BECKLEY -
Although Mountain State University has had a shaky past with accreditation issues, the termination of its long time president and the most recent decision to close its traditional nursing program, Acting President Jerry Ice said it is time to look to the university's "vibrant" future.
In a recent meeting, the West Virginia Board of Examiners for Registered Professional Nurses announced the revocation of the program's accreditation, which would take effect Aug. 31.
This comes after the Higher Learning Commission issued a show-cause order giving Mountain State until December 2011 to demonstrate why it should retain regional accreditation. The issues under scrutiny included monitoring of student progress, governance and available resources.
"MSU is accredited and continues to be accredited," Ice stressed. "I've been pleased in the last month the activity that has been going on the university," Ice said. "The faculty has really stepped up and created a very solid strategic plan that focuses on one, three and five years out for the institution."
Ice said the action plan calls for a greater focus on student learning and also addresses issues with governance.
"One of the criteria that was a concern with the Higher Learning Commission was governance," he said. "It doesn't mean any one person is reviewing and making all the decisions. It's a shared governance with faculty and certainly with student input because the key is the learning enterprise."
For the last year, there has not been admission into the nursing program. Ice said there are 77 current students in the traditional nursing program in Beckley. Many of the students are scheduled to graduate before the accreditation ends, Ice said.
"This week in particular, there is a concerted effort to meet with those dozen or so students to talk about switching majors of finding a transfer to another institution to complete that nursing program," ice said.
Many other students were involved in the pre-nursing program as part of a general education package, Ice said.
"Those students are all being advised that there will not be a nursing program to move into," Ice said. "They are told to seek another major or transfer out."
This may not be the end to Mountain State University's traditional nursing program, however. Ice said the university may consider bringing the program back in small steps about two years from now.
"We might only make the program available on the Beckley campus," he said. "And we may only start out with a small group of students from 25 to 30 students. Of course, the curriculum and the oversight would certainly need to get approval of the West Virginia Board of Nursing.
Ice said there are many misconceptions about the university's programs and accreditation. For example, Ice explained the graduate program in nursing is nationally accredited and is unaffected by the closure.
"There is no problem with that program or the RN to BSN," he said. "The issue quite frankly with the nursing program wasn't the traditional program on the Beckley campus. It was a cohort group outside of the Beckley campus that just was not performing well on the state board exams on their first try. That situation has not cleared up over the intervening years."
Yet, Ice said Beckley students' scores have gone up and down through the years.
"The chief academic officer indicated that most Beckley students did OK in relationship to national averages," he said. "Many times, the outlying cohorts do not have a full array of services and the kind of attention that one would get by being on campus in a traditional program."
Ice said another misconception is that Mountain State University strictly is the "school of nursing."
"Quite frankly, nursing is only like 3 percent," he said. "When you have 5,000 or 6,000 students and the entire attention is on less than 100 students, it seems to be a little overkill to think the university is only the nursing program -- especially, just the LPN to BSN program."
Ice said he wanted to stress that the university continues to be accredited.
"The university is making every attempt and is fully engaged in meeting all of the standards of excellence within the Higher Learning Commission standards…as well as putting into place future things that will enable us to be even more successful," he said.
Five years from now, Ice envisions the university to be "vibrant and strong."
"I think if we look down the road, we will still be a very important university and we will continue to grow," Ice said. "We will continue to be special and we will have a strong organizational and student leadership."
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