December 12, 2025

Jingle Bells! Oh what fun it is to ride in a…

social media campaign.

This week the student Community Engagement Officers solicited my help in producing a social media video where they become the leaders of the college. Thanks to Morgan, Mia and Emma for a fun afternoon along with Samantha Sims. Check out our end-of-filming photo below. You can catch the video on their Insta channel on Monday..

Speaking of social media, I received a compliment this week from a colleague.

Dr. Suzanne Walsh, the President of City U, and I have begun meeting regularly. She is a fan of Cascadia, a former president of a historically black college, and the chair of the Board for the national organization Achieving The Dream. We met at the UW president’s reception in October and decided to get together this week. Her perspectives and insights on higher education were fascinating and hopefully I can glean some great ideas for Cascadia from these conversations.

During the conversation, she mentioned that she has been following the college’s Instagram posts the last few months. She was so impressed by the content. She said the student vibe and authenticity of the campus were well-portrayed through these posts. She says that while other campuses pose students to display diversity, our photos were of everyday situations and the diversity of our campus was apparent without staging. She said that the range of events and activities demonstrated the values of Cascadia.

What a refreshing gift and a great way to bring 2025 to a close.

I want to set the stage for 2026 by talking about three things that will be on our minds.

Accessibility

There is an April state-wide mandate to have all our materials accessible. As we know, this has been a heavy lift and I appreciate everyone’s effort to get as close to the finish line as possible. One of our stumbling blocks has been accessible PDFs and I wanted to share two State Board messages from yesterday about this. This is not just a Cascadia problem. The emails are attached and, if this issue is of concern to you, please take a look. I think help is on the way.

Marketing & Communications

As I mentioned last week, Meagan Walker, Executive Director of Marketing & Communications, will be retiring. The consultant we hired to review our Marcom program presented results to the executive team this week. Over the next four weeks, we will consider this material and determine how best to staff and lead these efforts using existing resources and a possible reorganization of the department. Our brand and public outreach is an important part of student recruitment and connecting external audiences with our mission and values. We’ll need to make sure that we have a solidly resourced department as Meagan departs. I hope to communicate our new direction on January 12 via a Special Letter.

Budget

Our back-of-the-napkin sketch indicates that we seem to be in a good place to write a balanced 2026-27 budget. This budget takes into account increasing expenses, hiring 8 new faculty, tuition increases, enrollment increases, and a $180,000 reduction in our State Board allocation. Everything is still preliminary, but for the first time in my career at Cascadia, I was not worried about the winter and spring budget season.

That is, until the Governor announced last week that he intends to implement a mid-biennium $1B decrease to the state budget, which is unprecedented in the 16 years I’ve been here. He releases his budget on December 22. The State Board will analyze this and hopefully let us know the damage by our January 28 presidents meeting. The legislature will have 60 days to work through it and decide which proposed cuts to embrace. So, more to come on this.

In the meanwhile, this article was written recently in the Seattle Times about Shoreline College. I worry for our colleagues and hope they can manage. Please know that this is NOT our story. We have things in hand.

Shoutouts

From the IN Box:

Thanks to Mika Gerard. Mika was willing to jump into to help faculty and students during emergency flooding situations this week and went above and beyond to provide coverage. Not only is she doing all the day-to-day tasks, Mika is also cutting out time when emergencies such as this come up to spring into action. Mika is such a valued member of Cascadia and we’re so grateful for them. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication to our college, Mika!

AND

A big thank-you to the departments leading the way in completing mandatory trainings due March 20.

• Human Resources, Compliance, & Payroll
• Inclusion, Advocacy & Community
• International Programs
• Student Accessibility Services
• Student Enrollment
• Student Financial Services
• President’s Office – 100% complete!

Thank you for your proactive engagement! Keep up the great work as we continue moving toward full campus-wide completion.

Shoutouts can be sent to FLShoutout@cascadia.edu.

Thanks for a great 2025. See you in 2026!