The Digest
What’s Happening at KVCC
What’s below in this edition
Work week shortens (Page 1)‘Music’ to end (Pages 8/9)
Scholarship dinner (Pages 1-3)Solving problems (Pages 9/10)
‘Promise’ harvest (Page 4)Local resorts (Pages 10-12)
Sports history (Pages 4/5)Motown movie (Pages 12/13)
Canine champ (Page 5)Relay for Life (Page 13)
PTK’s No. 1 (Pages 5/6) ‘Wright’ flight (Pages 13/14)
Animation for youth (Page 6) Pond project (Pages 14/15)
New ‘Blue Line’ (Pages 6/7)IU partnership (Pages 15/16)
Weather data (Page 7) YW honors students (Page 16)
Building an ‘org’ (Pages 7/8) And finally (Page 16/17)
☻☻☻☻☻☻
Summer hourshere, impact food service
Effective today through Aug. 25, KVCC is operating under “summer hours.”
On Monday through Thursday, the work week is from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with a 30-minute break for lunch. And on Fridays during that period, the college shuts down at noon. Work hours are from 8 to noon with no lunch break.
The summer schedule also impacts food service on the Texas Township Campus. The cafeteria hours will be 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and 7:30 to noon on Friday.
Those operations of the colleges with special, evening and weekend hours - - facilities services, information technologies, the M-TEC, and the museum — will be adjusting their individual schedules to ensure coverage.
The KVCC Office of Human Resources reports that employees will be paid for 40 hours on the job even though the work week will be reduced to 36 hours during that 14-week period.
Friday is ticket deadline for scholarship dinner
Friday (May 26) is the deadline to buy tickets for the KVCC fund-raiser for scholarships that will feature remarks by John W. Brown, who took the Stryker Corp. to the Fortune 500 list.
“Opportunities for Education,” the KVCC Foundation’s second event to boost scholarship dollars, is set for 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 31, at the Radisson Plaza Hotel & Suites. Tickets are $95 each. A corporate sponsorship for a table of eight is available for $1,200. A large portion of the price of admission is tax-deductible.
Steve Doherty, director of development, said more than 160 tickets have been sold and there is limited seating.
Brown’s resume includes taking the Stryker Corp. from annual sales of $22.7 million in 1977 to placement on the Fortune 500 list and yearly sales exceeding $3 billion within 25 years. Stryker’s annual sales are now nearing $5 billion.
Now semi-retired as non-executive chairman of Stryker’s board, Brown will speak about “Lessons Learned” at the foundation’s second fund-raising dinner.
KVCC administrators, faculty and staff are invited to take part in this second annual event to build the foundation’s scholarship funds.
“This will be an evening,” Doherty said, “full of inspiration, excellent dining, common-sense commentary and personal anecdotes that apply to both business and everyday life, and the knowledge that participants will be helping students and the college in producing quality graduates and an effective workforce.”
Joining the foundation in sponsoring the fund-raiser are the Fairfield Broadcasting Co. (WKZO, WQSN and WQLR-FM), the Radisson in downtown Kalamazoo, Greenleaf Trust, and Fifth Third Bank.
Brown, who got his start in higher education at a two-year college in his home state of Tennessee, was raised on a hard-scrabble “boondocks” farm just outside of Paris near the Kentucky border.
His early memories of a work ethic were of steering a plow behind two mules.
While hanging on to that plow, he realized that education would be his ticket out of the river-bottom land of the Tennessee Valley Authority. At Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, he majored in pre-engineering and met his future spouse, Rosemary. They are the parents of two grown daughters.
After earning his degree in chemical engineering at Auburn University in 1957, Brown launched his professional career initially with an aluminum manufacturer and then with the company destined to be Morton Thiokol.
Brown moved closer to Kalamazoo in 1965 when he joined the Squibb Co., a major pharmaceutical competitor of The Upjohn Co. In addition to rising to the post of assistant to the president, Brown was also a new-product coordinator, working with manufacturing and marketing divisions to bring Squibb innovations into the mainstream.
In 1972, when the parent company purchased Edward Weck & Co., Brown was tapped to serve as the subsidiary’s president and was in that position when the late Burton Upjohn of Kalamazoo would not take no for an answer and recruited him to join Stryker in January of 1977 as president and chief executive officer.
The year before Brown began calling Kalamazoo home, Stryker sales were pegged at $17 million with earnings at $1.1 million. By 1987, those corresponding figures were $148 million and $12.7 million.
“A gentleman’s agreement I had with the Stryker board,” Brown told an interviewer, “was that eventually we would take the company public. It’s one way to establish the true value of a company, but I also had a personal motive. I always had the dream that if I ever got to run a company, I wanted it to be in the public arena.”
That all came about on March 28, 1979, when Stryker filed for its initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, proposing the sale of 2.1 million shares of stock, which represented less than 40 percent of the entity’s holdings.
The rest has become corporate and Fortune 500 history. By 1980, Brown was chairman of the Stryker board. He began his phase-out in 2003 when Stephen P. MacMillan was appointed his imminent successor effective Jan. 1, 2005.
KVCC President Marilyn Schlack will also have some podium duty May 31 as she offers perspectives about how scholarships give students the boost they need to become productive citizens and workers, the kinds that tend to give back later in their lives.
The KVCC Foundation was formed in 1980 and has accumulated nearly $8 million in assets. Its mission is to enhance educational opportunities and the learning environment at the college by supporting the academic, literary and scientific activities of KVCC students and faculty.
Its assists the college’s Honors Program, minority and non-traditional students through scholarships and awards grants that promote innovative approaches to learning.
“Because KVCC’s tuition is the lowest among the state’s 28 community colleges and fees are practically non-existent,” Doherty said, “scholarship dollars take students a very, very long way toward their goals. We want to help even more in the coming years, now that state and federal sources of scholarships are either drying up or are in jeopardy because of budget cuts.”
In the current academic year, the foundation was able to assist almost 400 students through scholarships amounting to $200,500 that covered not only tuition, fees, books and supplies, but also child-care and transportation costs that students face in pursuing a degree or a new career.
“That represents a minimal fraction of the dollar value of scholarships that are available through the KVCC Office of Financial Aid,” Doherty said. “That type of assistance has federal and state sources that carry restrictions. So do some of those scholarships established by organizations or individuals. And all of those are very important.
“Ours, however, are more open-ended, less restrictive, and available to a broader representation of students who choose to attend KVCC,” Doherty said. “They are what our ‘Opportunities for Education’ event is all about.”
While the unprecedented, nationally recognized gift to this community that is The Kalamazoo Promise is a blessing to families living in the Kalamazoo Public Schools district, Doherty said, during a typical semester no more than 15 percent of KVCC’s enrollment are Kalamazoo graduates.
That means a large segment of the other 85 percent still need various levels of scholarship assistance.
For more information about the fund-raiser, about how far scholarship dollars go at KVCC, and about tickets for spending an evening with one of Michigan’s and the nation’s best corporate-success stories, contact Doherty or administrative assistant Diane Kurtz at 488-4442. Their e-mail addresses are and .
‘Promise’ recipients promised to KVCC
Ninety soon-to-be graduates of Kalamazoo Central and Loy Norrix high schools intend to use their Kalamazoo Promise scholarships to enroll at KVCC, according to the May 11 edition of The Kalamazoo Gazette.
Overall, about two-thirds of the 300 students applying for “Promise” assistance so far intend to pursue higher education at either KVCC or Western Michigan University. No. 3 on that list is Michigan State University.
The Kalamazoo Public Schools has reported that about 75 percent of the district’s approximately 550 seniors can qualify for the “Promise,” which, thanks to anonymous donors, is offering 2006 graduates from 100 to 65 percent of their tuition and fees to attend a state university or college for four years.
As of mid-May, about 70 percent of the eligible students have applied. The remaining 125 who haven’t filed applications are being contacted. Some of the seniors had not picked a college yet, or have opted to go out of state or enroll in a private school.
Last Wednesday, seniors from Kalamazoo’s high schools were brought to the Texas Township Campus to be introduced to and briefed about the college’s technical programs and the degrees that they offer.
Of the 59 graduating seniors at high schools throughout Kalamazoo County who received $750 scholarships from the Excellence in Education program, two have indicated they will attend KVCC – Jessica Van Goeye of Comstock High School will major in dental hygiene and Andrew Moravek of Galesburg-Augusta High School will enroll in the pre-pharmacology program.
The seniors, parents and selected teachers were honored at the annual Excellence in Education dinner hosted each year by the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency.
Of their colleges of choice, 15 have selected the University of Michigan, seven each will attend WMU and Michigan State, and two will go to Calvin College. These four and KVCC were the only schools in double figures among the 21 that were indicated as college destinations. Ten of the students reported they had not yet decided on a college.
Women’s teams make college history
For the first time in the college’s history, three teams in the women’s sports program qualified for their national tournaments.
As reported by Graham Couch in the May 17 edition of The Kalamazoo Gazette, the milestone was accomplished when the women’s softball squad won its district tournament and qualified to play in the National Junior College Athletic Association Division II Softball Tournament against Murray State College from Oklahoma in Normal, Ill.
In the interview, KVCC athletic director Dick Shilts credited the efforts and skills of the three coaches. “The best thing I do is put the right people in the right situations,'' he said.
Earlier in the athletic year, the Lady Cougars volleyball and basketball teams reached that national level of achievement, a first for Shilts in his 27 years at the college.
Couch reported that the three coaches – 11-year veteran Ron Welch in basketball, Terry Reynolds in softball, and Jason Reese in volleyball – all used the same simple, yet easier-said-than-done formula:
● Recruit the best female athletes in Southwest Michigan high schools and convince them to stay around home. Thirty-eight of the 41 women on the teams are from within a two-hour drive of KVCC. Twenty-two of them are from the greater Kalamazoo area.
KVCC’er has top dog
Sue Nemedi and her Belgian Tervuren brought home the top award from a national competition for that breed staged earlier this month in Carlisle, Pa.
On the heels of being one of only three entries to pass the tracking-dog test earlier in the American Belgian Tervuren Club National Specialty, she and Phoebe competed in the obedience category. Among only 13 dog-trainer teams to make it through the first level, the duo went on to register 198 out of a perfect score of 200.
However, that was only good enough for a first-place tie in what is called “High in Trial (HIT),” which is the equivalent to what is known as “Best of Show” in canine competitions.
“I had watched that other dog win a runoff for first place in his class,” said the KVCC student records and office manager, “and he did some fantastic heeling work. However, Phoebe once again showed me how well she can heel, and we won the HIT.”
Nemedi wasn’t quite done. She and her second dog, Rumor, ran in the “Terv Two Miler” race to cap off the competition. During a routine week, Nemedi will jog up to 10 miles, but she plans to up that to 15 miles per week.
In Carlisle, they finished in the top 10. “And I finished second in my age group,” she said. (Note: While the age-group information was readily furnished, The Digest’s Mr. Nice Guy publisher-editor-circulation manager chose to censor it.).
Rumor accompanies Nemedi on her runs and seems to enjoy the exercise, so there will be no complaints filed with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
“Many people told me that it doesn’t get any better than this at a national specialty,” she said. “To have my first ‘terv’ at our first national pass her first tracking test on the first try, and then to go HIT is pretty much unheard of.”
Morrison saluted as PTK adviser
KVCC’s Lynne Morrison, who shepherds the Alpha Rho Nu Chapter of Phi Theta Kappa on campus, received the national organization’s Paragon Award as the top new adviser in the country at the group’s international convention in Seattle, Wash., last month.
This year, nearly 500 chapters competed for the society's coveted awards that recognize excellence in programs that promote the Phi Theta Kappa hallmarks of scholarship, leadership, service and fellowship. Exceptional members, officers, advisers, college administrators and chapters are recognized annually at the PTK international convention for their achievements.
The honor society for two-year colleges has recognized academic excellence since 1918. The society has more than 1,200 chapters at community, technical and community colleges in all 50 of the United States, in Canada, Germany, U. S. territories, the Republic of Palau and the British Virgin Islands, making it the largest and most prestigious honor society serving two-year colleges.
Membership is based primarily upon academic achievement. The organization offers a myriad of opportunities for scholarships, intellectual enrichment and personal development through programs based on the hallmarks.
Animation workshops for youths
The fundamentals and advanced stages of the art of animation, and how that all applies in the creation of video games, will be covered in a trio of three-day workshops in June at the KVCC Center for New Media.
Targeted for students at both the middle-school and high-school levels, the workshops are being arranged under the auspices of the Kalamazoo Animation Festival International (KAFI). Two are slated for June 13-15 and the third on June 15-17. The fee is $150 per student.
“Animation Workshop I” is aimed at middle schoolers and covers the basics of making paper puppets, how to bring those creations to life through computerized animation, and how to add sound effects and voices to the productions. The three sessions will run from 8 a.m. to noon.
Also slated for the June 13-15 time slot is “Animation Workshop II,” which is designed for students in high school. Using a variety of software, this 15-hour workshop will teach participants the basics of animation. The capstone will be the creation of a short animated piece by each enrollee. These sessions will run from 1 to 5:30 p.m.
The third workshop is “Game Design.” It is open to both middle-school and high-school students who have a working knowledge of the basics of animation. The workshop will guide participants through the process of creating a video game. It will focus on the generation of new concepts for games and how to communicate concepts to a prospective publisher. The dates are June 15-17 from 8 a.m. to noon.
More information about the workshops and registration is available by contacting Maggie Noteboom at extension 7883 or . KAFI, a biennial salute to the art of animation, is scheduled to return to its downtown-Kalamazoo venues in May of 2007. Its website is
25 complete police-academy training
It was 21 and 68.
Those were the primary numbers at the graduation ceremonies for the KVCC-based Kalamazoo Law Enforcement Training Center on May 16 in Dale Lake Auditorium.
The graduates at the program’s 68th commencement program are:
Derek Weldon, Brian Cake, Nathan Gernaat, Keaton Nielsen, Mark Ottney, and Ryan Veenstra, all of Kalamazoo; Lakisha Jones of the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety; Jonathan Duthler of Portage; Tyler Sleep of Otsego; Anthony Shumaker of South Haven; Christopher Rabbitt of Battle Creek; Charity DeRoo of Paw Paw; Benjamin Ludwig of Gobles; Jamil Elwaer of Decatur; Matthew Birr of Haslett; Justin Wolbrink of Watersmeet; Joseph Boutell of Belmont; Amy Bretes of the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department; Carlton Brooks and Henry Cooper of the Benton Harbor Police Department; Brandon Sredzinski of Howell; Robert Christner of Berrien Springs, Joseph Drelles of Grand Rapids; Patrick Kleinfelt of Grand Ledge; and John Hunter of Leslie.