Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties

Gogebic Community College board meets student athletes

By IAN MINIELLY

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Ironwood - Tuesday's GCC meeting of the college trustee's opened with the men's and women's teams being introduced to the college board. Each player from both the men's and women's teams came forward, introduced themselves and their major and gave the members of the board a chance to hear and see the student athletes.

Dennis Mackey, men's coach, said, "The guy's did a good job this year. If we win our next game, we host a tournament game this weekend." Mackey was interrupted by the players saying, "When," as in, "when we win the next game we will host a game this weekend."

Mark Movrich, women's coach, stated, "The team has represented the college well on the road and people like them." The ladies interrupted Movrich at this point to make sure he realized lots of people like them because they are likeable. It is not just because the team only has six players.

It was a different introduction to the board meeting and both sides appeared to get quite a bit out of the exchanges between the players, coaches, and board.

Gary Gouin, welding instructor, was part of a program review with the board and shared an extensive amount of data with the board regarding the welding program. Gouin said, "The welding program hits home with what a welding program offers a local community." Gouin said, "For every two welders getting ready to retire, only one welder is in school learning the trade, according to the American Welding Society.

The welding program provides stackable credentials for the students through AWS certifications, but the enrollment figures for the school are in danger of exceeding capacity. Presently the first cohort for next fall is already full and the school is taking applications for the second, according to Jim Lorenson, president. A cohort of students is 15 and the school is presently able to teach 30 if both cohorts are full.

Tim Kolesar said he is considering adding welding I, II, and III to the Ironwood curriculem, which would prepare students for even greater levels of achievement at GCC because they would enroll with some basic skills already present to build upon.

Kim Zeckovich provided a marketing and recruitment brief to the board. Currently the school is in its third year of a three year contract wit Interact Communication and they are casting the net wide to reach a large audience of potential students and their parents, according to Zeckovich. During the free application week ranging from Oct 15-Nov 2, GCC received 189 applications for the 2017 school year compared to 164 in 2016.

The advertising campaigns are being effective and the school is even receiving feedback from locations as far away as Appleton and Minnesota that are seeing the spot ads run. Zeckovich informed the board the new website is almost ready for deployment. The website will be released internally first, so the school can work out any bugs, but Zeckovich said the new website will be more user friendly than the current version.

 
 
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