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Faculty Newsletter

Monica Villarreal - Thursday, January 26, 2023
 Events 
Good Morning Gator Faculty,
Happy New Year from all of us in Student Success and Student Life (3SL)! We hope you enjoyed engaging with students and staff during our Week of Welcome activities and events. This is the first communication I hope to send you to update you on UHD students and the services available to them through the Division of Student Success and Student Life.  In this edition, you can learn some updates about this Spring’s class, opportunities for faculty engagement with students, as well as our support for student mental health and basic needs.
Student Success & Student Life Jan 2023
3SL Letterhead

3SL is a new division that brings together Student Affairs and units from the former University College to create a holistic and XXX for student success. You might not have heard of us before, but surely you are familiar with some of our many units. Take a look below:

3SL

Please allow me to share a few activities we are engaged in this Spring.

I believe we have all become increasingly aware of the pandemic ripple effects on Student Success that will last for years to come. For example, here at UHD, 37% of our first-year freshmen went on probation after their Fall 2023 grades were posted.

Academic Recovery Program

37% of Fall 2023 entering freshmen went on probation after their first semester. 1,209 full-time first-time in college students (FT-FTIC). 451 went on probation after their first term. 904 are registered for Spring 2023 (227 of the students on probation are registered

That is 451 students who now have a major student success setback, that could potentially delay or prevent their graduation altogether. For us to graduate 58% of these first-year students within six years, we will need to all work together to ensure these students are successful. Indeed, collaboration is a key strategy in our Academic Recovery Program. Students on probation are registered in an academic success course and supported by a cadre of professionals, the course instructor, an academic success coordinator, an academic success coach, and a peer mentor. Contact Dr. Jemma Sylvester-Caesar, Director of Gator Success Center, to learn more.
Naomi Berger-Perez

In case you had not heard, our Student Counseling Services just celebrated their first birthday and now employs 5 full-time professional counselors. In collaboration with Disability Services, they continue to offer regular Mental Health First Aid training on the last Friday of each month. Students, faculty, and staff can sign-up for the workshop or contact Naomi Berger-Perez, Director of Student Counseling Services for more information.

Eugene Bernard

To aid students with food, housing, transportation, and other basic needs insecurities, we recently launched our Basic Needs portal. As the president shared last week, we now have $1.3 million in grants to address a variety of student needs. Specifically, these funds will be used to supplement our Food Market and provide access to emergency hot meals from UHD’s Food Service as well as to provide public transportation prepaid cards and emergency transportation, housing, and dependent-care grants. Our Determined Gator Fund was launched recently and has provided a steady supply of emergency funds for students in crisis. Contact Eugene Bernard, Director of Student Life to learn more.

I hope I have raised your awareness of some of our activities here in 3SL. We look forward to working with you to further support student success and student life.

Message from the Interim VP

As the semester begins, I want to share with you a personal story that always reminds me of the power of faculty. I once took a class from a particularly brilliant professor – he was world renowned in his field, a notoriously unforgiving grader, and each of us students were terrified and awed by him. Toward the end of the semester, my grandmother passed away, and I needed to let the Professor know that I would miss a class. I was terrified that he would disbelieve me – we all know that students are notorious for killing off grandmas when times get tough at school. But when I went to his office hours, he invited me to sit down and took the time to process my Nana’s death with me. He shared his own story with me about his grandmother’s death while he was in college. Many decades later, I still recall the impact that short time he took with me at a milestone in my development as an adult. As you go about the important work of teaching your subject matter to students, we appreciate you will also, when you can, take a few minutes to touch the human beyond the student. You may never know what it means to that student, but I promise, they will never forget you.

 

Sincerely,
Lynette Cook-Francis
Interim Vice President, Student Success and Student Life
University of Houston-Downtown