Notable Now – July 2019

Summer semester is in full swing at CCV! Here’s the latest roundup of news and announcements from students, faculty, and staff around the state. Happy reading, and don’t forget to share your own Notables with us by emailing marketing@ccv.edu.

• Faculty member Emily Arnason Casey’s essay collection, Made Holy, is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press’s Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction. In haunting prose, Made Holy tells the story of the American family. Love, loss, and addiction entwine in this moving debut collection. Casey employs the lyric imagination to probe memory and the ever-shifting lens of time as she seeks to make sense of the disease that haunts her maternal family tree and the alchemy of loss and longing. Casey teaches English Composition and Dimensions of Self and Society in Winooski.
• Eighteen students who are licensed nursing assistants (LNAs) at Central Vermont Medical Center celebrated the kick-off of their journey to becoming licensed practical nurses (LPNs). A new partnership between CCV, Vermont Tech, and CVMC provides a pathway for incumbent LNAs that aims to reduce two of the biggest barriers to higher education: time and money. By investing in their workforce, CVMC hopes to address a statewide nursing shortage.
• CCV students celebrated the Fourth of July with events in their local communities. CCV-Morrisville staff and students marched in Waterbury’s Not-Quite-Independence-Day parade and in Morrisville’s parade on the Fourth. Meanwhile, CCV-Newport staff and students made an appearance in Derby’s 4th of July parade and celebrations.

• Faculty member Alexis Latham was selected to attend the Marble House Project’s 2019 artist residency program in Dorset. The program is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Latham teaches humanities classes in Winooski.
• Staff and alumni spread the word about CCV at local sporting events this month! CCV sponsored STEAM night at a Lake Monsters game on July 14th, and a night at Devil’s Bowl Speedway on July 21st.
• CCV-Middlebury coordinator of student advising Jennifer Stefani was the keynote speaker at the Addison County Vermont Adult Learning’s Class of 2019 graduation ceremony on June 16th. Vermont Adult Learning supports families and communities through basic skills instruction, high school completion, college and career services, and English language instruction.
• CCV-St. Albans hosted its first annual Bat House Brunch in June. The event aimed to educate people on the important role bats play in our ecosystem, and how their current low populations are causing an increase in local insect populations. With the help of the Vermont Bat Center, participants built 15 bat houses that can each accommodate up to 100 bats! One bat can eat roughly 1,000 insects a night, which means the project not only helps to protect bats but also supports pest control.
• Students in instructor Jennifer Guarino’s Natural History of Vermont class took part in a service learning project last month. On July 8, eight Upper Valley students braved poison ivy and ticks to help remove Japanese knotweed from the Big Rock Nature Preserve in Lyme, NH. Like Vermont, New Hampshire is experiencing a massive invasion of this hardy plant. CCV partnered with the Lyme Conservation Commission to implement this service learning project, which gave students an opportunity to extend their learning to the real world through relevant, meaningful work. In the two hours that CCV students pulled and cut knotweed, they cleared a substantial area along Grant Brook in the preserve. This fall, Forest Ecology students will continue this work to apply their learning while contributing to improved environmental conditions in the Upper Valley.