DK Ranch donation goes to the University of Arizona

By R. Oliphant
Tuesday, July 21st, 2015

University of Arizona expanding its footprint in Northern Arizona

The Steele Foundation announced Monday that it selected the University of Arizona  rather than  Yavapai College  for its donation of the 45.7 acre DK Ranch along Oak Creek. However, Yavapai College has been granted access to the property through a reciprocal program partnership with the university.

The Steele Foundation selected UA out of several local colleges and universities who had vied for the Ranch It is  valued at $2.6 million.

According to Angela Gonzales, Senior Reporter, Phoenix Business Journal, the University of Arizona will use the property for its proposed veterinary school, among other programs. You may read Ms. Gonzales complete report by clicking here.  The Journal was told that every student within UA’s Veterinary Medical and Surgical Program will be able to live on the property for at least six weeks to complete rotations on ranch management, riparian ecosystems, wildlife medicine and management as well as other programs.  The veterinary program is scheduled to open in August 2016.

Tom Tracey, reporting for the Verde Independent, interviewed Dr. Penelope Wills about the decision.  His complete article may be accessed by clicking here.  Dr. Wills’ told Mr. Tracey that  “[w]e congratulate the University of Arizona on being selected to receive this magnificent donation. We understand that The Steele Foundation cited as a strong point in U of A’s proposal their partnership with and commitment to working with Yavapai College. We have a solid relationship with Dr. Shane Burgess, dean of the University of Arizona Agriculture and Life Sciences department, and I’m confident that many of the programs that we had included in our proposal will be part of the plan going forward.” 

The proposal-period for deciding who should receive the ranch generated anger from Dr. Wills who charged, without naming the Sedona 
Redrock News, that a cartoon on its editorial page might interfere with Yavapai College receiving the ranch.  At the time of the Steele Foundation announced its decision,  it stated it felt this was a “win-win for everyone involved.”  D K ranch map

 

 

Categories : Gift of ranch

College Performing Arts Website promotes Republican Women invitation to radical speaker Dinesh D’Souza

By R. Oliphant
Saturday, July 18th, 2015

Should a Community College website promote and support indirectly political programs not associated with the College and student education?

The Republican Women of Prescott invited radical right wing speaker Dinesh D’Souza to attend a political program at the Yavapai College Performing Arts Center that features  Dinesh D’Souza on Tuesday, July 28 at 7:30 p.m.  While the College has a right to rent to any political party, should it promote the political event on its web site and collect tickets for the showing?  Common sense suggests it should not.  In today’s political world, it should stay completely neutral.  Furthermore, if it invites a radical right winger, then it should offer the same opportunity to a radical left winger.

According to Reuters, the right-wing media star who will speak at the Performing Arts Center  “was sentenced [in September, 2014]  to spend eight months in a community confinement center” as part of five years of probation for violating federal campaign finance laws. In January, 2014 D’Souza was indicted for arranging excessive campaign contributions to the Senate campaign of his friend, Wendy Long. After spending several months protesting the charges and claiming he was being unfairly targeted for his political beliefs, D’Souza pleaded guilty in May, 2014.

In a May, 2015 article,  Evgenia Peretz writes that  after D’Sousa made “wild arguments about race, he would make even wilder arguments about 9/11, in the 2007 book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11—whose title summed up its thesis. The real reason terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers, he wrote, was anger stirred by the left—Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Planned Parenthood, Brokeback Mountain, and The Vagina Monologues.”

Peretz also wrote in the article that in a book D’Sousa titled,  “In The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010),”  he wrote that President Obama “had a single goal: to avenge the injustices inflicted by colonialism upon his father’s Kenyan homeland, by intentionally weakening America’s economy and power in the world. The book was written in two months, he boasted in the introduction. And with sentences like these, it showed: “The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dream of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s—a polygamist who abandoned his wives, drank himself into a stupor, and bounced around on two iron legs … raging against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions. This philandering, inebriated, African socialist is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” The conservative Weekly Standard called the book “lunacy.”  You may read the entire Vanity Fair article by clicking here.

The following shows how the College website is being used for this program.  One would think that the Administration would exercise better judgment.

website 1

 

Categories : Politics

YAVAPAI COLLEGE BASEBALL COACH RYAN COUGILL named a 2015 American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA)/Diamond Regional Coach of the Year t

By R. Oliphant
Saturday, July 18th, 2015

Yavapai Community College Prescott campus baseball coach Ryan Cougill named a 2015 American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA)/Diamond Regional Coach of the Year on July 5

Cougill guided the Yavapai College — Prescott campus — Roughriders to a National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) Division 1, Region 1 championship and a Western District title this spring en route to the program’s first berth into the Junior College World Series in nine years. The team lost in the first round of play.

baseball 4The ABCA, founded in 1945, is the primary professional organization for baseball coaches at the amateur level. Its more than 6,600 members represent all 50 states and 23 countries.

Since its initial meeting of 27 college baseball coaches in June 1945, Association membership has broadened to include eight divisions: NCAA Division I, II and III, NAIA, Junior College (NJCAA and Pacific Association Division), High School and Youth.

Categories : Baseball team

Prescott Film Festival returns to Yavapai Community College — Prescott Campus

By R. Oliphant
Saturday, July 18th, 2015

Prescott Film Festival returns to Yavapai College next week from Wednesday to Sunday, July 22-26

The Prescott Film Festival Founder and Executive Director, Helen Stephenson, said the Prescott festival has grown incrementally every year. She said she is hoping to fill the Community College’s  performing arts center on the Prescott campus. She said that “the festival has something for everyone.” Prescott film festival

Recall that in 2014 the Community College shut down tight the Sedona Center’s internationally recognized film school.  It had participated annually in the Sedona Internal Film Festival.  The Sedona festival was founded in 1994. After closing the Sedona Center, Ms. Stephenson was put in charge of what was left of the Center by Dr. Penelope Wills. She remains in charge as of the writing of this note. 

Categories : Sedona Campus, Underserving the Verde Valley

Kids film program

By R. Oliphant
Wednesday, July 15th, 2015

Yavapai College Kid’s Film premiered July 15 on Verde Valley Campus

The world premiere of Strange Island, the Yavapai College Kid’s Film Project, was screened Wednesday, July 15 at 9:45 a.m. and again at 11 a.m. in Room M-202 at the Verde Valley Campus. Led by instructor Edward Darkslade (also known as James Davis), children ages 7 to 10 learned how to create a 30-minute film from pre-production to premier. The summer class taught cinematic skills such as effects, scoring, screenplay writing, prop work and design, green screen and puppetry.

childrens film programUnfortunately, the Blog did not receive notice of the event until after it had occurred. Sorry Blog readers.

Categories : College for Kids

C Administration of Justice program ranked

By R. Oliphant
Wednesday, July 15th, 2015

College program trails Rio Salado, ASU Skysong, Coconino, and Arizona Western

A website, CorrectionalOfficer.org, ranked five administration of justice programs in Arizona.  Of the 5 that were ranked, Yavapai Community College finished last.  Rio Salado was ranked number one and was followed by  ASU Skysong, Coconino, and Arizona Western. There were 18 programs analyzed. 

In response to the ranking  the College said that “[w]ith the heavy focus on having program completers, this is a marvelous stat. This stat [ranking last of 5 in the ranking] alone shows how much more effective we are at that goal than many of our larger competitors.”  

vector scales of justice and gavel

Yavapai programs included in the evaluation are Associate of Applied Science in Administration of Justice degree, Certificate in Law Enforcement and Corrections, Certificate in Justice Studies and Certificate in Criminal Justice and Security, as well as the college’s Detention Academy operated in cooperation with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office. The college graduated 49 students in these programs during the 2012-13 school year.

How many of you knew the Community College operated a “Detention Academy?”  You may read the rankings taken from the CorrectionalOfficer.org website by clicking here.

The Blog notes that according to the Fall 2015 course catalog there are  14 courses in Administration of Justice with 9 are online and 5  face-to-face classes  on the Prescott campus.  The Administration of Justice courses offered  in the Verde Valley consist of 12 courses:  9 are online and 3 are taken in Prescott.

The Detention Academy is apparently offered only in the summer. 

 

 

 

Categories : Detention Academy

Yavapai College Soccer Clinics scheduled only on West side of the County

By R. Oliphant
Saturday, July 11th, 2015

Historic athletic discrimination against the East part of the County continues

All of the athletic teams and athletic facilities for these teams are kept on the West side of the County.  Summer athletic programs for youngsters are likewise made available by the Community College only on the West side of the County.  Here, for example, is the announcement of the soccer clinic to be held in Prescott Valley.SOCCER 2

Friday, August 14-Free Yavapai College Soccer Clinic

Yavapai College soccer team members will conduct a free clinic from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at Mountain Valley Park in Prescott Valley. Boys and girls ages five to 16 are eligible to participate. No registration required. If possible, participants should bring their own soccer ball. All participants will receive a special soccer souvenir gift. 

 

 

Categories : Soccer team, Underserving the Verde Valley

Verde Valley Board Advisory committee requests college financial data

By R. Oliphant
Saturday, July 11th, 2015

Will College provide details or continue hiding them?

The Verde Valley Board Advisory Committee voted unanimously at its July 1 meeting to request operating and administrative expenses from the Community College administrators for the Verde campus over the last two years. The question is, will the administrators provide this data to the Committee?

Hiding dataIn a story by Verde Valley Independent reporter Tom Tracey, Dr. Clint Ewell, the VP  for finance and administrative services, responded that  “We need time to see what we can provide for them. As far as the information being anything new, this has been requested by other groups in the past, as well. The problem is our accounting system is setup by function and account.”  “We really don’t collect information by location, so we will have to work on manually pulling that information out.” (You may read the entire story in the Verde Independent by clicking here.)

Ewell’s response is the same one he has given Verde Valley requests for this information over the last 18 months.  The Blog hopes that the Committee will be more successful than the groups that have tried to pry this information out of the College in the past.

Categories : Advisory Committees

Summer Aviation program struggles for enrollment

By R. Oliphant
Saturday, July 11th, 2015

VA crackdown on College may be one cause for poor summer aviation enrollment

The aviation program at the Community College Career and Technical Education Center showed low enrollment in several classes for the 2015 summer session. In checking the courses that were offered and scheduled to begin in May, there were several courses that ended up with 4 or fewer students. For example, the Private Pilot Airplane Ground course had one student sign up for it. It could accommodate 24 students. Helicopter Ground I had 4 students; Commercial pilot Ground 1 had 1 student; Flight instrument air ground had 3 students; Pilot preventative maintenance had 1 student; Commercial Pilot Air Trans had 2 students; Airplane pilot preventative maintenance had 1 student.

Recall that the College claimed that it had 40 students waiting to take education courses in May of this year when it received the letter from the VA stating it would no longer fund VA training in the aviation.

The chart below was taken from the College registration module and is believed to be reasonably accurate. The low enrollment may be the result of the Veterans Administration crack-down on the College for failing to meet the minimum percentage of non veterans in aviation courses and refusing to fund an incoming group of about 24 vets.  When you see 24/24, this means that the course had 24 student seats and that no one signed up for the course.

 

 

Aviation enrollment summer 2015

 

Categories : Flight school

Investigation by Los Angeles Times triggered VA crackdown on Yavapai College flight school

By R. Oliphant
Tuesday, July 7th, 2015

Claims are that Yavapai College was charging “exorbitant fees” for the training and failing to meet VA minimum enrollment requirements

In a series of articles published in the Los Angeles Times in March, 2014, and another on June 27, it was pointed out that Yavapai College and Southern Utah were college programs that charged the VA exorbitant fees for flight training. The VA adjusted its enforcement of a regulation that requires flight school programs to have 15 percent of its positions filled by civilians. It then refused to fund any new VA applicants for Yavapai’s flight program.

According to the Times, the helicopter flight companies were exploiting a loophole in the newest GI Bill to train veterans entirely at government expense, with no cap on what they could charge. The programs were cited for violating a requirement that nonveterans make up at least 15% of students in VA-funded programs, a rule aimed at ensuring that programs don’t exist solely on GI Bill money. The VA hadn’t been enforcing the rule.

The programs at Yavapai and Southern Utah often trained veterans in expensive helicopters rather than the basic two- and four-seat models that other students used. In comparison to the charges at Yavapai College, at the Chandler-Gilbert Community College near Phoenix, helicopter training costs about $110,000 for two years. At Yavapai the average was $96,176 for one year of training, with four students costing between $205,189 and $232,474. Training usually went for two years at Yavapai College.

Legislation introduced in Congress this year would close the loophole by capping yearly tuition and fees at $20,235, the limit placed on all private colleges and universities. Current students would be exempt from the cap for two years. The bill has been approved by the House Committee on Veterans Affairs and could reach the House floor for a vote this summer.
This Blog story was based on information from the (click here for complete story)  Los Angeles Times, June 27,  and the (click here for complete story)  Havasu News-Herald of June 30, 2015.

Categories : Flight school
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