As President Michelle Lewellen called the faculty senate meeting to order, faculty senate members rose for the pledge of allegiance, some with their right hands over their heart, while others saluted the flag.

In the Cheryl A. Epple Board room, topics such as the tutoring centers, the new Canvas update, facility plans and Program Excellence concerning athletic students. That presentation was given by the Athletic Director Dan Clauss.

Clauss’ main objective in the presentation was to detail on “transfer and completion”.

He said, “Last year we had 107 student athletes transfer on scholarship to four year universities […] that accounts to approximately $3.2 million of scholarship offers to our student athletes here. We’re one of the top programs in the country and this is what it shows for.”

Clauss continued, “I want to give you an idea about transfer requirements for our student athletes, they’re very difficult. The NCAA keeps raising the requirements on us from a community college to a four year.”

The list of requirements is aggressive toward the athletic students and because of this the Athletic Department has come up with ways to help out the process.

One of the ways the department has gotten together with other programs to come up with solutions to pave the way for students to transfer by keeping what Clauss calls an athletic scorecard, which compares regular students and athletic students along with their grades and behavior.

Clauss said, “Our State Athletic Organization along with the Chancellor’s Office and Cal Pass got together a couple years ago and we’ve been working on trying to create an athletic scorecard so we can compare our Cerritos student athletes to the Cerritos regular students. As well as the students athletes across the state and the non-student athletes across the state.”

With this information, it can be seen where the athletic students struggle in the academic field and therefore can create more programs to help them achieve transfer to a four year college.

Most of the senate faculty were satisfied with the information that was presented in the Program Excellence.

Lewellen was among the satisfied faculty members. “One of our goals is to promote Program Excellence.

“Having doing that and to see the numbers for the athletes be differnt than what the perception of how athletes behave, I think that was the important thing, that was definitely the highlight of the meeting to see how great our athletes are doing,” she said.

An update of the Program Excellence will be done in spring 2017.