Butte College: Tammera Shinar, Director of Financial Aid

REGION ONE ReportFARR MEETING/CCCSFAAA MAY 4-6, 2015

With my limited time on board here at Butte, I asked the staff for some highlights or things they thought we should share:

Default rate has dropped 4 percentage points over 3 years! 
We are converting our imaging system from Kwik Works to Image Now
We now have all of our forms electronically available online for students which has cut down on the volume and wait times for FA
Butte also received a 2.5 million governor’s grant
We had 3 retirements from FA the past year. The Director and two senior technicians. They hired me and we are in the process of recruiting for the two open senior positions

Feather River College: Andre Van der Velden, Director of Financial Aid

Feather River College: Our campus is busy developing our Bachelor of Science Program in Equine and Ranch Management. Nicholas Johnston, Financial Aid Technician, joined us in December. Several of our staff (myself included) received training in POP SELs and SQL. We are in the process of setting up and implementing our student employment module in Banner which we hope will help automate the student employment process for us.

Lassen College: Matt Levine, Director of Financial Aid

We have submitted a revised Default Prevention Plan for a second successive year and submitted a Participation Rate Index (PRI) Challenge due to a draft FY 2012 3yr rate above 30%, which will make for our fourth year above 30%.
Implemented Microsoft SharePoint Student Portal early last fall.
Implemented Retention Alert in late fall.
Currently in the process of implementing ellucian’s new product, Colleague Self Service. It is better than webadvisor, fixes many aspects of the student’s view to their information.
The college began looking at imaging, or content management, software this spring and will probably begin implementation on campus this fall with financial aid being among the first to dive into it.
We just began the processing cycle for 2015-16 this week.
This fall Laura Greer, our Financial Aid Technician II, will be going out for maternity leave and we hope to be able to have a temp in place.

The fun, it never ends.

College of the Redwood: Lynn Thiesen, Director, Enrollment & Financial Aid Services

We have implemented more auto packaging for 15/16, which has resulted in sending out award notices earlier than ever before. Our president is retiring at the end of June, the search for a permanent replacement ‘failed’ so we will have an interim for at least one year.I have announced my retirement effective 12/30/15. I decided 35 years in FA is enough.

Shasta College: Connie Barton, Director of Financial Aid

College of the Siskiyous: Jan Harris, Director of Financial Aid

We have made several changes to our processes at College of the Siskiyous. We are partnering with Higher One for our FA disbursements beginning with the summer term. This has involved a lot of time spent updating our website, getting the information out to our students, and trying to get through all the training! I know the questions from students will begin once the “green envelope” starts arriving in their mailboxes!

Another big change for us is auto packaging. We are all excited about getting funds out to our students sooner for the 15-16 school year! We have streamlined some of our processes, which will allow more students to be ready for disbursement at the beginning of the fall semester. Our forms were updated and posted to the student accounts early April, which was 7 weeks earlier than in prior years!

We are also working with our Banner consultants this summer to implement automated SAP. If all goes well, we should be able to run SAP in a manner of minutes by the end of the fall 2015 semester! Current process takes 3 staff members a week to review our students’ progress.

It’s been an exciting 6 months since I became the director, but I’m not so sure my staff will agree!

Shasta: During the past year our office has been trying to implement the SAP module with Datatel. We are almost there and along with that we are also implementing more automated packaging. A little tricky with clock hour programs. We are trying to transition to document imaging. This process has already taken two years of discussion so it may be another two before we are ready. But we are trying to not depend on paper and depending on our electronic information. We recognize that our workflows will be changing and have been rethinking how we process.

Staffing: Becky McCall, Financial Aid Technician accepted a grant funded position on campus last January and it looks like we will continue to back fill until next January. Renee Garcia our Financial Aid Assistant has been filling in for her and learning tech duties. Several part time employees have been filling in the void for Renee’ s position.

Campus events: Shasta received a $5 million governor’s grant for innovative practices which the campus is quite ecstatic over and the campus will be developing the bachelor program for our health information management program. Lots of fun days ahead.