higher level campus decisions.
“I think it would be nice to outline things like the Integrations Curriculum and the Academic Program Prioritization process in a way that students easily understand and give students more insight on how those decisions get made,” she said.
As the school hosts the upcoming focus groups next week, Kolomitz said she hopes students and faculty engage as fully as possible with the process so the CSB+SJU community is well-informed and supplementing the plan as it evolves.
“We don’t want students to say in the fall, ‘wait, there’s a strategic plan?’ We want them to know about it and be intimately involved,” Kolomitz said. “Student voice is the most impactful, meaningful way that colleges can understand their work and find out how to make their work better.”