Top Award
Congratulations to Brianna Schmitz, who was named Emporia State’s ninth Ken B. Jones Award winner during the MIAA Awards Celebration presented by Husch Blackwell. The award is the seventh for a Hornet female student athlete and the fourth time an Emporia State track & field woman has won the title.
National Honor
Emporia State earned the Voter Friendly Campus designation from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators and Fair Elections Center’s Campus Vote Project. The designation is in effect until December 2020. Emporia State is one of only three Kansas universities to earn the honor. Universities that earn the honor have developed strategies to register students and have them vote. ESU’s program is coordinated by Rob Catlett, associate professor, and Bekah Selby, assistant professor, both in the Department of Mathematics and Economics.
Accreditation
In late May, The Teachers College was informed it passed its Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation accreditation with flying colors. For more than a year, Dr. Joan Brewer, associate dean of the college, and faculty were involved in gathering numerous reports and documents, as well as preparing for site visits by a CAEP team. Sometimes accreditation reviews come with notes on areas for improvement or stipulations — but no such notes were made on ESU’s accreditation report.
Biology Camp
The Ninth Annual Science Camp at Emporia State was filled with 20 students in third through eighth grade learning about various biological topics, including entomology, microbiology, botany, herpetology, aquatic ecology, and prairie ecology. The campers caught insects, cultured bacteria sampled from different objects, hiked to find interesting plants and animals, sampled plankton, seined fish and other aquatic organisms, handled and identified turtles, and caught snakes.
NCAA Invitation
The NCAA leadership development office, in partnership with the Board of Governors Committee to Promote Cultural Diversity and Equity, has invited Emporia State Deputy Director of Athletics Kristy Bayer to take part in the NCAA Pathway Program during the 2019-20 school year. She is one of 22 senior administrators from across all three NCAA Divisions selected for the program.
Arts & Sciences
The Mid-America Woodwind Quintet toured to Ottawa Middle School, Trailridge Middle School in the Shawnee Mission district and Johnson County Community College last semester. Members are ESU faculty members Dr. Allan Comstock on bassoon, Dr. Dawn McConkie on clarinet, Dr. Kate Bergman on flute, Terrisa Ziek on horn, and guest oboist Mark Rustman from Lawrence
Many thanks to Qiyang Zhang, assistant professor in physical sciences, who presented a research seminar at South China Agriculture University in Guangzhou, China, and shared information about Emporia State’s academic programs.
Congratulations to four nursing students who were chosen for the Newman Regional Health Summer Extern program — Avery Hall, Zoe Pray, Amanda Sergeant and Kelsi DeLong. This is the fifth year for the program.
Alum DJ Newman (BFA Art 2003) was featured in a VoyageDallas story about his path to opening his own graphic design studio, Salted Roots Digital Studios.
Audience members at tonight’s Summer Theatre opening show will enjoy refurbished seats in Bruder Theatre as well as a new state-of-the-art sound system. This is the 65th season for Emporia State Summer Theatre.
Nine ESU students, along with Economics Professors Rob Catlett and Bekah Selby, attended the Women in Economics Symposium at the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis. While there, the group met with James Bullard, President and CEO of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and Mariah Cline from Walmart’s corporate office. The students also participated in a special Women’s in Economics FRED Workshop where they worked together with other students on a special project using Federal Reserve data. Only 20 students from the 120 participants attending the event were chosen to participate in the workshop.
Business
Dr. Joyce Zhou’s marketing project was featured in a booklet published May 16 on AACSB’s Innovations That Inspire web page https://bit.ly/2YXZBBe. Students collaborated with area businesses to develop a complete business plan for a virtual reality application, from creation and development to point-of-sale transactions.
Ten students and two sponsors traveled to China May 17-30 on a study abroad trip. Stops included Beijing Union University, Guangzhou, South China Normal, and Hong Kong, along with visiting Chinese companies.
The Teachers College
Dr. Dennis Kear and the Kansas Masonic Literacy Center was thanked at Logan Avenue Elementary School’s assembly on May 24 for the resources we provided the past two years and KMLC gave each student a book for the summer.
Pre-service teachers worked with USD 253 Emporia in late May help clean up the grounds and sort clothes for students.
Learning continues during the summer for Elementary Education students as they explore phonemic awareness and phonics activities for young children in the college’s Resource Center.
Congratulations to Ross Bjork (BS, 1995 – Recreation), who was recently named the new athletic director at Texas A&M.
Stephanie Perez was named ESU’s Outstanding Academic Advisor of the Year in early May.
The first floor of Visser Hall is undergoing renovations this summer. Unfortunately, this means the 24/7 learning commons for students is inaccessible at this time.
Alan Shinn (BS 1969 - Mathematics), Uniontown, retired this year after 50 years of service of teaching math at Uniontown High School. He coached math students into more than 100 first-place victories in competitions from three to 30 schools.
Library & Information Management
Rachel Bridgewater (Oregon MLS 2004) has been elected Vice-President/President-Elect and Amy Stanforth (Oregon MLS 2009) was elected member-at-large for the Oregon chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Dr. Mirah J. Dow, professor and director of the Ph.D. Program, will receive the American Library Association’s Beta Phi Mu Award on June 23. This award is given in recognition of the achievement of a library school faculty member or another individual for distinguished service to education for librarianship. This annual award, which consists of $1,000 and a citation of achievement, is sponsored by the Beta Phi Mu International Library Science Honor Society.
During the government shutdown earlier this year, Kristy Martin (current Oregon SLIM student) created a “Dependents Shutdown Guide” for the U.S. Coast Guard as part of her LI802 course with Dr. Jenny Ma. This guide will be included in the Future National Coast Guard Museum’s archive in New London, Connecticut, once that museum is built.
Student Affairs
Officers from Emporia State Police and Safety joined Emporia police officers and Lyon County sheriff’s deputies for a Tip a Cop/Tip a Deputy event. Officers from the three departments turned into wait staff during dinner to raise money for Special Olympics Kansas.
Athletics
Welcome back to Les Stafford, Emporia State’s new tennis coach. Les was a four-time NAIA National Tournament qualifier during his playing career with the Hornets and is a member of the Emporia State Hall of Honor.
Emporia State student-athletes combined to donate over 5,600 hours of community service during the 2018-19 school year to place seventh among NCAA Division II schools in the NCAA Team Works™ Service Challenge presented by Helper Helper. In addition, the Hornets had four teams ranked in the top ten nationally in their respective sports.
Emporia State women’s track & field All-American Brianna Schmitz earned CoSIDA Google Cloud Academic All-District honors for her work in the classroom and on the track. She is a first-team selection and is now eligible to earn Academic All-America honors.
Make it 17 straight years for Emporia State’s men to score at the NCAA Division II National Outdoor Track & Field Championships. The Hornets had five All-Americans on the final day of competition in Kingsville, Texas to finish 43rd in the nation.
Emporia State’s student-athletes have outstanding semester in the classroom. Over 300 student-athletes combined for a department GPA of 3.11 during the spring 2019 semester. Four programs had a team GPA of over 3.50 while all but two maintained a 3.00 GPA during the spring. A total of 204 of the 316 student-athletes for Emporia State had a 3.0 GPA during the semester while 37 Hornet student-athletes had a 4.0 GPA in the spring.
Presentations
Dr. Terri Summey, Professor, University Libraries and Archives, and Dr. Sandy Valenti, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Management, presented “Pool Manager, Lifeguard, Swim Coach, Swimmer: Keeping Your Head Above Water with the ACRL Framework” at the 2019 LOEX Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Dr. Connie Schrock, professor of mathematics, will present a webinar, “Mathematical Situations: Mean and Median,” sponsored by the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics and Texas Instruments on June 13.
Theodore Wheeler, psychology major, presented his original research, “Undergraduates With or Without Leadering Training: Similar Justification Scores but Different Perceptions of Self-Morality Scores,” at the annual convention for the Association for Psychological Science, in Washington D.C. May 23-26.
Dr. Rebecca Rodriguez Carey and Dr. Alfredo Montalvo, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime and Delinquency Studies, presented “Mass Incarceration in the United States: Gender, Race, Incarcerated Mothers and their Children” to staff at the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center in Topeka, as part of their staff training for their Play Free program initiative. The Play Free program is a play-based education and exploration program that partners with the Topeka Correctional Facility to provide rich play experiences for children with an incarcerated mother or grandmother.
Publications
A paper co-written by Carolina Taylor (accounting student) and Dr. Joyce Zhou (School of Business Chair & Marketing faculty) titled ”How does culture affect international business between the United States and China?” will be published in volume 13(3) pf the Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness.