Dee Baird
Vice President, Continuing Education and Training Services, Kirkwood Community College, Cedar Rapids, IA

Dee has led the Continuing Education and Training Services division at Kirkwood for the past nine years. In the last five years, Dee has led her team in a major program overhaul using LERN strategies as her blueprint. Over that time span, Kirkwood’s program has re-created itself and moved to new heights of marketing, programming

Patricia J. Hoyt
Executive Director for the Institute for Economic Advance at Lakeland Community College, Kirtland, OH

Pat leads six diverse centers at Lakeland Community College. She has utilized LERN organization and staffing strategies to move the centers in common directions and in working more effectively and efficiently together.

Deploying LERN’s contract training expertise and strategies, Pat has exponentially increased contract training revenues over the past three years. Pat credits LERN organizational, program, marketing and
contract training benchmarks and strategies for providing the framework for an incredible revenue growth of 300% over all six centers in the past three years. Lakeland also participated in LERN’s Program Review Process and used the process to analyze their status, set new goals based on LERN benchmarks and implement a new action plan, all of which also contributed to their incredible revenue growth and financial stability.

Rita Martinez-Purson
Dean of Continuing Education and Community Services, University of
New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

Rita is the dean of a continuing education division that serves more than 20,000 students annually. In building and managing her division, Rita relies on LERN operational guidelines, planning and management strategies and trend analyses. Key program staff have used LERN programming benchmarks to turn revenue-losing programs into major profit centers. And, Rita’s marketing staff have leaned on LERN principles and strategies to re-target their marketing efforts.

Russell Mills
District Director for Continuing Education, City Colleges of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Russell has over 30 years of progressive leadership roles in higher education and is experienced in program development from concept to implementation.

Russell currently oversees the continuing education departments at seven individual City Colleges of Chicago. Before that, he spent six years as the Dean of Continuing Education at Harper College in Palatine, Ill., where he led a restructuring initiative to implement the LERN organizational model. Within two years of making the change, the Continuing Education Department went from losing $500,000 annually to making a profit. Within four years, that department was returning at least $500,000 to the institution.

Doug Soo
Dean of Continuing Studies, Langara College, Vancouver, BC

Under Doug’s leadership, Langara College applied a number of the LERN concepts resulting in an increase from $100,000 revenue for Langara’s satellite campus operation to a $10 million annual gross revenue business in 10 years. Initially the program had 75 courses that ran two terms per year.