Sacramento State looking to define its future goals

Sacramento State students voiced their thoughts and opinions regarding the campus’s future at a town hall forum Dec. 4.

Sacramento State students voiced their thoughts and opinions regarding the campus’s future at a town hall forum Dec. 4.

State Hornet Staff

After only nine students attended a strategic plan town hall forum in November, economics and communication studies major Jake Peabody, 23,  took it upon himself to create a marketing campaign to boost the attendance rate for the Dec. 4 meeting.

“The most important thing that I got out of that meeting was that Sacramento State wants to hear from its students on how it could improve,” Peabody said. “I love the fact that the college is looking for input from its students versus just making executive decisions without any type of vote.”

“Campus monorail 2015 – Help plan it today,” read the headline Peabody wrote for a blog post on Associated Student Inc.’s website, which eventually informed students there was no monorail, but in fact a meeting to help plan the future of the school’s strategic plan.

“I was thinking ‘what’s a good way to get people to look at something?’” Peabody said. “So I was like ‘let’s make something that’s realistic, but so outlandish that students feel like their money is going in a different route.’”

The blog post garnered over 300 unique clicks and though the correlation may not be direct, the second student town hall meeting was at near capacity.

Sac State President Alexander Gonzalez and his Strategic Planning Committee are currently in the process of gathering input from students, faculty and staff to develop a new strategic plan for the university’s future.

This will be the first revision of the strategic priorities for Sac State since the last plan was implemented in 2007.

Strategic Planning Committee member John Kepley said there have been many changes in public higher education since 2007, and the president and committee felt now was a good time to develop a new plan to help the university move forward.

“There’s new challenges, there’s opportunities (and) there’s the increasing role of technology to recent budget cuts that we’ve gone through,” Kepley said. “These are things that we expect to continue to encounter going forward and it’s important that the university has a really unifying plan so that we can all work together to address those challenges and do the best for our students.”

A strategic planning task force was created to define a mission, vision, values and strategic direction that will help establish a clear public perception of what Sac State means to the community and beyond.

Gonzalez sent an email Nov. 7 to the campus community notifying them of strategic town hall meetings that took place in November and December. The meetings were designed to get as much face-to-face input from students, faculty and staff to establish a direction in which the new strategic plan could move towards.

Along with the town hall meetings, the task force had focus groups for faculty, staff and alumni and established a website where people can submit feedback at any time.

Kepley said they are currently in the information gathering phase.

Sociology major Andrew Shaw, 21, is a resident advisor in the American River Courtyard who said he promoted the meeting to his students.

“The student engagement was really essential to the success of today,” Shaw said. “There were so many different views and opinions covered, so it wasn’t just athletes or just residents. There was actually a good amount of the other student body that were here. I think that really helped the overall perception of what students really want.”

Government major Mark Sohl, 19, said he agrees that it is important student opinions are heard because he feels administration makes decisions without student input. He also said he would like to see a more defined strategic plan.

“I just noticed that with the strategic plan they used a lot of vague language,” Sohl said. “It wasn’t really specific at all. I think it has some great things and some bad things. It all kind of goes down to defining ourselves. Are we defined as an academic institution or are we defined as a social institution?”

Kepley said the plan’s rough outline is intentional because the committee wants to hear from as many people as it can.

“A big part of what we do is serving community,” Kepley said. “We really want to hear from everyone we can so that as we continue to craft the plan it will serve everyone as well as it can and really that’s where it is now. We just want to hear from everybody.”

As the task force moves forward, it will be presenting key findings and developing strategic priorities and indicators of achievement by the end of February. By April, the strategic planning task force plans to present the Strategic Plan draft to Gonzalez and the Strategic Planning Committee.