President outlines plan for a better CEU

In response to the Statement of Expectations given by the Associated Students of the College of Eastern Utah last spring, President Ryan Thomas decided to establish a plan for the future of the College benefiting the staff and the students.
To kick off CEU’s plan of growth, Thomas wants to “Establish a baseline … ” He hopes to create a standard in which CEU can work toward, to satisfy the students and staff.
“This is a nice opportunity for us to step back and look at revising of our mission statement.”
Thomas also hopes to create more of a research perspective, instead of “Impressionistic … ” with, “not a lot of hard data.”
Thomas wants to focus on the experience of CEU and “evaluate what things in that experience really make a difference to the student and actually get some data.”
He plans to hire consultants to “collect the data in a variety of ways,” and to look at, the entire range of the student experience from the recruitment efforts through graduation.
The consultants will not be the staff from other schools, but will be professional education consultants from private industry.
As the initial data gathered with the consultants is collected, it will be distributed throughout the school to separate departments. The departments then will begin to discuss the objectives and goals they need to achieve in that semester, and continue to discuss what steps everyone can make in their department to succeed in meeting the objectives.
As each department discusses these objectives, the objectives will be reviewed to ensure that they fall within the mission statement of CEU.
“Most mission statements are ‘feel good statements’ … the problem with that is they don’t give any guidance. What we need is a set of statements that really can give us direction, so we need to move from ‘feel good statements’ to statements that really can help us focus.”
There will be a supervisor over each department who is aware of the objectives that will enforce and encourage that the objective be met. “People who are not succeeding, either improve or get out.”
The changes taking place will heavily involve the students in various ways. One of the ideas that Thomas will institute, will be focus groups that cover several campus issues and lead by a trained staff member and student.
The trained student and staff member will lead the meetings with the subjects that will be given them, and the students that attend these focus groups will be able to give their insight on the matter that is discussed. “The students will be involved at every level.” Thomas states. “Anyone that is impacted by the outcome, needs to be part of the process.”
The plan is in process at this point. The consultants are being reviewed by the president, some meetings with consultants will occur on September 6, depending on how the interviews turn out, the selection process may not be completed until the end of September.
Advertising will take place for the focus groups in a variety of ways, none of which are documented. Although, Thomas did say that he will try and coordinate with the newspaper to bring the CEU community his plan.