From the Dean’s Desk

Dear Friends and Alumni,

It has been a year since our last Envision, a year of success and enormous activity for the College of Education. In the pages that follow, we share stories about our hopes, dreams and some of the folks helping to make our dreams become a reality.

You’ll see how, for instance, with generous support from the Albertson Foundation, we designed and implemented the university’s most highly technology-integrated classroom/ lab. With this classroom, we provide future educators with world-class technology integration skills, as well as conduct practical, in situ research on the ways teachers and students use technology. Through these pages, we hope you feel the energy your College of Education is creating — on campus, in the state and across the country — as we set high standards of research quality and bring in grants that benefit K-12 students, teachers and administrators and communities.

During this past year, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, as well as the state of Idaho, granted the college full continuing accreditation for our educator preparation programs. The process was rigorous, prolonged and intense — entire computer servers were dedicated to evidence of program quality and student performance. Site visits by national and state evaluation teams resulted in our strongest-ever review, and we continue to receive national recognition for the work we do.

Our physical facilities have consumed a great deal of attention this year. The “skin” of the Education Building (all its outer walls that are not brick) has been failing for some time. When it rains, we place buckets on the floor; dangerous asbestos materials are pervasive, which raise health and safety concerns. The state agreed to provide funds to remove the outer skin and for abatement of asbestos-laden materials, and the university committed to bonding for replacement of the building.

But we considered that the state’s citizens, its university, and its students could be better served by more than mere replacement. We set out to see whether our community thought so, too. We are pleased to say that through the generosity of alumni and foundations, in the fall of 2016 we will move back into a state-of-the-art, high-tech building. It will be a new home that features student and faculty collaboration spaces filled with light, a building that will inspire future educators to greatness and benefit the entire university. We cannot thank enough those who have contributed to what will become a very special building for the UI campus. To people for whom this is new information, there still is more to do; we hope you also will consider supporting the building’s renovation.

Read and enjoy. Thank you for your support, now and in future. And please stay connected — let us know where you are and what you’re doing.

Sending you warm greetings,

Cori Mantle-Bromley, Dean