COMMITTEE:                      Calendar

MEETING DATE:                January 31, 2005

PERSON PRESIDING:         John Crammer

ATTENDEES:       Jeff Phipps, Trey Martindale, Jonathan Dembo, Stephen Dock, Punam Madhok, John Crammer

EX-OFFICIO:        Austin Bunch, Angela Anderson, Nancy House

VISITORS:            

The meeting was called to order at 2:00 pm in Rawl 142 by John Crammer.  Stephen Dock moved ( Jeff Phipps seconded) approval of the minutes of the December 1, 2004 meeting as modified and contingent on changes by Catherine Rigsby who was at the meeting. Motion passed.

Austin Bunch reported on commencement.  After further discussion, it was decided to maintain the current institutional commencement schedule on Saturdays.  There will be one ceremony in the Fall and two indoor ceremonies in the Spring.  Additional unit ceremonies will have to be on Thursday.  There is a possibility of adding a Summer commencement ceremony or instituting restricted seating for the institutional ceremony.  The Fall 2004 ceremony had a decrease in participation by graduates with only about twenty percent participating.

Crammer reported on contacting Dr. Wanda Bunch at Pitt Community College concerning coordinating calendars.  In the e-mail exchange coordination of calendars, semester start, holidays, and making up days missed due to inclement weather. 

The committee looked over the preliminary proposed calendar for 2006-2007.  Angela Anderson asked that the calendar dates for the last day of drop/add, add only, and dropping classes specify a time of 5:00 p.m. which is when the Registrars Office locks the system.  Recently a problem arose when students using OneStop tried to make changes at night after the system was locked.  These changes were placed in the proposed calendar for 2006-2007.  She will check with the Cashier’s office on dates for late fees and canceling schedules in the spring.  Due to ECU’s conversion to SCT Banner, registration for early registration for summer and fall 2007 will take place in two separate systems – summer in DB2 and fall in Banner.  Jonathan Dembo pointed out that the first sentence in the last paragraph of the exam schedule was confusing.  The sentence involves final exams for classes that do not start on the hour and/or meet longer than one hour.  After some discussion, the sentence was reworded.

The final topic of discussion concerned making up classes lost due to weather.  There are two points to discuss.  First, when should days be made up, and secondly, when they are made up, how should they be made up.  It was decided that when only part of a day is lost (morning only or afternoon/evening only) that the day does not need to be made up.  When whole days are missed it was noted that in the past there was no consistency in making up days.  The last time whole days were missed were Fall 2003 due to hurricane Isabel.  Bunch pointed out that if there is no policy, faculty may opt to make up the day or not.  The public school system (K-12) and community colleges require that missed days be made up but the university system has no such requirement.  Bunch asked whether SACS has any requirements on minimum amount of days or time required.  Anderson noted that it is easier to incorporate one missed day over a semester than multiple missed days as happened with hurricane Floyd.  She will check to see if there are any SACS requirements.  The prevailing thought is that missed days should be made up only when we are required to make them up.  When days are made up, the consensus is that Saturdays should be avoided.  Rather than making a proposal to the Faculty Senate, the committee would prefer to have strategies for making up days as part of the committee’s internal guidelines.  Nancy House suggested that we leave the method open and allow faculty to use alternative methods such as the Internet for making up classes.  Another possibility is using the Reading Days at the end of the semester.

The next meeting will be 2:00 Monday at the end of February or the beginning of March in time to make the agenda for the March meeting of the Faculty Senate.  The main purpose of the meeting will be to approve a proposed calendar for 2006-2007 to be presented to the Faculty Senate.  Mary Farwell will report on the calendar for Pitt County Schools, and the committee will discuss how to make up class days missed due to weather when making up the days is required.

Meeting adjourned at 3:00 pm.