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Cook Honored with KCIA Award

published January 8, 2015Cook Honored with KCIA Award

Cook Honored with KCIA Awards

Melissa Cook is one of two Highland Community College faculty who have been honored by their selection as recipients of Scholarship Awards from the Kansas Council of Instructional Administrators (KCIA).   Cook joins mathematics instructor Lauren Jacobs as two of the four recipients of this year’s $1000 awards to community and technical college faculty in Kansas based on the quality of their applications.

Cook is a faculty member in the LPN program at the College's Technical Center in Atchison. She will use the scholarship to attend the ATI National Nurse Educator Summit in San Diego. Explaining how this professional development will improve her leadership skills and help her institution, she wrote:

 Understanding the constantly changing world of healthcare will help me to be a leader in the nursing department at            Highland. This will also help me to teach nursing students the importance of ATI testing, and how to better utilize it so that more students pass their state board exams and are able to obtain licensure. I would love to go to learn more about ATI and the NCLEX plan. Kansas higher education already produces great nurses, I would like my institution to become the best technical education program for nurses in the state.

Highland Vice President for Academic Affairs Peggy Forsberg, a previous KCIA scholarship applicant reviewer noted, “The KCIA scholarships have been an organizational project for at least 10 years.   One of KCIA’s goals is to promote leadership opportunities for faculty and staff members at member institutions.  Highland has not had a recipient for at least five years, so having two this year, given the excellent field of applicants, is a real honor and speaks well of our innovative faculty.”

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