I have some information that I wanted to provide to all of you about what we're doing at Delta.

Some of the successes that we've had in the past since, I've seen you last.

We try a Delta to, since I've gotten here at least, we've tried to make sure that we meet with you all.

The leadership of this community every semester.

And what the goal is to tell you, when I first started at Delta had set out an agenda.

We're still on that same exact agenda to give you updates on how we're doing with regards to that agenda.

And subsequently also, hear and listen to what you're seeing out in the community so that we can react accordingly.

My agenda today is simply to tell you what we're doing at Delta, how we're doing, and then provide some time and space for you to give us feedback on where we can improve.

So your feedback has actually been significantly helpful to us to think about ways in which we can address all students, but especially those that you're running into every day.

In order to to make sure that we are reacting to the community in the way that we need to.

So we created a strategic plan that was approved by our board last year that I've been this will be year three for me, in July.

I will have complete year three.

We it's the same agenda that I set out with.

The strategic plan was codified by the board.

But the board approved a very simple but, like, very simple and concept, but hard to perform strategic plan, completion with no equity gaps.

That's it.

We're not trying to build new buildings.

We're not trying to have a new telescope over here.

We're trying to say our role is to get more people into jobs, or more people to a bachelor's degree with no equity gaps.

And we do that in two ways.

We get people who don't have jobs, to jobs through our workforce programs, or we get them into gen eds and transfer programs through our transfer programs.

Community colleges, Delta included, have been built on the notion of getting students in and hoping they get through to to graduate.

We are building ourselves again in a new way to make sure that once they get here, we're doing our best to make sure they graduate.

In the last year, we have increased our completion rate for Hispanic students by 3%.

That's unheard of, whether you know it or not.

Like, because that that kind of increase usually takes 4 to 5 years.

Hispanic students, right now, we're completing at 2.4% lower than the aggregate.

It used to be 5.3.

So we're making progress.

We want that to be zero.

We want everybody to be zero.

It never will be zero because somebody is always going to be up above or not.

But that's a significant progress.

A couple of other things.

We take the census data, of the three areas that we serve, and we say if and this is the case, Hispanic population is about 7% of the three counties that we serve, African Americans, about 11%.

Whites are almost all the rest.

We are demographic.

Our arguments are that we should be at least those percents in our student body.

We have in the last, three years, increased, we've eliminated opportunity gaps for Hispanic students, and they're actually overpopulated.

If you want to go by that methodology, we're 2% above what the demographics of the three counties are in Hispanic.

We're below for African American by 1%.

Retention is up 4% for Hispanic students.

We're we're up, about 3% total.

Where we're suffering is males, across the board.

Males are not going to college nationally, and they're not going to college here either.

So so 38% of our students are male.

It should be 49, based on that same data.

That's true of all across the country.

So one of the major questions I would have for you all is how can we get to your male student population?

I personally would like to applaud Delta College, especially Dr. Gavin, for even bringing our community together to actually hear firsthand from our community leaders, from our community, members on what it is about our community.

What it is to make it special so they can, they can do good work in their area, to support our community.

Thats specific to our, our specific needs.

So I do think it's very important, it's very valuable to have those community conversations because it's, creating a dialog.

It's creating trust between our community and Delta College as well.

One of the things I would like to see from Delta College, and I'm, really hoping that they're going to be able to produce is specific data related to our, Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Latinx community, to help, their employees or both their staff, their faculty, to just be knowledgeable on how, what it is to support, our students specifically.

I think overall, I'm just really, excited for the future of Delta College.

I'm a Delta College alum.

And to just watch how the university has grown, especially under the leadership of Dr. Gavin.

Just really proud to to be an alum of Delta College and looking forward to the continued relationship that he's going to build with our community.

I would just say I'm grateful to have the opportunity to meet with, this leadership group.

It's one of those, I know most of the people personally here.

it's great people.

It's actually one of the reasons I really love working in this region is the people.

And, I was really grateful for the conversation tonight, because I'm starting to see that we we can have conversations that can be tough.

And also have common ground in which to, find resolution.

In the next year to two, we hope to be shifting to more bilingual documentation, whether it's the website, e-learning, forms in offices.

We have a group called the Council for Innovation, Belonging and Equity that has brought that up a number of times.

And we hope to see some action plans with regard to doing just that through a website revamp and some other documentation revisions, as a result.

I wanted to share all of that with you, because that's that a lot of that came from your input, in the last 2 or 3 meetings.

We're doing really good work.

We're not close to where I want to be.

Like, I showed you that graph that we're not even close to where we want to be.