Earl Dowling, VP of Student Affairs
Earl Dowling presents the Jack Kent Cooke Award and explains it as the largest private scholarship for community college students judged on achievement, academic ability, and the desire to help others. Our most recent Jack Cook Kent scholar is Omar Escamilla.
Omar will be transferring to DePaul to study Organizational Communication.
Omar is COD’s 8th recipient of this scholarship.
Dowling then presents the PHi Theta Kappa students who were selected as participants in the Phi Theta Kappa All-State Academic Team, Omar Escamilla and Paulo Mazza. Paulo will also be transferring to DePaul to pursue a degree in Organizational Communication.
Dowling also notes that Paulo has played the role of Chappy, the College’s mascot, and the secret is now revealed.
Dowling invites Professor Steve Schroeder and the Phi Theta Kappa members to the podium.
COD was named as in the top 100 out of 3500 chapters of Phi Theta Kappa. Distinguished Honors in Action award. This year’s topic was “Frontiers and the Spirit of Action. This year the COD team pursued the theme of Anxiety as a mental health issue affecting college students.
COD was also awarded $500 for their winning case study project “Mental Health: America’s Forgotten Frontier.”
Hamilton asks for a motion to approve the consent agenda.
Trustee Mazzochi asks to remove 7B1 and 7B3 G IT contract renewals
Napolitano moves, Mazzochi seconds.
Chair Hamilton announces changes to this procedure from now on.
From now on we will expect a competitive bid report for each purchase order. We will expect that sole source contracts for outside of professional services they will be very rare. And if they are used staff will need to be prepared to offer a blind market report to know what expected prices might be.
Motion to approve. Unanimous
Smith Maintenance Company — contract for a total of over 1 million dollars.
Chair Hamilton asks for appropriate person to come to the podium to discuss this item.
Jim Ma comes to the podium.
Hamilton: Could we hear a summary of the contract and the bidding
Jim MA: We have 46 full time and 9 pt custodians. We do not have enough staff to clean the areas. We have 12 during the day, 5 in the evening, the rest at night. We use an outside contractor to supplement the workforce. This has been going on for many years. The contractor’s prices are lower than what we pay our employees. This is clearly an economic measure.
Hamilton: Questions?
Mazzochi: I just wanted to know if this is the cost-effective way to bid this,compared to hiring more people.
Jim Ma: We pay our employees 12 per hour to start plus benefits.
Napolitano: have we used them in the past?
Jim Ma: We have used them in the past. They lost their bid last year because their prices had gone up.
Mazzochi: were we happy with their services?
Jim Ma: yes.
No further questions.
Hamilton: The next item 71B. Grading and restoration north of Pond 9 to Landworks, $129,516.
Napolitano moves, Mazzochi seconds.
Hamilton: Could appropriate staff person come to the podium. Could you reveal the competitive process that led to this contract?
COD Engineering staff describes the bidding process that leads to awarding the contract to the lowest qualified bidder.
Mazzochi: Is this part of a larger schematic plan?
Engineer: Part of a larger plan. Pond 9 was expanded to improve storm water retention on campus. At the time we started this we did not know the route that the College road would take. Now as we have the actual road we see a low spot that doesn’t drain properly. We need to address this.
No further questions. Roll call: Unanimous yes from all trustees.
7bG3 — contract for 1,259, 000 for IT contract renewals.
Chuck Currier, VP for IT is up at podium. There are many items in this board item. Is there something specific that I can address?
Mazzochi– lots of different line items and because it is over a million dollars I would like to get an understanding of what these involve.
Currier: Fair number of maintenance contracts, license contracts that come up annually. We have aligned most of those to start at the beginning of the new fiscal year, July, so that they come up at the same time. IT makes it easier for accounting purposes. Each one of these are different — licensing, maintenance, support. Could I concentrate on any particular one for you. I do have a report on the big number, the Ellucian Inc contract. Currier gives a report on this contract.
Currier says there are three approaches. 1 is “home grown.” tends to be costly. 2nd is “best of breed.” find modules form different vendors and weave them together. That is intricate to achieve. 3rd is the “integrated sweep.” From one vendor, it is pre-integrated and therefore the work is less complex. In 2005, COD had a mainframe and a combination of home-grown and best of breed.
In 2005, COD formed a selection committee. Faculty were involved in this. We put out requests and made site visits. In 2006, COD approved Datatel and Colleague. The team selected and the Board approved this. Datatel is the vendor and Colleague is the product. Thus, we moves to an integrated sweep approach.
We tried to reduce the number of vendors. We wanted to get more efficient use of our staff.
Initial implementation in 2007. Student, HR, Payroll, etc all were part of this implementation.
From 2008-2015 various other products were added, all form Ellucian.
Currier provides further details of how COD purchases products form Ellucian.
Raises some caution about Ellucian moving to the cloud.
162,322 charge to the college for various services form Ellucian.