The digital magazine for faculty, staff, students and friends of Pensacola State College
January 17, 2020
U.S. News and World Report once again has named Pensacola State College’s online Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) Program as one of the state’s – and nation’s – best online programs for 2020. PSC’s online BSN program is ranked third among Florida College System institutions and tied for ninth in the state among all Florida colleges and universities. PSC’s online BSN program was ranked 73rd in the nation. It’s a great accomplishment – and an improvement over PSC’s 2019 rankings. But the accolade only tells part of the story. Because maybe a greater accomplishment is the success the program’s graduates have found in the nursing field after leaving PSC. Many have gone on to earn master and doctorate degrees in nursing at other institutions, while many more have become nurse practitioners who are guiding and providing health care to families and individuals across the region and nation. “They’re becoming the foundation of the (health care) community," said Buffi Bailey, the college’s BSN program coordinator. “There aren’t enough primary physicians and nurse practitioners are making up for that shortage.” 

They studied together. They struggled together. And when it was time for 12 Pensacola State College veterinary technician students to take a national competency exam, they all passed together. It’s the first 100 percent passing rate for a class from the PSC Veterinary Technology Program since 2013, when all nine students passed the 150-question Veterinary Technician National Exam (VTNE). The exam is used by most states and agencies to evaluate competency of entry-level veterinary technicians. The passing rate for PSC students taking the exam over the previous three years was 88 percent. The national average for passing the VTNE over the same three-year period was 70.31 percent.

Pensacola State College has appointed Jill Hubbs to serve as interim general manager of WSRE and executive director of the WSRE-TV Foundation. She joined the PBS member station in 1996 and has served as director of Educational Services and Outreach. She is replacing Bob Culkeen, who joined WSRE in 2016 and has been named president and chief executive officer of WTCI in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Hubbs is a graduate of Pensacola State College and the University of West Florida with a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Development and Elementary Education.

A former school teacher, she has successfully launched major early learning initiatives and teacher training programs during her 23 years at WSRE. Most recently, she led the opening of a neighborhood Imagination Station early learning activity center at Weis Elementary School.

She is also the award-winning executive producer of several WSRE productions, including “Gulf Islands National Seashore: The Treasure of the Gulf Coast” and “Baseball in Pensacola.” She produced “They Were Their Fathers” in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, resulting in national broadcasts, screening events at the presidential libraries of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and last year’s week-long Reading of the Names at the Wall South in Pensacola’s Veterans Memorial Park, for which she is a founding board member.

“Jill lives the mission of public television on and off the job. Her work at WSRE has positively impacted many lives in our community, particularly our children, teachers and military. Bob will be missed, and fortunately Jill is well poised to build upon his successes with a solid team at WSRE and PSC,” said Sandy Cesaretti Ray, PSC’s associate vice president of Community and Government Relations.

“I am grateful to Bob Culkeen for his service to the station, college and community. His accomplishments here have been significant, from launching the new WSRE PBS KIDS channel to completing technology upgrades that will serve us well into the future. We will miss his fun sense of humor, and we extend our congratulations to Ms. Hubbs on her new leadership role,” said PSC President Ed Meadows.

-- Mary Riker
PSC's Nonprofit Center for Excellence and Philanthropy will present its latest workshop, "Donor-Centered Proposals and Presentation," from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 29, in the Nonprofit Center, Bldg. 17, Room 1703, at the College.

Leading the workshop will be Cathy Brown of The Fund Raising School. Cost is $75 per registered attendee.

The workshop will cover donor centricity; how you can test your communication; how to quantify donors vital to your mission’s success; putting the donor at the center of communications, stories, and thank-you notes; quantifying your organizational effectiveness and efficiency in a way that allows donors to own the success; what research tells us about how donors feel about fundraising; components that matter in the fundraising relationship.

Brown, a Pensacola resident, is the associate director of education at The Fund Raising School, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. She currently serves as lead practitioner faculty for many of the face-to-face professional development courses as well as online courses. Brown joined TFRS first in a curriculum design capacity, updating course materials, implementing adult learning strategies into course design, and creating new faculty guides and instructional tools.

Brown has 15 years’ experience running small nonprofits and quasi-government agencies, as well as board and volunteer experience in a wide range of subsectors. She also has career experience in K-12 and college-level curriculum design, college access, grant proposal writing and grant management, solid waste and recycling program management, newspaper writing, and classroom instruction ranging from elementary school through college.

Michelle Schulte understands the art of teaching
New gallery director hopes community will discover the wonders within
Michelle Schulte taps at the security keypad next to two large doors at the end of the corridor and swings one of the doors open, propping it with a door stop.

The room inside is dark ─ Schulte has some problems with the digital light switch ─ but no matter. It’s huge and very impressive, even in the dimness. The room is not quite a circle and not quite a square or rectangle. Like many of the rooms, corridors, nooks and crannies of the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola State College, this massive space is not a simple, unimpressive shape like so many other mundane buildings.

But as Schulte looks around the room, the excitement on her face has nothing to do with the shape or size or lightness or darkness of the room. It has everything to do with its potential.

A potential that is completely in her hands.

Schulte is the new gallery director and chief curator of the Switzer Center, which includes the Charles W. Lamar Studio, of which this 6,000-square-foot room is the focal point. All told, the Lamar Studio has added 10,000 square feet to the Switzer Center and a bevy of possibilities to the curator, who came to the College in October.

"I think one of our main goals is to bring the community in more," Schulte says. "My goal is to figure out what we can show and who we can present and who we can bring in that will draw the community but still keep these other constituents happy, still be a benefit to the students and to the instructors and the administrators."

Born and raised in Germany as a self-described “Army brat,” Schulte eventually landed with her family in Georgia, where she went to school and attended the Savannah College of Art and Design as a photography student. Upon graduation she taught art in the Savannah public school system.

“I decided that I really just preferred working with objects and writing about objects versus working directly with children, so I switched over to museum work, and started working with the Telfair Museum of Art in their education department,” Schulte says.

Her museum experience convinced Schulte that her future was more curatorial than strictly educational.

“In the museum field, how it works is generally the curators come up with all the content and then they pass it along to the educators, who then would teach it. I was feeling that I was missing out on a step, I was being handed content when I felt I should be crafting the content and making it all around inclusive.”

She continued in the museum field, working at a variety of locations, including 10 years as the curator of education at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, and, most recently, as gallery director at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland.

Throughout, she says, she never ventured far from “that basic root of wanting to teach people.”

The teaching galleries of the Switzer Gallery and Lamar Studio were a perfect fit for her. In fact, she says, it was the beauty, size and potential of the facilities that brought her to Pensacola State.

“Every gallery is different,” she says. “When you come into someplace new, you get the feel for the community and you get the feel for your administration. You have a lot of different people to please. I need to make the people I work for happy, need to make the students happy, need to be able to make the instructors happy. This is a teaching gallery, so I need to be able to put artwork up and provide content that they can use and in which their students will be interested.”

But it's not just the artwork that’s important, Schulte says.
“I’m a big proponent of not just showing art work but bringing in artists and having them interact with people,” she says. “I really prefer artists who are open to that rather than artists who just want to ship you their artwork.”

Taking a visitor on a tour of one of the facility’s climate-controlled vaults, she browses through some of the items in the gallery’s permanent collection. The items, numbering in the hundreds, have come from a variety of sources. Many were donated, some by the artists themselves.

“Sometimes when an artist exhibits at the gallery, they’ll leave behind a piece as a donation,” Schulte says. She points to a work. “I believe that’s a Tracy Spikes piece there,” she says, referring to the artist whose exhibited this past summer.

Taking a piece of pottery from a shelf, she says, “We’ll probably start a teaching collection, perhaps a shelf in one of our common rooms. That way, if an instructor is covering a particular period or type of art, they can check out one of the pieces and you can have actual art work that students can handle. It expands that whole mission of being a teaching gallery.”

She comes across a student’s art work in the collection.

“It’s crazy to see the student pieces,” she says. “I’m always having to ask the professors, ‘Is this a student piece or not?’”

Schulte says the Switzer Gallery and Lamar Studio are in the middle of the accreditation process by the American Alliance of Museums.

“That’s the rubber stamp of approval,” Schulte says. “It shows that you are following best standards and best practices. It allows us to take in artwork that we wouldn’t otherwise have, and it shows artists that we’re serious about what we do. I think there’s only two or three college galleries in Florida that are accredited. The standards are really high. In fact, they crafted the new addition based on AAM standards.”

Schulte is preparing the gallery for two upcoming exhibits, Susan N. McCollough of Gulf Shores, Alabama (see below), and Linda Mitchell of Atlanta. In April there’s the Art Student Honors Exhibition (prompting her to repeat her earlier point, “the quality of the student art here is really quite amazing”).

But those are exhibits that already had been scheduled by the previous curator. Schulte is looking forward to putting her own mark on the gallery.

“Technically my goal right now is to figure out the next line of shows and how we can challenge the viewers and challenge the community a little bit more but at the same time draw them in and not push people away and still make everybody happy, so it’s a balancing act.”

She glances down a bright, polished corridor lined with pieces from the permanent collection.

“I don’t think the community understands what a nice facility this is.”
-- Mike Suchcicki

Know of someone who would make a great Pirate Profile? Let us know at thepirate@pensacolastate.edu .
'Contemporary Expressionism' on display Jan. 27-May 1 at PSC
“Contemporary Expressionism,” an exhibit featuring the works of Alabama-based artist Susan N. McCollough , will be on display Jan. 27-May 1 in the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola State College.

A prolific painter, McCollough lives and works in Gulf Shores, Alabama. An artist reception is set for 6-8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 30, in the Charles W. Lamar Studio in Building 15. The reception is free and open to the public.

McCollough’s vibrant, large-scale canvases have been exhibited in numerous national and international galleries and museums including the Uffizi Gallery Museum in Florence, Italy, the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris and the Niagara Falls History Museum in Ontario, Canada. Her artwork also has been featured in a variety of publications.

The Switzer Center galleries are open 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday. Tours are available with prior arrangements. For more information, call 850-484-2563 or email mschulte@pensacolastate.edu . The center is always free and open to the public.
‘Toying with Science’ comes to Pensacola State on Jan. 25 
Garry Krinsky will bring Toying with Science, a fast-paced, fun-filled and interactive learning experience, to Pensacola State College at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 25, in Ashmore Auditorium.

Krinsky will share the scientific principles of gravity, leverage, fulcrums and simple machines with audience members using circus skills, mime and original music. During the high-energy show, Krinsky and audience members jointly investigate basic scientific information and delve into the imaginations of scientists who explore the world.

The auditorium is Building 8, on the Pensacola campus at 1000 College Blvd.

An original member of the Boston Buffoons, cofounder of the Patchwork Players and a member of The Wright Brothers, a New England vaudeville troupe, Krinsky has brought Toying with Science to thousands during performances at festivals, schools and theaters.

Tickets are $11, adults; $9, seniors, non-PSC students and children; $7, PSC Seniors Club members, PSC faculty and staff; and free for PSC students with current ID. To purchase tickets, go to www.pensacolastate.edu/mt. 
‘Machinal’ auditions set for Jan. 21-22 at Pensacola State College
Pensacola State College will hold auditions for “Machinal” at 7 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan. 21 and Jan. 22, in Ashmore Auditorium, Building 8, on the Pensacola campus, 1000 College Blvd.

A play by American playwright Sophie Treadwell, “Machinal” was inspired by the real-life case of Ruth Snyder, who was executed at New York’s Sing Sing Prison for the murder of her husband. The play, first staged in 1928, is considered one the high points of Expressionism theater on the American stage.

The play will be staged March 5-8 in Ashmore Auditorium.

Auditions will consist of readings from the script. Adult actors of all ages are needed, however there are no parts for children.

For more information, contact Rodney Whatley at 850-484-1807 or email rwhatley@pensacolastate.edu .
LET'S GO TO THE MOVIES! Check out the upcoming movie nights for the spring semester! All movies will be in Hagler Auditorium on the Pensacola Campus and begin at 6:30 p.m. Movie nights are FREE for all PSC students, faculty, staff, their families, and friends. Drinks and popcorn are provided by the Campus Activities Board (CAB).
H ave a great PSC graduation story? We want to hear it!
If yours is like most families that include Pensacola State College graduates, you have memories of great anecdotes or unique situations having to do with the graduation ceremony. Perhaps something fascinating or unusual happened at the event. Perhaps you have three generations of PSC grads in the same family. Perhaps your journey to a PSC diploma took a unusually circuitous route. If so, we would like to hear that history, those memories, those anecdotes. Share your tales with an email to thepirate@pensacolastate.edu . Be sure to include your full name and contact information (phone number or email). And thanks for sharing!
There's never an idle moment at Pensacola State College, whether you're into art, athletics, drama, music, science, technology, engineering, dance, movies, books or just plain socializing. Make plans to make plans with our online Calendar .

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