I had numerous meetings with my vice presidents, deans, students, prospective students and alumni throughout the week. I also enjoyed a visit from my colleague President Rick Gallot from Grambling. He is already making a difference on the Grambling campus and I look forward to working with him to enhance higher education and our community. I had to spend a half day at home to focus on a SACSCOC accreditation review of another institution. While this is time consuming, it is beneficial to see how other institutions operate and it is important to our profession to do peer reviews like these. One of my most enjoyable activities this week was a trip to Monroe’s Sallie Humble Elementary School to welcome U.S. Department of Education Secretary John King who stopped through there on a multi-state bus tour as part of the Believe and Prepare Initiative. The event at Sallie Humble featured our College of Education’s model clinical residency program for education majors. The college, under the leadership of Dean Don Schillinger and direction of Dr. Amy Vessel, have developed and implemented a hub for research on the impact of yearlong clinical residencies (replacing traditional Student Teaching) guided by use of The TEAM (Teacher Educators and Mentors) model, developed at Louisiana Tech. The panel session at Sallie Humble Elementary featured three of our seniors and their teacher mentors. They talked about their experiences, and it was clear to me that this program is having huge impacts on enhancing the classroom experience for students and enhancing the preparation and retention of our education graduates. We also had good news this week when U.S. News & World Report ranked Tech in its top tier of national research universities for the sixth consecutive year, and with Tech moving up nine positions in the list of public universities. And another ranking came out citing Tech’s A.E. Phillips Laboratory School as the top elementary school in the state. Not a bad way to kick of the 2016 academic year! Enjoy some of my favorite pics from the week: