THE LAND OF LAKES AND VOLCANOES

After conducting research in Nicaragua through the 1990s, I had another dream: to one day travel with my father back to the country of his birth, to remind him that even through revolutions, economic embargos and the fact that it is the second-poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Nicaragua will always be a part of who we are. In 2007, that dream became a reality when I traveled with my father to Nicaragua. I watched in awe as Dad touched the ground on which he had played as a young boy for the first time in 35 years.

This summer, another dream—21 years in the making—came true. I took seven enthusiastic students on a service-learning, study-abroad course to Nicaragua. My dad, Eddy Reyes, accompanied my students and me on the 14-day course called Nicaragua: Land of Lakes and Volcanoes, a fitting title for a country known for its numerous lakes, lagoons and volcanoes, which number more than 50.

My objective for this course was to provide students an opportunity to apply anthropological principles previously learned in the classroom to a cross-cultural understanding of Nicaragua. Students explored the connections between history, politics, economics, foreign aid, tourism and ecology to further enrich their historical and cultural perspectives. Additionally, I designed the course to expand the learning process through service learning and experiential education.

The majority of the course took place in Granada and Matagalpa. Week one, in Granada, comprised several excursions designed to challenge the students physically, mentally and socially. It was in Granada that the students experienced the land of lakes and volcanoes firsthand, where we hiked the nearby Mombacho volcano.

We followed that excursion with an exhilarating zipline ride through the canopy on 2,000 feet of cable stretching between 17 platforms situated from 10 feet to 100 feet above the forest floor. Everyone marveled at the breathtaking views of Mombacho and the coast of Lake Nicaragua. Later in the week, we kayaked through the little islands (Las Isletas) in Lake Nicaragua created by Mombacho, while the students observed their first colorful guardabarranco, the national bird. Lectures, readings and journal writing rounded out each day. One afternoon, I instructed the students to conduct fieldwork by heading out in the streets of Granada, observing a public cultural phenomenon and later sharing their written reflections about how that experience provided a different perspective of Nicaragua than from the required readings alone.

Seven days later, we headed to Matagalpa, located in the central mountains of Nicaragua. There, the students worked and interacted with approximately 20 young mothers from Casa Materna, a nongovernmental organization that seeks to reduce maternal and infant death rates in the Matagalpa region by providing pre-natal and post-natal care and education for mothers with high-risk pregnacies from rural areas.

The most meaningful service learning, however, took place at Selva Negra, a coffee plantation nestled among mountainous virgin cloud forests, where troops of howler monkeys, bellowing their deep calls above our heads, live among more than 200 species of birds, many endemic to Nicaragua. Selva Negra is an organic coffee farm that employs 250 fulltime workers and provides housing, three meals a day, a health clinic and a school for children grades K-6. Many of the workers and their families stay on at the farm long after their schooling, as is evidenced by four generations living and working there today.

I first visited Selva Negra in the early 1990s, where I met the owners of the farm, Eddy and Mausy Kuhl, with whom I have maintained a close relationship ever since. The Kuhls had told me that the workers in the vegetable gardens wanted to know more about urban farming techniques like shallow pool gardening, basic wick gardening and wading pool gardening. Each of these methods are inexpensive, require no energy or moving parts, instruments or analysis, and are made from local materials, recycled if possible. My students’ well-researched presentation to the workers about these techniques was sincerely appreciated and prompted a vigorous and fruitful discussion.

As much as my students, my father and I enjoyed the trip thus far, our time spent with the gardeners and families was the most rewarding of all. We worked side by side to plant tomatoes, peppers and green beans in the exhilarating tropical rainfall, listening to the sounds of children playing and laughing, our hands full of moist, rich and fertile soil. It was a privilege for my students and me to be welcomed into the workers’ homes, and walk through their gardens, experiencing their daily activities. Eddy and Mausy also had asked that we bring used clothing and supplies for the school children. So, several weeks before our departure, my father (a teacher in the Denver Public Schools) requested donations of children’s Spanish books and clothing, which amounted to 11 stuffed suitcases that each of us checked and delivered to Selva Negra. As we delivered the books to the school one chilly morning, we were told that there was no library in the school, and these books would be the first to establish a children’s library. My students and family were sincerely moved by this aspect of service learning, realizing that this simple act of giving would be a continuous source of joy and knowledge for the children for many years.

“Every day of the trip was filled to the brim with experiences and discussions the challenged my mind and heart.” –student Anne Latimer

“You came to Nicaragua for discovery, adventure and learning. You are leaving with a fire in your belly that will guide you in your search to fulfill what is needed and wanted in our world. Keep the fire alive and tattoo in your souls the noblest of virtues: to better the human condition.” –Eddy Reyes (’97)



IT’S ALL IN THE METRO STATE FAMILY
By Leslie Petrovski

On July 21, when Col. Laura Richardson (’86) accepted command of the U.S. Army Operational Test Command at Ft. Hood, she became the first woman in the Army’s history to do so.

Col. Richardson is accustomed to firsts. She was the first woman to command Ft. Meyer (now Joint Base Meyer- Henderson Hall); Laura and her husband, now Brigadier General Jim Richardson, were the first married couple to command battalions at the same time in the same division during the United States’ initial invasion in Iraq; and she was the first of three siblings to graduate from Metro State. (A fourth sibling, Elaine, did not attend the College.)

Richardson, who’s been nominated for promotion to Brigadier General herself (her nomination awaits U.S. Senate approval), her sister Janis Coffin, M.D. (’94) and brother Darwin Strickland (’95 and ’96), are among a burgeoning number of alumni who have made Metro State a family affair.

“My dad was a big supporter of Metro State,” Richardson explains of her siblings’ decision to attend. “He never dictated where we should go, but he knew that Metro State had smaller class sizes and that you got to know your professors one-on-one. Janis and Darwin went for the same reason I did, the ROTC programs are wonderful, there are tons of classes to choose from and you’re in downtown Denver on this beautiful campus.”

Family matters
Pushing toward its 50th anniversary, Metro State is now of an age where legacy status is starting to matter. In “college-speak” a legacy is a prospective student or current student with a family member who attends or graduated from the same college. Traditionally colleges and universities (even fraternities and sororities) favored legacies for admission. The reasons range from assuming family members share characteristics, which make them good institutional fits, to cultivating donations from wealthy alumni parents by admitting offspring.

A recent study by a researcher at Harvard University demonstrated that legacy preferences haven’t disappeared with freshman beanies. Harvard doctoral student, Michael Hurwitz, showed that at 30 highly selective colleges, legacy status conferred a 23.3 percentagepoint admission advantage. Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of the book, “Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions,” has derided the practice, which favors students from families with strong educational or affluent backgrounds as “fundamentally unfair.”

It turns out, most applicants don’t answer the question, says Office of Institutional Research Director Ellen Boswell (’77), but the numbers are still illuminating. In fall 2000 Metro State had 826 students who provided legacy information or 4.67 percent of the student body. Fall 2010 saw 1,951 students or 8.15 percent indicate their legacy status. Either students are more willing to share their family connections on admission applications, or there are more legacies going to Metro State.

That there are more students with Metro State histories makes perfect sense: With the golden anniversary looming, Metro State has enough years behind it to have matriculated several generations of Coloradans—Boomers, Xers and Millennials, not to mention nontraditional students harkening back to the Greatest or Silent Generations. It’s not unthinkable that some of today’s students have received Rowdy nudges from enthusiastic alumni grandparents.

“Anecdotally, over the years working with students, I have encountered quite a few who tell me, for instance, that their mom, dad, brother, sister, etc., also attends or attended here,” says Director of Admissions and Outreach Vaughn Toland. “This gave me the impression that it’s fairly common for family members to attend here as well.”

As the College looks to position itself for the near future and further refine its brand, its history can play a role. When multiple siblings or multi-generations from the same family select Metro State, it sends a powerful message: Suddenly Metro State isn’t just a college of opportunity, it’s a college of choice.

“Two of my daughters went to Metro State,” says Peggy O’Neill-Jones, professor of technical communication and media production who directs the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Western Region Program housed at the College. “My girls could have gone anywhere, but they chose Metro State.”

When Roy Alexander (’74, accounting) immigrated to the United States from Grenada, he lived with his great aunt in Northeast Denver for nine months while planning his next move. Anxious for a higher education and lacking a car, he took the advice of a cousin and enrolled at Metro State.

“I could get there by public transportation, it was affordable and good quality,” Alexander says, “and that’s all it took for me to end up there.” Like many of his classmates, Alexander balanced work with his pursuit of an accounting degree. He landed his first post-college job at then-Big Eight accounting firm Touche Ross (now Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited), after one of his professors, Russell Bean, chided him for not attending the on-campus recruiting sessions.

“He said, ‘Come to my office and I’ll give you business cards for a few of the big CPA firms. Just call them and don’t be afraid to use my name.’

“I did call and interviewed with three of them and got three offers. If Dr. Bean hadn’t seen potential in me, he wouldn’t have given me those cards. Whenever I speak—and I recently was the keynote speaker at the Metro State scholarship awards dinner—I try to mention him.”

Today Alexander is a heavily involved community leader and the former chief executive officer and executive director of the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority—as well as the father of current Metro State senior, Ian Alexander, an electrical engineering technology major who transferred to the College after a year at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. In addition to Ian, two of Alexander’s siblings, Claudia Alexander Samuel (’90) and Ivor Alexander (’90) of the Denverbased engineering firm, Samuel Engineering, graduated from Metro State, as did his mother-in-law, Arcenia Davis (’76). Other relatives, including Alexander’s wife Sheryl, have taken classes at the College.

“The family legacy here is big,” Ian explains of his decision to transfer. “My dad went here, my grandma went here, my aunt and uncles. I used to come to Metro State basketball games with my dad. I was homesick. I have several friends here at Metro State and I wanted to be at school with people I knew.”

The Salazar family, too, has a strong legacy at Metro State. As a young woman, Hope Hernandez-Salazar (’78, education and Spanish), the wife of U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, aspired to be the first person from her family to graduate from college. Though her mom supported her decision, her father took the traditional position, “You’re just a girl. Why do you need a college degree?”

Since Salazar’s graduation, her sister Suzanne Yamashita (‘94) and nephew Gabriel Salazar (‘03) have graduated from the College, and her youngest daughter, Andrea, is well into her hospitality, tourism and events management studies.

“It was close to home and convenient. My first semester there I was pregnant with my daughter,” Andrea explains. “I decided to continue because I did so well and I liked the campus and the people and there are so many choices; you can do anything you want at Metro State.”

“My experience there,” Salazar says, “gave me the ability to recommend Metro State to other family members who changed their lives, my sister, nephew and now my daughter, all of them might not have completed or continued their educations without Metro State.”

The ties that bind
When Anne O’Neill accepted her diploma from her sister Peggy O’Neill-Jones in spring 2007 there were probably few dry eyes on the dais.

“That was probably one of the proudest moments of my life,” she says. “We had a $20 bet on who was going to start crying first. It was way fun and way special.”

O’Neill had spent 21 years working in myriad high-level positions ranging from oil accounting to owning her own business to sales and marketing, and what she liked most about these positions was planning events. Presented with a chance to reinvent her life (“that’s Latin for, I got a divorce,” she says), O’Neill, sitting in her sister’s Metro State office, decided to get a hospitality, tourism and events management degree, a degree she has since leveraged into a career as an account manager at The Meeting Edge. (Read this issue’s Ask an Alum by Anne O’Neill on p. 25.)

“We’re practically the Metro State family,” she jokes. Her niece and O’Neill-Jones’ daughter, Kerry Jones (’02), who went on to get a master’s in mechanical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and now is a quality assurance engineer for Belle Bonfils Memorial Blood Bank, helped O’Neill get through math at Metro State. Kelly Jones-Wagy (’05), O’Neill-Jones’ second daughter, earned a degree in education and history and currently teaches social studies at Overland High School. Now her husband, Jack Wagy, after two tours in Iraq, is a Metro State accounting major. O’Neill-Jones’ step grandson, Keith, is also attending Metro State.

Mark Jastorff, Metro State’s executive director of the alumni association, is interested in legacy stories like the O’Neills and the Joneses, because not only do they shape the College’s narrative, they also represent alumni ties that are potentially tighter than those of one-off grads.

“Legacies have different levels of loyalties in fundraising, legislative advocacy and recruitment,” Jastorff says. “There is a much stronger sense of loyalty not just because of what the College did for you, but because of what it did for your mom or your brother. If we can identify those folks, we can give them things to do and they can tell us what they want to see.”

Anne O’Neill is a case in point. A member of the Metro State Alumni Association, O’Neill is teaching in hospitality, tourism and events management this fall as an affiliate professor.
“I don’t want to understate this, but Metro State changed my life,” she says. “I’ve tried really hard to give back. They gave me an education when my window of opportunity had closed on many things. The teachers and staff and institution gave me a leg up. And, my sister, she’s my biggest supporter.”

Birds of a feather
The Office of Alumni Relations is in the process of launching a Birds of a Feather Legacy Program to collect better data on legacies as well as celebrate the College’s unique legacy tradition. “We have parents going to school with their kids at the same time and graduating at the same time,” he says, “and we want to celebrate that.”

Alumni Relations will be instituting a Family of the Year recognition program and are considering ways to honor legacy enrollments at Freshman Orientation and other events. The alumni board by-laws define an alum as anyone who has taken a class at Metro State.

“One out of every four citizens in Colorado has had a class at Metro State,” Jastorff says. That’s a gigantic web and we need to capitalize on that.”

Editor’s note: Have a legacy story of your own? Share it at www.mscd.edu/alumni/birdsofafeather


ON EQUAL FOOTING
Metro State’s Access Center doesn’t just provide assistance to students with disabilities, it empowers them.
By Julie Lancaster

When Wayne Marshall (’07, human services) attended college for the first time, he was fully sighted. After earning an associate’s degree in communications at St. Louis Community College, he worked for the phone company for a few years.

But his vision was deteriorating due to the genetic condition retinitis pigmentosa, and he realized he needed to change careers. By the time he enrolled at Metro State in 2005, he was considered legally blind.

“I knew that I needed some help figuring this out,” he says. Metro State’s Access Center for Disability Accommodations and Adaptive Technology equipped Marshall with screen-reading (text-to-speech) technology to access instructional materials and testing accommodations (a reader/scribe to read him the test questions and write his answers).

“The Access Center was very resourceful in helping me,” he says. “I gained a lot of valuable experience that assisted me not only with my education but also in my professional career.”

Today Marshall is a case manager and senior services facilitator at the Colorado Center for the Blind.

Follow the yellow tile
Located in the Auraria Library at the far end of a yellow rubber tile pathway that starts near the library entrance—a visual guide and a tactile one for those using canes—the Access Center is a small department whose work permeates the campus and has repercussions far beyond.

To use the Access Center’s services, students must identify themselves as having a disability as outlined in the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). Since ADA provisions are different from those that govern K-12 schools, the center helps high school students make the transition through its annual STEP event, in which students visit campus to learn about adaptive technology. The center also presents a 10-week adaptive technology class for high schoolers.

Led by Director Greg Sullivan, the staff includes seven employees plus part-time reader/scribes, student workers and student interns. This team works with some 1,300 Metro State students with disabilities each semester—a population that is shifting, according to Greg Root, Access Center assistant director.

“Today 85 to 90 percent of the students we serve have hidden disabilities, and may have difficulty with reading, writing and taking tests,” says Root. “And it’s not just learning disabilities and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder); there is a growing segment of mental illnesses such as TBI (traumatic brain injury) and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), especially with our returning vets.”

In addition to the technology available at the center itself, the staff has installed assistive technology on 400 student laptops and in all 12 of the College’s computer labs. In spring 2012, the center will launch Metro State’s own “virtual desktop” for students with disabilities—a capability currently offered only by such large universities as Stanford, Harvard and MIT. It will enable students to log on and access assistive technology from anywhere in the world.

Root credits the College’s commitment to accessibility as a primary reason for Metro State’s prominence in this area. “We get a great deal of support from this institution,” he says, “and that is reflected in what students have available to them.”

Another reason, according to Root, is that most schools don’t have an IT professional like Ozi working as an adaptive technology specialist. Ozi is quick to add that the center’s dedicated student workers help him stay abreast of the latest technology.