By Melody GustafsonEAST LIVERPOOL -- New Assistant Dean Dr. Susan Rossi, who in January assumed the duties of former interim Assistant Deans Shawn Golden and David Guy, looks forward to the challenge of managing the campus.
Before coming to KSU, Rossi spent 15 years at Eastern Gateway Community College (EGCC) occupying various administrative positions, including admissions counseling and academic affairs. Her final position before moving on was dean of business, engineering, information technology, humanities, and social services. "I was, in a nutshell, dean of everything except nursing and like medical disciplines," she said.
During her time there, she worked with her collegues to design new programs, including power plant technology, which attracted non-traditional students who had been displaced from local, industrial occupations. "It was so great to see them learn and be successful, graduate and get jobs, and maintain their quality of living," she said.
Dr. Rossi helped start pre-collegiate early-intervention programs, termed Quest, of which the first was Math Quest. Realizing that one impediment to student success is undeveloped skills prior to admission, she and her collegues strategized that an early, sixth-grade level intervention would be helpful. According to Rossi, fifth graders, especially girls, generally begin to lose interst in math and science at that age. Steubenville youths, regardless of ability, engaged in fun games that would make them more comfortable with mathematics.
Although the retention rate at EGCC and KSU fall in line with national averages, Rossi explained that "We wanted to change our little part of the world after seeing how many developmental students we had," also pointing out that the intervention must come to younger students who have already turned away from academia. By developmental, she means students who must strengthen skills that should have tempered before commencing higher education.
The success of that program led to Quest's growth beyond math; different faculty members would champion various Quests that focused on disparate age groups up to the high school senior level. High school senior business students participated in business-plan competitions; sophomores benefited from an interactive digital media event and the students' presentations were shown on computer screens displayed gallery style. In all cases, the age group and discipline determined the type of event and its organization. At the time she took her leave from EGCC, the faculty was researching the possibilties of Chem Quest.
Although she is still acclimating herself to KSU, she plans to improve retention levels from the nationally comparable 50-75 percent because "we aren't where we should be and can do better than that," she said, "And besides, from a business perspective, it's cheaper to keep them than find new ones." After gathering the data that will show her "a snapshot" of the campus, she will formulate a more definitive stratagem based on hard fact rather than idyll theory.
Guy said of the transition: "We [Guy and Golden] have done some of the functions in the past, and we are available to help her. She is making this move very smoothly, and her past administrative experience qualifies her so that she only needs to learn the Kent way of doing things."
Originally an East Liverpool resident and ELHS graduate, Rossi said, "Everyone has been very supportive and I'm glad to be here."
