Dear Truman College Community and Friends:

Since its launch a year ago, our five-year strategic plan continues to reflect the intentional collaboration that happened across thecollege. Today, it remains a comprehensive roadmap to leading our college forward while also serving as the framework for amplifying our mantra, “One Truman!”

Despite the challenges presented by the global pandemic, students, faculty, staff, and administrators have been committed to pushing through the obstacles they face. Their efforts have been directly tied to the achievement we have experienced in implementing several key strategies over the last year. Our workhas been and continues to be centered around three primary pillars: enrollment, communication, and college experiences. These pillars have allowed us to create a common set of goals and aspirations across our college that has guided our path forward and clarified our mission and vision.

In our effort to meet our strategic objective of attracting, recruiting, enrolling, and retaining students from every demographic pool, we have remained steadfast in creating an exceptional student experience. Over the past year, we have expanded staffing and additional resources for our enrollment management office. We have rebranded the Office as Campus and Beyond to better reflect our desire for Truman to be the destination for college students and the community. The space in Campus and Beyond has been reconfigured to foster a more welcoming environment for our students by creating a place that reflects our diverse population, including creating play areas for the children of students and setting up space to host recruitment sessions for prospective students. Additionally, we have launched the Leadership Engagement and Development (LEAD) Center to create more opportunities for students to build and foster their leadership capabilities in the academic setting.

As we embrace being a college that is responsive to and reflective of the diverse identities and needs of the students, faculty, and staff, we have been committed to improving equity across the institution. As such, we have relaunched the Diversity and Inclusion Committee shortly after releasing the strategic plan. The members have engaged in thoughtful conversations about ways to support students in the virtual space and how to create more opportunities for faculty and staff to participate. Additionally, they have hosted several campus-wide meetings with over 75+ attendees, the majority being students. Truman will continue to support the Committee to meet its goals for the upcoming year. Additionally, the Chair of the Committee has been assigned release time to help ensure consistency, support, and integration into the college work.

In response to the economic needs of our city, Truman has grown its partnership with Chicago Public Schools (CPS). In addition to the endorsements that we offer for teachers, we are providing a pathway for current CPS graduates to obtain their Professional

Educators License through a 2+2 partnership with CPS and Illinois State University. Also, students in their first two years at City Colleges can receive the Supporting Emerging Educator Development (or S.E.E.D) scholarship, a refundable scholarship, to cover the cost of their education. Furthermore, through One Summer Chicago, we have partnered with the Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) to provide One Summer interns the opportunity to teach STEAM skills at Ability Sites. Our One Summer interns have also participated in Chicago Youth Service Corps, an initiative started by the Mayor’s Office.

We have been working hard to build a culture of excellenceand innovation as the Center of Excellence in Education, Human, and Natural Sciences. As such, we formally launched Innovation One as the designated space for community members, students, faculty, and others to build their IT skills and access additional technology opportunities, training, and infrastructure. The space includes a discovery bar, a training lab, a podcast studio, and a loaning library. We are also expandingInnovation One’s reach by supporting the opening of satellite offices across CCC. Over the next year, we will implement continuing education courses to support the ongoing development of students and the community.

Collaboration remains a central pillar in the implementation of our strategic plan. One area worth noting is the launch of our Action Research Initiative. It is an ambitious strategy that provides financial resources for various departments across the campus to collaborate to address policy inequities at Truman. In year one, we have selected our Champions and are currently providing them with the training, tools, and opportunities to propose and enact their Action Research Projects. These projects will address inequities within the Champions’ spheres of influence and cultivate an environment where students, faculty, and staff feel safe and supported in exploring, naming, and learning about each other’s own identity and community. In addition, we are working with the champions to help them to have the knowledge and skills necessary to become leaders and support action research efforts across the college.

In the last year, we have poured several resources into strengthening our institutional health. This has included expanding the reach of our Office of Research and Strategic Planning across the campus to increase faculty, staff, and other administrators’ confidence in using data and research to inform their work and practice. The Office has provided valuable support formany of the faculty’s summer research projects that has informedtheir academic programming and offerings. Additionally, the Office has hosted several trainings on our data systems and created additional tools and resources to support our enrollment and retention work. Over the next year, the Office will develop new performance metrics for each department, create an enrollment pipeline dashboard, and invest in tools that will support better collection and reporting of data for our campus.

As we continue to measure the progress of our strategies, we have been diligent in monitoring our key performance indicators (KPIs). Our KPIs show the many successes our strategies have had and the various challenges we still face. The majority of our successes come from improving our students’ momentum and mobility while also

increasing completion. We have exceeded the targets we set for students taking and passing college-level English and Math within their first year of study. In fact, the share of students taking and passing college-level English and Math in their first year is the highest it has been in five years – a milestone for our college. Additionally, we continue to havethe highest IPEDS graduation rate for ourcollege in years and a large percentage of students earning a credential. Furthermore, a larger proportion of our students transfer to a four-year college/university within two years of earning a credential from Truman.

Our challenges, however, continue to be enrollment across the various student groups, which has started to affect our ability to retain students. While we have not seen a decrease in our fall-to-spring retention rate (it has remained flat year over year), we have not been able to increase it. The pandemic has amplified this issue, with many prospective and current students delaying enrollment.

Moving forward into the next year of implementation, we will be focusing and tailoring our strategies to increase enrollment across all student groups. We have applied for and received a special grant that will target students who have stoppedout. We are investing in more resources for our adult education students to support their educational attainment and promote a smoother transition into our credit programs. We are providing more professional development opportunities for faculty and staff to better train the new generation of leaders at our college. And finally, we will invest in more tools and resources for our departments to strengthen our institutional health and prioritize efforts in generating diverse streams of revenue.

As I have emphasized, we are One Truman! We cannot do this work alone, and I am excited to continue building on our enrollment, increasing communication, and cultivating a positive experience at Truman College.

Sincerely,

Shawn L. Jackson, PhD

President, Harry S Truman College