Welcome Lale Yurtseven, New Business Instructor

Please welcome Lale Yurtseven, who will be joining our full-time Business faculty. Ms. Yurtseven will be teaching courses across the Business curriculum. Ms. Yurtseven is Turkish, grew up in Germany, and is multi-lingual, speaking English, German, and Turkish.

She holds an M.B.A. in International Management and a B.A. in International Relations from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She has been an adjunct faculty member, teaching Business, at both De Anza and West Valley Colleges for over eight years. She has also served as a grant manager promoting business and education collaboration throughout the California Community Colleges system.

She started an Entrepreneurship Center at West Valley College, where she counseled students and community members who are interested in starting a business. Prior to her experience in education, Ms. Yurtseven worked in management positions at both fortune 500 companies as well as startup companies. She also founded an information technology company, and continues to serve on its board to this day.

New SparkPoint Center

It has been said that many of our students are a “flat tire away from dropping out of college” as they have limited resources available to support themselves as they are pursuing their education. In the past, we have been unable to address these basic needs of our low-income students. The SparkPoint Center at Cañada College is being established to provide support services to give students the tools they need to remain in college.

To get the Center up and running, the college has received a “Working Families Success Network” three-year $100,000 grant administered by Achieving the Dream with funding from several foundations – Annie E. Casey, Kellogg, Bank of America and Lumina. The Working Families Success Network (WFSN) is a national initiative to advance a fresh approach to helping low-income families achieve financial stability. The network is made up of national and local foundations, community colleges, and community-based organizations.

The WFSN strategy, known by some as an integrated services approach, is helping community-based organizations and community colleges rethink how they serve working families through the bundling and sequencing of complementary services and supports in the three key areas:

Education and employment services: Services that provide students with the skills needed to enter and retain employment and advance in the career of their choice.

Work and income supports: Services that assist students in accessing public benefits and other income supports in order to increase family economic stability and encourage college retention and completion.

Financial and asset building services: Services that build the financial knowledge of students, increase their access to savings and wealth-retaining financial products and encourage the meeting of both short and long-term financial goals.

The key outcomes for participants in the SparkPoint Center include job placement and retention, increased family income, credit score improvement and increased completion rates for college degrees or training programs.

In addition, SparkPoint at Cañada College will be part of a regional United Way of the Bay Area network of financial education centers designed to serve individuals and families who are working to achieve financial self-sufficiency. This Center is modeled after the SparkPoint at Skyline College and will significantly improve our overall support provided to students.

A Steering Committee for the SparkPoint at Cañada College is meeting this summer to make plans to begin providing services in late fall 2014. We will keep the campus posted on the progress made in the development of the Center through regular reports in the Olive Hill Press.

Submitted by Dr. Robin Richards, PharmD

Degrees Submitted for Approval

As nearly everyone knows, SB 1440 mandated that the CSU and the community college systems develop transfer degrees (AA-T or AS-T) to facilitate transfer of students from the community colleges to the CSUs. Templates for each degree were developed by discipline faculty from both systems and then each community college was required to determine whether they have the courses to fit in the template. Each CSU has to determine whether they have a similar degree and how the student can complete the Bachelor’s degree in 60 semester units after transfer with the AA or AS-T. New templates are released for degree development in February and September.

The faculty at Cañada College has been diligently working to develop and get approval for the degrees for which we have the programs and courses. To date, we have submitted 20 degrees to the State Chancellor’s office for approval and (as of) July 1 have received approval for 17 of these. Some of these degrees were very straightforward and others required significant course updating and revision and/or development of new courses. Of the templates expected to be released in September, we should be able to develop 2-3 additional transfer degrees for our students.

Anthropology

Art History

Business Administration

Communication Studies Philosophy

Computer Science

Early Childhood Education

Economics

Elementary Education (pending state approval)

English

Geography

History

Kinesiology

Mathematics

Physics

Political Science (pending state approval)

Psychology

Sociology

Studio Arts

Theatre Arts (pending state approval)

Submitted by Dr. Janet Stringer, MD, PhD