In attendance: Debbie Sackett, John Young, Ya-Ping Huang, Al Dumbuya, Matiur Rahman, Bill Cheek, Donna Lyon, Deborah Walker, Linda Gregory, Lew Barnett, Fred Miller, Nina Baj, Gary Rodge, Anusha Nanayakkara

New Full-Time Faculty: One of our two new full-time faculty members was introduced, Dr. Matiur Rahman. Matiur is stationed at PIN. His phone number is 223-8220 and his email address is mrahman@austin.cc.tx.us.

Our other new full-time faculty member, Dr. Chris Uzomba was unable to attend. Chris is stationed at RGC.

Library Research Assignment: Linda Clement reported that the Mini-Grant for revision of the library research topics for CHEM 1411 was complete. She asked for help from anyone teaching CHEM 1411 to assist in evaluation of the new topics being incorporated this year.

PTA Program: The result of the meeting between Dr. Lagowski (UT chemistry), Donna Lyon (UT and ACC) and Debbie Sackett was reported. An NSF grant is being written that proposes the development of a Peer Teaching Program to be offered both at UT and ACC. Ultimately, students entering this program will earn a Chemistry B.S. degree, with a teaching option. The program will involve development of 3 new courses designed to train students to become high school chemistry teachers. The first two courses will be offered at both UT and ACC. The third course, the capstone course, will be offered at UT. As a part of the courses, the students would be expected to assist instructors at UT and ACC with instruction. This could involve assistance in the lab, someone to hold discussion sections outside lecture time, etc. ACC instructors would teach the ACC courses.

This proposal was favorably accepted by the Task Force committee and will be submitted to the Dean and upwards when the grant proposal is finished.

Lab Technicians: Changes in lab technician locations/job functions:

• One half-time position will be moved from RGC to NRG. This gives each of the large campuses 1 and 1/2 positions and each of the small campuses 1/2 position. Because of the low number of classes offered at EVC, Bobby Shepherd will spend 8 hours a week at RGC.
• As a result of prompting by HR, it was decided that lab technicians are not "qualified" to teach make up labs. An alternative solution was offered. Each campus has an allotment of hourly money. This money can be moved to the hourly faculty account and adjunct faculty can be hired to teach the make up labs. The catch is that we cannot hire adjunct who are already classified employees of the college. This means lab technicians and I.A.s cannot teach make up labs.

Lab coordinators: A draft of their responsibilities was passed out. They will essentially take over the duties of the former Assistant Dean with respect to supervising lab technicians. The following list of names was generated among the Dean and science Task Force Chairs.

Chemistry Lab Coordinators

CYP - Debbie Sackett
EVC - Debbie Sackett (?)
NRG - Al Dumbuya
PIN - Steve Ziser
RGC - Ya-Ping Huang
RVS - Ron Johns

Assistant Task Force Chairs: Chemistry received an additional Assistant Task Force Chair. Madan Mohan has accepted the position for this semester.

Course Topics: Curriculum committees were selected to work on formalizing our list of topics taught in CHEM 1405, 1411 and 1412. Not everyone wanted to work on all 3 topics, so we broke it up into 3 committees.

Anyone else is free to join the various committees. Each committee will decide on their method of meeting/communication.

Faculty development: Kathy Nabona has agreed to teach a class on power point. Also, John Young has agreed to teach a class on web page building. We hope to offer these classes this semester. Debbie Sackett can teach a class on the use of Datatel, providing the users have a password. This would entail going to one of the preliminary training sessions offered by FDO.

All faculty development activities are reported to the Task Force Chair, not FDO. Full-time faculty are required to complete 12 hours of faculty development in a year, and adjunct faculty must complete 4 hours.

Budget: The Chemistry Department received $6,000 in additional hourly funds this year. We also received and additional $5,100 for consumable supplies/equipment. This will cover classes at PIN and EVC, with a little extra.

The following budget numbers were not finalized as of the task force meeting, but are listed below in their final form. They are based on the number of classes that made in the Spring, Summer and Fall of 2000. The number of seats offered per class, not the actual enrollment was used to generate the percentages going to each campus.

Web pages: Currently our internal and external web pages are located at http://www2.austin.cc.tx.us/chem/. These serve as our internal and external web pages. This means, for example, that anyone can read our Task Force minutes. Additionally, there was a web site developed at the RVS campus as a part of a Mini-Grant. These web pages are being reworked to be generic for the college. This website is at http://www2.austin.cc.tx.us/chemlab/. It was proposed that these pages become our external web pages, and the original web pages become for internal use only. The Task Force favorably accepted this suggestion.

We will begin asking that links be changed. It may take months for all links (that can be found) to be changed. On the new external pages, many sites are still listed as under construction. Feel free to forward suggestions about these pages or any other comments to John Young or Debbie Sackett.