As part of the college-wide belt tightening this year, CIE’s budget has not been funded. Instead, we are using the money that we have left over from last year to fund our needs for this year. I do not think this will be as bad as it sounds. Because of the pandemic, NMC has instituted a travel ban and all fall national conferences that I have heard about will be virtual (and therefore much cheaper) anyway, so these limited funds should be sufficient to cover many of our PD needs. However, we will need to think about and do things a bit differently–we will have to plan ahead for conferences, be frugal and discriminating with our outside PD choices, and–for those of us who are frequent users of CIE-funded PD–maybe take a break this year and let others take advantage of the limited resources.

So how do you go about getting funding for a conference or workshop this year? Here is a document explaining the entire process, but this is the short version: if you would like to request PD funding for this year, full time faculty will have to submit that request in the Faculty Evaluation Plan as part of the PD goals. Adjunct faculty are being asked to limit PD experiences this year to in-house PD unless they are required to participate in outside PD because of area needs. These needs will still need to be submitted at the same time as full time faculty’s requests. Chairs will then meet to prioritize and fund all of the requests given the amount of money available.

Feel free to reach out to CIE with questions if you have them now or watch for more information in September.