Best of Florida Schools 2005
Web-Only Categories—Page 9

Best High School/College Facility
High Tech High School
Glass walls, plasma screen televisions, and comfy chairs to relax in with your wireless laptop—it sounds more like a plush apartment than a high school. But to the students attending the Clark Advanced Learning Center at Indian River Community College, it’s just another day of class.

The doors of the Clark Advanced Learning Center, a public charter high school, opened this fall to high school juniors and seniors in Martin County. Complete with a digital media studio, editing suites, and audio suites, students have full access to the latest technology. Each student also is issued a laptop computer to tote around campus, to internships, or home for the weekend. The center’s aim is to give students only the best to prepare them for the digital age.

“The school engages students in a futuristic, highly innovative, technology-rich environment that prepares them for the challenges of the 21st century,” says  Michelle Abaldo, director of institutional advancement.

Classrooms surround the “Knowledge Room,” where groups of students work together on projects while the plasma screens flash digital projects they created. For lunch, students head to the covered patio or to the “Career Café” to sit on the floor with their laptops. Perhaps the best perk is that it’s all free. Students graduate with a minimum of 24 credit hours—some even with an associate’s degree—at no charge. Any student in the Martin County School District can apply and must meet eligibility criteria, including minimum GPA and FCAT standards, to be accepted. The program is funded by legislative allocation, the school district,and private donations from Hays and Rosamond Clark, the patrons for whom the center is named.

IRCC worked closely with the Martin County School District and received input from the business community to create the program. Students choose a major and then set to work solving complex real-world problems linked to their career interests. The program is so advanced that it has become a national model and was awarded a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

“The center applies proven best practices in education that respond to the learning styles of students born in the 1980s or later, with the goal of preparing a highly skilled workforce equipped with strong academic and technical skills,”
Abaldo says. —MM

For more information, contact info@ircc.edu.

Best Substitute Pig-Kisser
The Ultimate Kiss-Off
Professor Larry Gunter had to grab an Altoid and pucker up. He wasn’t participating in a typical kissing contest, however. When things started to go awry at Lake City Community College’s Student Government Association fund-raiser, Gunter stepped in to kiss a pig and save the day.

For its Fall Festival, Lake City’s SGA set up jars with Polaroid photos of staff, faculty, and students attached to the front. Participants dropped money into the jars, and at the end, the person whose jar contained the most money “won” the grand prize: a chance to lock lips with a sexy swine. “Students were really curious about which teachers were participating and why the pig was there,” says Kristi Fuller, 2004-2005 SGA president. “They really wanted to see a ‘difficult’ teacher kiss the pig.”

From 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m., SGA brought in $161.23, but when it came time for the big make-out session, there was one problem—the winning professor was nowhere to be found. “When we went up on stage and called for him to meet us by the pig, a large crowd of students and faculty had started to gather, but the pig kisser was absent,” Fuller says. “Some students and faculty searched the entire campus for him.” It turned out the MIA professor had gone to lunch because when he’d left, there was so little money in his jar that he thought there was no way he’d win.

“Just as I started to freak out because I was the second place winner, speech professor Larry Gunter came up to me and said that he would step in,” Fuller says. Not one to leave the audience hanging, Gunter came to the rescue, bravely kissing the porker as students cheered him on. –LD

Contact Fuller at sga@lakecitycc.edu.

Best Advertising Solution
Your Attention, Please
At colleges and universities, getting the word out is paramount. Student groups are always looking for eye-catching ways to advertise their events. But, Lake City Community College need look no further. It’s Student Government Association and Student Activities Office have engineered a cheap and effective way to get attention.

Using PVC pipe, students create self-standing frames the size of half of a black shower curtain. They paint messages and information in bright markers that contrast on the black “canvas” of the curtain. “We post them on various corners and intersections of the campus—not only near the entrances and exits, but near other buildings that are in less-traffic areas,” says Jenneffer Bachmaier, student activities coordinator.

Not only are these billboards effective ways of advertising, they’re extremely cheap to make. “We built them at about $3 to $4 each,” Bachmaier says. “Each shower curtain is $2.” SGA and student activities only had to splurge for the markers, which were $200. The signs are used to promote all kinds of events, from Spring Fling to Black History Month. “Other departments advertising various events have asked us to help publicize by painting these signs,” Bachmaier says. “Most surveys reflect that students learned about events from these billboards. This is a definite winner!” –LD

Contact Bachmaier at bachmaierj@lakecitycc.edu.

Best Business Etiquette Course
Outclass the Competition
Do you know which fork to use for your salad or how to greet a potential client? These things may seem trivial, but they can make all the difference in the cutthroat business world. In addition to exploring business strategies, students at Lake-Sumter Community College learn how to shake hands, make small talk, and put their best feet forward—the little things that companies look for in new hires.

In 1997, LSCC’s Business Advisory Committee suggested that the business program should develop a course addressing the issues of ethics and proper etiquette while meeting local business needs. Business instructor and Department Chair Graham Bourne developed the Business Ethics and Etiquette course, which he began teaching in 2000. The class not only covers business strategies but also dressing professionally, proper manners, and conversational skills. “Ethics and etiquette are no longer being taught as they once were, but the business community still desires the skills within their employees,” Bourne says. “Business programs across the country are now trying to meet this need by teaching these skills to students.”

During the ethics portion of his course, Bourne uses classroom exercises and debates to teach students that many business-ethics decisions aren’t simply black and white. “I have an exercise where a salesperson has a dilemma about making a sale to a customer,” he says. “I ask the students what the salesperson would do based on each of five ethical models. To their amazement, the students realize that the salesperson would behave in five different ways depending on which ethical model was being used.”

During the etiquette portion of his course, Bourne invites local business people to join the class for dinner at a fine restaurant, giving students a chance to show off what they’ve learned in class while in a “real world” atmosphere. “Students are required to dress in business attire and must practice their skills of introducing themselves, shaking hands, demonstrating small talk, and conducting themselves properly during a business meal with the local business people,” he says. “Many companies believe that the behavior you exhibit during a business meal will be an indicator of the behavior you’ll show at a job.”

After dinner, Bourne asks each businessperson who impressed him the most during the evening. “I tell students that the only way they can get an ‘A’ on the exercise is to impress a businessperson,” he says. “I’ve had a few students who were contacted after the exercise and offered a job by some of the business people attending the dinner.”

With companies now spending money for experts to teach their employees proper business etiquette, LSCC is giving its students a leg up on the competition. “I share some research I found with my students that shows companies with employees who know etiquette do better profit-wise than employees who don’t know etiquette,” Bourne says. “My model allows the student to get ‘just enough’ to make them dangerous.”—AMC

Contact Bourne at bourneg@lscc.edu.

Kindest Diplomats
Random Acts of Kindness
They leave candy on your windshield when you’re not looking. They make trash disappear and even create valentines for strangers. They might sound like magical elves from the pages of a fairy tale, but Lake-Sumter Community College’s Campus Diplomats work hard to support their faculty and fellow students.

Members of the Diplomats service organization do an awful lot of good deeds, on campus and off. They help out at student activity, club, and athletic events; collect items for local food banks; coordinate blood drives; assist students during registration; and work with Habitat for Humanity and Relay for Life. But some of their largest—and most enjoyable—efforts take place during Random Acts of Kindness Week and World Kindness Week.

“There’s a Random Acts of Kindness Foundation—it’s a national society—that sponsors a World Kindness Week in the fall and a Random Acts of Kindness Week in the spring,” says Heather Elmatti, student activities coordinator. “The Campus Diplomats decided to adopt it because we like to do service projects, and it’s nice to do something non-traditional. For both weeks, we have three different projects that we do: a kindness project for the students, one for the faculty and staff, and something for the college in general.”

One year, the diplomats placed candy and handwritten notes on the windshields of all 500 cars in the campus parking lot, hoping to light up everyone’s day. Another year, they handed out cards that gave students a specified amount of free printing at the library. Last spring, they picked up trash to beautify the campus. And this fall, diplomats delivered about 200 handwritten encouragement cards attached to carnations to faculty and staff. “The students and faculty love it,” Elmatti says. “They know when the week is coming up, and they know that sometime during the week that something’s going to happen, but they don’t know what.”

With only 10 students out of 3,000 chosen as diplomats each year, the process of becoming one is pretty selective. Diplomat-hopefuls must fill out an application, provide two letters of reference, and have a minimum 2.0 GPA. Those who make it past that stage face a panel of three to four faculty and students who select the top candidates during an interview. And once they’re in, diplomats must maintain their grades, perform 70 hours of community service, and perform well on their semester evaluations to remain in the organization.

In preparation for Random Acts of Kindness Week this February, LSCC’s campus do-gooders got out their doilies and glitter to create handmade valentines for everyone. They also set up a valentine-making table, where students created their own masterpieces for loved ones. However, students got a sweet surprise for themselves when arriving to make a valentine—free ice-cream floats. “We try to be as random as possible, but you can’t be totally random,” Elmatti says. —AMC

Contact Elmatti at elmattih@lscc.edu.

Copyright © 2006 Oxendine Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved