Merrimack Valley Magazine

The Virtual Valley

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Keep Your Mind Active While Staying Safe at Home.

Some of us are a bit less mobile than we used to be. So, as many businesses and organizations remain shuttered through the fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there might be an inclination to set aside the traditional comforts of autumn in New England for other, more subdued, activities.

But giving up certain comforts doesn’t have to mean disengaging from your community entirely. Staying active and engaged with local organizations is as important as ever, and we are fortunate to live in an area that offers an abundance of digital resources to keep its residents mentally active, healthy and energized — all while safely distancing.

Here are some great virtual resources to check out this fall:

 

Merrimack Valley: Place and Meaning 2020

This summer, a range of local organizations collaborated on the development of the Merrimack Valley: Place and Meaning 2020 project, a searchable online database that highlights the expansive variety of activities, cultural touchstones, and spaces that are available in the region. All listings came from local residents who were asked to send in their thoughts on the landmarks and activities that mattered most to them. The result is a rich archive made by and for the people of this diverse region. The Merrimack Valley: Place and Meaning 2020 project is a partnership of the Essex County Community Foundation’s Creative County Initiative, the Merrimack Valley Planning Commission, Creative Community Builders, and Elevated Thought, an arts and social justice nonprofit. Learn more about this project at PlaceAndMeaning.mvpc.org.

 

Virtual Museums: Tour History Through a New Lens

Don’t let closures get in the way of your local tourism plans this fall. In order to mitigate the challenges of operating during this difficult time, several Merrimack Valley museums have turned some of their attention to the internet, developing free online galleries and talks that allow visitors to enjoy history from the comforts of home. Explore the Addison Gallery of American Art’s guided exhibition tours via Zoom or dive into the Andover organization’s collection of nearly 22,000 items through its abundant digital archive. Later, click over to Haverhill’s Buttonwoods Museum, which offers a range of resources to help you take on your own historic walking tour or video mini tour. Looking for more? Contact your favorite Merrimack Valley museums to find out what educational opportunities are available remotely.

 

Affordable Noncredit Courses Close to Home

Want to learn a new skill, advance your career, or broaden your knowledge of a particular subject? Your local community college is a great place to start. Northern Essex Community College and Middlesex Community College both offer a range of affordable noncredit options year-round, all of which are available to adults of any age and education level. Most are remote through the spring and cover a wide variety of topics, including computer literacy, accounting, podcasting, and more. Visit the schools’ websites for up-to-date offerings available this coming winter and spring.

 

Virtual Events from Your Local Library

The Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners has organized a collection of virtual event calendars, separated by region, to keep you informed on all the latest lectures, readings, workshops, and club gatherings. Visit Libraries.state.ma.us to check out and sign up for virtual events near you — and get involved with your local library in the process!

 

 

 

 

Ready, Set, Sharpen

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NECC Offers New Culinary Arts Certificate Program in the Fall of 2020 

Northern Essex Community College (NECC) is preparing to launch a culinary arts certificate program. Set to begin in September, this 29-credit certificate offers students the opportunity to learn and develop practical culinary skills they can take with them along their desired career path. 

“We have classes that range from beekeeping to plant-based cooking. Students will acquire actual skills and knowledge without the pressure of grading, papers and homework,” says Sandra Zappala, the program manager at NECC’s Center for Corporate and Community Education. “The classes are small, intimate and have a social aspect that is fun with an undercurrent of real hands-on experiential learning.” 

The program is headed by Denis Boucher (top of page), who also serves as program manager of NECC’s existing hospitality associate program. A native of Maine, Boucher has an associate degree from the Culinary Institute of America and over 20 years of experience as a chef and restaurant manager. His resume also includes teaching at New England Culinary Institute from 2005 to 2014, where he was named “Teacher of the Year” in 2006, and serving as director of Tompkins Cortland Community College’s Coltivare restaurant in Ithaca, N.Y. 

 

NECC’s culinary arts program will have its own floor in a 10-story building known as “The Heights at Haverhill” left) — currently under construction on Merrimack Street in Haverhill. Sandra Zappala (right), the program manager at NECC’s Center for Corporate and Community Education, notes that class topics run from beekeeping to plant-based cooking, and the curriculum is focused on hands-on learning experiences.

“Denis exudes a passion for what he does,” Zappala says. “He speaks the language of the cooking industry, and through years of experience in the field brings a practical knowledge of the culinary business that is invaluable.”

Boucher hopes the culinary arts program at NECC will eventually expand into an associate program. “We’re beginning the foray into that venue with a certificate program because we found it important to get students right into operations and viable positions within the industry,” Boucher says. 

According to Boucher, many students had expressed interest in the program, but the COVID-19 pandemic caused a temporary halt in enrollment, forcing the college to alter its strategies. 

The coronavirus has also forced the leaders of the culinary program to adopt social distancing policies. The first semester of the program, therefore, will be taught remotely. “We looked at the certificate program and pulled out pieces that we know we can teach online,” Boucher says. 

Boucher says many of the program’s foundational courses can be easily adapted to online formats. Examples include a sanitation and safety certification by the National Restaurant Association and an intro to culinary arts class that involves the theory and history of the culinary arts. For the latter, Boucher plans to share extensive videos on how to properly operate kitchen and lab equipment.  

“We’re encouraging students to get all of these requirements done and get a head start, because come the spring semester, they can start doing their hands-on [courses], and it will pretty much be nothing but hands-on at that point,” Boucher says. 

The culinary arts program will have its own floor in a 10-story building known as “The Heights at Haverhill,” which is currently under construction on Merrimack Street in Haverhill. Plans for the building include two first-floor restaurants and a top-floor sky bar that will provide internships and real-life opportunities for culinary students. 

To further help students pursue their culinary aspirations, NECC is also creating articulation agreements with nearby colleges such as Bunker Hill Community College, Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and UMass Lowell to help students continue their educations as they desire. 

“If somebody has a passion and wants to continue their education, we want to make sure that the courses they’re taking now are applicable and transferable,” Boucher says. “Our mission as a community college is to both educate and offer educational opportunities to our community, so we would love for these students to stay local and benefit our own local food industry.”   

The setting features an extensive array of state-of-the-art kitchen gadgets so that students can acquire practical knowledge, not to mention enjoy views of the Merrimack River.

An Open Letter to Elected Officials and Policymakers

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Thank you for your public service. The work you do is both important and complicated. I recognize that the vast majority of you want to do what’s right for the greatest number of people, but “what’s right” isn’t always clear, and there are a lot of demands on your time and attention.

So, I have only one straightforward request: The next time you have to make a decision — any decision — about “higher education,” please stop for just a moment and ask yourself this question: “How are community college students different?”

If you do, you will make better decisions, benefit more lives, make better use of resources, and improve your state or our nation’s economy more than you may have ever thought possible.

You’ll also go a long way toward creating a more fair and equitable America while you’re at it.

Decisions about higher education funding and public policies are being made all the time, and they are always important; but the COVID-19 pandemic has created a new sense of urgency around better understanding the differences among colleges and their students before some critical decisions that are about to be made in the weeks and months ahead.

Please know that all “higher education” is not the same.

 

There are enormous differences between highly selective, very expensive, private universities (for example, MIT, Stanford, or Yale); pretty selective and expensive, public “flagship” universities (like UMass, UCLA, or the University of Michigan); somewhat selective and more affordable public state colleges and universities (Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts or Fitchburg State University); and “open door”, inexpensive community colleges — like Northern Essex Community College up here in northeast Massachusetts, or any of the more than 1,100 community colleges across America.

Still, when most people think about traditional “college students” they tend to picture someone who just graduated from high school, maybe 18-19 years old, financially dependent on their parents, living in a dormitory, taking classes full-time, and enjoying campus athletics, clubs, and social life.

Those students still exist, but they’re less than 30% of America’s undergraduates. They are also largely concentrated on the country’s selective, expensive private college and public university flagship campuses, which have daunting application processes, low acceptance rates, and admit only students near the top of their class (which usually means students who come from wealthier families with college-going experience).

Most of today’s “traditional” college students — especially at community colleges — are “non-traditional.” They are older, poorer, represent much greater diversity, and are likelier to be raising families themselves.

A group of NECC students (and one very young future freshman) study outside the David Hartleb Technology Center on the Haverhill campus. Photo courtesy NECC.

Out of all those different sectors of higher education, community colleges serve larger proportions of:

  • First generation students
  • Low income students
  • Minority students
  • English language learners
  • Students with learning disabilities
  • And many other “at-risk” students

They are also the lynchpin for the nation’s local economies. After graduation, 85% of community college degree earners stay close to their alma maters, contributing to the workforce, buying homes, raising families, and becoming the next generation of community leaders.

But for all the value community colleges and their students provide, all too often they are overlooked or, even worse, disadvantaged by decisions about funding or public policy.

For example:

  • Even though community colleges educate nearly half of the undergraduates in America each year, they typically receive 25% or less of a state’s higher education funding, and have the fewest resources to spend on their students of any level of education in America, as this table illustrates:

  • According to the most recent Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Voluntary Support of Education report, charitable donations to colleges and universities in America rose last year by over 7% to nearly $47 billion. But almost 70% of those contributions went to already wealthy research universities, while community colleges collected less than one-half of one percent (.004).
  • Critical federal educational policies routinely ignore community college students. The U.S. Department of Education’s approach to Pell grants for low income students, data gathering for institutional accountability, student loan regulations, Title IX enforcement about athletics and sexual assault, and many other important policies are usually aimed at those young, “traditional” four-year, residential college students, who are less than a third of U.S. undergraduates today. The needs of the nearly six million community college students, who tend to be a little older, live off campus, take classes part-time, and work thirty or more hours a week to pay for their own education and often to support families of their own, are overlooked.

Even when state and federal policy makers try to help higher education, they often end up widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Here are two recent examples:

In Massachusetts, the state legislature created the “Endowment Match Incentive Program” back in 1997. The program provides $1 in matching state funds for every $2 raised through private fundraising, up to whatever amount is available in a given year.

For more than a decade, no matching funds were available. But the past couple of years (until the COVID-19 Pandemic struck) have been very good ones for the state budget, so the legislature agreed to put $10 million into the program this year — a wonderful opportunity for the foundations and fundraisers at the Commonwealth’s public colleges and universities to go to work with donors eager to make their contributions go even farther.

One catch: The Endowment Match Incentive Program funding follows the same formula as the state’s overall approach to funding higher education: 50% goes to the flagship University of Massachusetts, 25% goes to the state universities, and 25% goes to the community colleges.

That $5 million for the University of Massachusetts means:

  • $1.25M for each of four undergraduate campuses
  • $68 per student (for 74,000 students)

The $2.5 million for the state universities means:

  • $278K for each of nine campuses
  • $37 per student (for 67,000 students)

And the $2.5 million for the community colleges means:

  • $167K for each of fifteen campuses
  • $23 per student for (111,000 students)

My campus and students can certainly use $167K for scholarships and assistance, and we’re grateful for it. But the end result from a public policy perspective is that universities with much larger endowments, already generous donors, and students who are, on average, better off financially get more.

Meanwhile, community colleges have to work harder to raise less money to earn a smaller match that has to get spread across a lot more students who have fewer resources themselves in the first place.

Somewhere along the way, it would have been tremendously helpful to ask that question: “How are community college students different?”

Similarly, community college students really found themselves at the short end of the stick for this week’s distribution of the federal CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act funding.

The CARES Act is expected to provide nearly $14 billion in emergency aid to higher education students and institutions, based on a formula that considers the full-time equivalent enrollment of students, as well as their eligibility for Pell grants.

Sounds reasonable, but when you ask, “How are community college students different?” here is what you discover:

Because they tend to be poorer, raising families, and working more hours while in school, most community college students attend part-time.

At Northern Essex Community College, 5,233 students enrolled last Fall, but only 32% were full-time, so our “full-time equivalent” enrollment was actually 3,080. The median family income for our students is $52,900. Most come from the lowest family income rungs on the economic ladder, and over half are eligible for Pell grants.

The NECC Foundation has an endowment fund worth just over $4 million.

We are expecting to receive just under $3.3 million in CARES Act emergency aid (which will help, but will not come close to covering the expenses and losses we and our students are experiencing right now).

Meanwhile, 115 miles away in Hanover, New Hampshire, 4,418 undergraduates are enrolled at Dartmouth College, one of the eight prestigious “Ivy League” schools. Not surprisingly, 99% of Dartmouth’s students are full-time, so their “full-time equivalent” is the same as their headcount enrollment. The median family income for students at Dartmouth is $200,400 and 70% come from the top 20% of income earners in America. Only 14% of Dartmouth’s students are eligible for Pell grants.

Dartmouth has an endowment fund worth nearly $6 billion (yes, that’s “billion” with “B”).

Dartmouth is receiving just over $3.4 million in CARES Act emergency aid.

Two colleges, not far apart, but incredibly far apart.

When it comes to the CARES Act, helpful though the additional funding will be, here at NECC, like at community colleges across the nation, we will have fewer dollars to spread across more students who need much greater assistance.

If you’ve read this far, dear elected officials and policymakers, please accept my sincere gratitude again for your public service, and for hearing this plea; and in the weeks and months ahead, as some critical decisions about higher education are made, please, please pause for just a moment before each one, and ask yourself that important question: “How are community college students different?”

 

Lane Glenn is president of Northern Essex Community College.

Perspectives is a curated opinion forum published by Merrimack Valley Magazine.

 

SHED Children’s Campus Executive Director Appears on The 495

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Today, my guest on The 495, was Linda Shottes Bouchard, executive director of the SHED Children’s Campus, a nature-based educational program. The campus is located in Andover, Mass.

MVM has published stories on SHED before, including one in the most recent issue’s education section. You can read it here.

We talked about SHED’s unique approach to education and how the main pillars of its educational philosophy can help children in a time of crisis. We also spoke about how the program’s techniques and methods can help parents. According to Shottes Bouchard, SHED has come up with some innovative ways to continue remotely educating children.

You can rewatch the broadcast on our Facebook page, or listen on our podcast page.

Tune in and email me at editor@mvmag.net to let us know what you think!

 

Growing Mindfully

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SHED Children’s Campus Teaches Kids How to Find Balance

The educational programs at SHED Children’s Campus in Andover have been evolving since the nonprofit’s beginnings in 1984. With its roots firmly established in the child-centered Reggio Emilia philosophy, SHED branched out in 2011 to identify four additional pillars — community, gardening, nature and mindfulness — central to its preschool, after-school and summer programs for kids age 3 through grade 8. Mindfulness is of particular interest in this article, but it turns out that all the tenets seem to come together organically.

Mindfulness can be described as the state of actively tuning in to the present moment as a way to ease troublesome interference that may be emanating from somewhere else, including ruminations about the past or the future. Practicing mindfulness through traditional meditation, yoga, sensory observation, or simply spending a moment to take acute notice of the act of breathing, can be a powerful tool for easing anxiety, anger, inattentiveness and other challenges — benefits that are crucial to a child’s learning, interactions and healthy development. 

 

SHED Executive Director Linda Shottes Bouchard says the idea to include mindfulness popped up with little effort as the organization brainstormed back in 2011. As the important foundational pillars for children and families in the community were considered, “mindfulness was definitely one of them,” Shottes Bouchard  says. 

Andover’s SHED Children’s Campus uses the Reggio Emilia approach, a self-directed, student-focused philosophy for its preschool and kindergarten programs, before- and after-school clubs, and summer programs. Mindfulness is a central pillar to their approach.

While the Reggio Emilia philosophy puts much emphasis on children as co-leaders in their own development, the role of educators as gentle guides is integral to that process. This ties in with the way mindfulness is seeded at SHED: It starts with the staff fully incorporating it into their daily routine. Shottes Bouchard says that before each administrative meeting, the team gets a dose of mindfulness by lowering the lights and taking a few minutes for some conscious, centering breathing. 

This emphasis on integrating mindfulness into the daily lives of educators is how it finds its way into the classroom in a natural way, Shottes Bouchard says. “This is how we approach our environment and what we’re doing. It really becomes second nature.” Teachers fully equipped with their own personal tool kits for coming back to the moment are able to guide children in doing the same when necessary, and kids quickly pick up the skills at SHED to do so on their own. 

“In every classroom, there are areas for them to sit and just be,” Shottes Bouchard says. And while teachers will lead mindful activities in their classrooms, such as yoga poses for tuning in to bodily sensations, kids also have the opportunity to self-regulate when they need to. “I think that’s sometimes the yummiest thing to watch,” Shottes Bouchard says, “when you just see that one child who’s sitting. They’ll get into their posture and sit crisscrossed with their arms out. They’re taking their time.” 

Mindfulness, the practice of actively tuning in to the present moment, positively influences children’s abilities to interact, problem solve and learn. Two of the other pillars of the SHED approach, gardening and nature, pair well with mindfulness, and the grounds of Philips Academy, where the campus is located, provide kids ample opportunity to explore, garden, observe and play.

These mindful skills aren’t just for the classroom. Kids take them along wherever they go, like into the great outdoors. Two of the pillars, gardening and nature, are perfectly paired with a mindfulness practice. 

When enjoying their time on the wooded grounds of Phillips Academy, where SHED is located, the kids’ senses are free to take it all in. “Once you have that awareness, the whole world opens up,” Shottes Bouchard says. “You begin to notice the bug that’s crawling up the tree.” Some of the kids have even come to enjoy weeding the many vegetable beds on campus as a calming activity, and the products of calm focus can be purchased when they host farmers markets with goods they’ve harvested and prepared. The public is free to come buy the salsa when it’s in season.

As for the community pillar, Shottes Bouchard hopes that mindfulness is one of the many things that ripples outward as kids head back home or to school with what they’ve learned. 

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