Administrators met last Friday to discuss what occurred during the most recent Kansas Board of Regents meeting, Feb. 14 and 15. 

According to President Allison Garrett, there was only one ESU specific item on the Board of Regents agenda.

In order for the new dorm to be named after former President Kay Schallenkamp, ESU was required to get approval from KBOR, according to Garrett.

“We proposed that the new dormitory be named for President Kay Schallenkamp, who was the first female president of a public university in Kansas,” Garrett said. “It’s a wonderful way to honor somebody who was a glass ceiling breaker, who did a number of great things while she was here.”

In the KBOR chief academics officers meeting, they spoke about the changes to proposal submissions that were recently made, according to David Cordle, provost.

There is a certain format for submittal that universities must use and the previous format was complicated to use, Cordle said. In the old format, the prompts that they were required to respond to were easy to misinterpret.

“In many cases there’s more than one way to interpret the information they’re asking for,” Cordle said. “So we find ourselves in the situation where we send a proposal up there, KBOR staff reads it, they say ‘oh well, that’s not what you needed there,’ they send it back to us, you can easily lose two months in the cycle from having it go back and forth.”

According to Cordle, KBOR staff drafted a new process that was more streamlined and clarified the prompts.

During the Fiscal Affairs and Audit meeting, they discussed the upcoming audits, according to Diana Kulhman, vice president of administration and finance.

“As a matter of policy and procedure, the six regents have to report out to fiscal affairs and audit about this time of year, every year, on our current fiscal picture,” Kuhlman said.

Emporia State will be discussing their fiscal picture during the next KBOR meeting, Kuhlman said. 

Megan McReynolds, junior sociology major, said in her committee meeting they spoke about creating a new KBOR council.

“We talked about…working towards our goal of still creating chief diversity officers council within KBOR,” McReynolds said.

According to McReynolds, they hope to file on March 1 and discuss the proposal at the next KBOR meeting, March 14.