Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 07-01-25_TUESDAY_7AM

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Pebble in your shoe Tuesday open phone calls, more fireworks discussion and calls, RCC President Randy Weber talks an important Carnegie Foundation rating, and we discuss that and all the new projects and good news there.

The Bill Myer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at www.clouserdrilling.com. 770-5633. It is Pebble in Your Shoe Tuesday. So if there's something on your mind that you wanted to jump in on, share, de-stress, you know, cortisol is a big problem. It makes you grumpy, you don't sleep so well, You know cortisol is a big problem. Makes you grumpy, you don't sleep so well, you know you don't go into nice deep REM sleep no matter how much melatonin you chow down, you know. So if you've got something bugging you go ahead and just uh just let me know. 7705633 last hour we had a

little bit of fun talking about this plan in southern California. Southern California in numerous cities now for the first time ever on July 4th, they are going to be flying drones and flying drones like big time, fining people up to $1500, catching them doing illegal fireworks activity, which for all I know in Southern California may mean that you're not allowed to do anything. I don't really know what the laws are, but that's what they're even talking and then they would even fly over and if it's a rental house they'll send the ticket to the landlord. I'm sure the landlords are going to like that. Yeah, that kind of thing. And would you be in favor of something like that here for Southern Oregon? I have mixed emotions. I understand the public safety aspect of wanting to keep the illegal firework activity and the burning down, you know, in our tinder dry land.

I get that, I get that. And yet there's another side of me that the whole point of America was that we were a little bit rebellious at times. And I look at the fireworks every July 4th as a little kind of small reminder of what a rebellious people we once were. What do you think about that? We could talk about that. 7705633.

770KMED. Would you want drones flying around us and making sure that you're a good little American? Or is the risk of illegal fireworks activity worth it? Like I mentioned, my next door neighbor in Jacksonville before, oh my gosh, he brought all the good stuff off of the reservation. And I was always expecting Jacksonville police to show up, but it's a small town, small force, and I have a feeling they just realized there was just no way they could keep up with it. And that's the way it is usually in most cities. And yet they'll say, yes, only the safe fireworks, et cetera, et cetera.

And yet there are always some people that are bringing the stuff out that well, would rival anything you would see in red, white and boom, you know, that kind of thing. So we can talk about it. 7705633, drone them out of existence or not. What do you say? All right. Okay. They're complaining about what is going on in Salem. The fact that Salem closed out without paying off ODOT. There was that $11.7 billion monstrosity of a transportation bill and it ended up going nowhere. And it's because, not because Republicans

voted against it, but because Democrats were voting against it, right? There's talk of a special session. Yes, Governor Brown over the weekend was talking about maybe having a special session on this. Would you support that? That could be another one. In other words, we have to come up with some kind of tax increase for ODOT. We can do that. Statewide minimum wage increasing today, 35 cents an hour in some places. Standard statewide hourly wage goes up to $15.05. Is that what Jackson and Josephine County will be $15.05? Probably. It's about that. If you live in Portlandia, the minimum wage there goes up to $16.30 per hour. If you're wondering why your drive-thru hamburger is very expensive, that may be why. Other story this morning,

Statewide Recycling Modernization Act begins today. This month they're going to have a brand new recycling kind of law here. It was actually passed a few years ago and you're going to be having one set of recycling rules in place, and everyone's going to be doing the same thing, everybody has the same rule, and there will be a few more things that we'll be able to recycle. I'm not as impressed with recycling programs as much as I would be if we were actually doing the sensible thing, which would be burning the recyclables for energy. They call it waste to energy plants. And they're finally starting to, to count out to the fact that, yeah, you just can't

bury all this stuff and there's not a lot of recycling ability. And so they're now building more incinerators out on the on the East Coast and they are really clean these days. Of course, I'm sure that in Oregon, they would be aghast at that thought. Releasing carbon! There would be carbon! Yeah there's energy to fill in when your stupid solar panels and wind farms don't work. Speaking of which, up in the Portland area, out in the PGE land, they're having trouble with their turbines in one of their wind farms, and so they're saying, we're going to add solar to that.

So great. Even the one thing about wind power is that the wind power can at least sometimes turn at night if the wind's blowing. Solar? Oh yeah, so you replace something intermittent with something guaranteed to be intermittent. I'm sure that's going to help. Okay, 7705633. Oh, by the way,

we had a Jaguar at Cave Junction's, you know, the Big Cat Park, the Great Cats Park? One of their Jaguars escaped yesterday, ran around the park, but they got it caught and put back in. News Watch 12 ended up reporting that. And this big cat, that's a little too close and personal, right, for getting to know the big cats and not under investigation, but they got the cat back in, had a veterinarian on the scene, tranquilizer dart about 2.30 in the afternoon. Big kid he's put down back in the cage, I guess.

Let me go to the first line here. It's Pebble in Your Shoe Tuesday. Good morning. Hi, who's this? Hi, it's Monica. Hey, Monica, how are you doing this morning? What's on your mind? Well, on my mind is the drones. As soon as she said that and what it was about, I just kind of got a chill down my back and I'm going, oh God, what if they'd had those with COVID?

And they shut us all down. And then they fly these drones to find out who left their house when they shouldn't have been. Yeah. Reminds me of those stories in which, gosh, wasn't there a story in California in which someone was swimming? Yep. They were swimming and a sheriff's deputy came...

They were surfing. Yeah. They were surfing and swimming and sheriff's deputy came out and got them. So, I mean, it just, oh, it just makes me, I don't want them flying over my house, period. It's just scary, it's scary. Wouldn't it be interesting if there was some way to get a property right to the air

above you to a certain level in which, you know, if you're going to fly above me, you have to be so high up, I guess. And then they're going to find the apartment or house renter, the owners because of their renters. Because they know they're not going to get the money out of the renter, so the people they're going to go after, the ones they're going to find, they're going to go after the people that have a little bit of money. Yeah, well apparently so, going through the...but of course remember, Monica, it is always about public safety and the United States of safety is,

you know, that's kind of reigning supreme. But yet I also understand that in Southern California, just like here in Southern Oregon, Northern California, ridiculous behavior can be pretty risky on wildfire. We get that. We get that. So I understand that. So I kind of feel both sides of it. But there's something lost here in the United States when everything is based on the cult of safetyism. Yes.

And I just think of... It's like I have to wear a seatbelt and I wouldn't if I didn't have to. I mean, it's my choice. Yeah, the thing is that I would wear the seatbelt anyway, even if there wasn't a bonger to remind me. But yeah, I would agree with you that there should be... It's this whole concept that we are little more than tax mules. It's all of a sudden, everybody's telling me what I have to do and I'm not hurting anybody else. It's my decision, but I have to do it.

Or I don to do it. But then is shooting off the M-80 on your property? Are you risking your neighbor? You could be, I suppose. I wouldn't do that though. But you see, you're a good person. You're a good person. I wouldn't do that. That's the thing. It's just like you take these few people and everybody has to pay for it. Yeah. All right, Monica. Appreciate your opinion. It's Pebble in Your Shoe Tuesday. 7705633770KMED. Oh, by the way, I have a Pebble in My Shoe driving. Has everyone noticed how nobody pays attention to that law, the driving rule? And I think it's a pretty good driving rule that says that if you cannot clear the intersection, you don't go in the intersection. I've

noticed in that section of the Swidewalk, where the morons from the State Department of Transportation end up having the multimodal thing, they're putting in the wide sidewalk by the Rogue Valley Mall on 62. And so the traffic backs up. And then on Highway 62, everybody just piles through and jumbles up the intersection so nobody can go through it. I wish more people would mind that rule. It's actually a good rule. You don't go into the intersection unless you can clear it. But you see it all the time. People turning left to try to get into the shopping center and they can't clear it, and so they just take part of your green light going the other way.

You know that kind of stuff, right? That's one little pebble in my shoe. 722, hi, good morning. Who's this? Welcome. Yeah, this is John. My heart is still, I'm just thinking about it. I got to calm down a little bit. My heart's just beating away. Oh, okay. You got to calm down? What's wrong? Just curious. Oh, a few years back, there was a, I think it was called Ghost Dancers, and the feds decided they were going to bust the pot patches out here in Oregon. So they hired the reserve helicopters from Kisley down in K Falls, fly and look for pot. Well we were not growing pot, but we had a lot of water lines to our garden, stuff like that,

from our place. They flew at less than treetop level over our garden. It winnowed our tomato patch where they were in craze, just blew them over in a row. The patio furniture that was in our above-ground pool on Little Deck, I went in the pool. My daughter went screaming to the house. My wife went down the back road. I was at my shop. I ran up the hill because I thought she was going to get a gun. And that is still a trauma in my mind. And that was not a drone. That was our government. Yeah. Wow. And when did this happen, John? It was a month before the

first Iraq war. Those same pilots probably ended up over there. Oh. Now was that in southern Oregon here where that was going on? That was southern Oregon. They found, I think, three pot plants. Really? Buzzing you. You know, you think about it, to go that low that it blows over your furniture, that helicopter was low, man. I was at my shop, I was looking out, and it was below the power lines. The power lines were in my line of sight into the open door bay.

I don't know what it was, a Huey or something like that. I can't help but think, Wayne, so when you hear that about drones, this is serious. This just takes you right back to that kind of situation. Drones are little. You could shoot them. I don could skeet shoot with a.22. And I was just afraid she would do it. When it comes to then drones flying over property to monitor for illegal fireworks activity, which is what they're going to be doing in Southern California this week for July 4th, it sounds to me that you're not much of a supporter of that kind of thing? No, I don't support our government interacting directly with us

in that kind of a manner. I think that than they don't belong here. Okay, so you would prefer the squad car shows up with an officer saying, hey, knock it off, right? Yeah. Okay. All right. So you don't want to be like going down the Robocop or some Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of science fiction movie in which you go, screw y'all freedoms. I just want everybody to

know that it's already happened. It's already pretty bad. I appreciate you sharing your story. Anytime they want to because nothing ever came of it. I appreciate you sharing your story. I'm anytime they want to because nothing ever came of it I appreciate your story. Thank you for calling 727 at KMED Wow the helicopter close enough to knock over the furniture on the pool To look for a few pot plants, but it was a big deal back then I know that some of the sheriff's departments were really, really big on that back in the day. Maybe it's a little bit, of course now it's just kind of like, what are we going to do? It's run by illegal aliens and we can't do anything with them. Thank you, state of Oregon, I

guess, right? It's 727 at KMED. You're on the Bill Myers show. Hi, this is Glory from Eagle Point. My dad asked me to get a quote from my own auto insurance and suggested I call Steve at Skypark Insurance. Steve said in my situation, it would be best to stay on my parents' policy due to my age. Steve did quote my parents, including me in my car, and saved us big time.

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But don't wait if your roof loses too much protective coating. It's too late. So call 855 RoofMax. You're hearing the Bill Meyers Show on 1063 KMED. How would you like $1 thousand dollars in your pocket? All you have to do is be talented. Coming up in the Jackson County Fair in a couple of weeks, they have the Jackson County... Well, it's the... at the Expo, the big talent show.

Like... okay, I'm just gonna say big-ass talent show. We're adults here, alright? Okay. and what you do is at the prize, the grand prize is $1,000. That is pretty darn good money. Whether you're a singer or magician, maybe you have an animal act, maybe you tell jokes, whatever it is, do you have a particular talent? Well, get a phone or have somebody get their phone

and take a little short video of it and then enter on at the expo.com click on the participate tab and there's a part on it for the big-ass talent show and then you can enter and I'm gonna be one of the emcees on the stage that night and I'm hoping to see your talent and it could be you could be it no it's not for it's not for kids it's for anybody but if you have a grandchild or kids that might be interested in this, tell them about it. So $1,000 is pretty darn good. It could be musical, singing, animals,

whatever kind of act that you have. It's not American Idol. It's not just American Idol, it's not just music, but it could be all sorts of different things. And they got this talent show and it's a thousand dollars. It's good money. Even in today's America, a thousand bucks is not just pocket change. You can go out and have a lot of fun with that. Enter on at the expo.com. Deadline, I think, is going to be this Sunday or is it Monday? It could be Monday, but get that together and

get your family or friends or relatives there. Someone who has talent, get it out there on the stage. OK, we're in a thousand dollars. Seven thirty one a KMED. We're going to talk with the president of RCC. Some things have been changing around there for the good. They have a pretty good ranking right now. We'll talk more about that. And what is coming up next?

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Oregon. I'm saving big news brought to you by Millett construction, specializing in foundation repair and replacement. Get on solid ground. Visit Millett construction.com from the KMED News Center. Here's what's going on. Oregon's Department of Transportation is reacting to the legislature's failure to pass a comprehensive funding package. ODOT says it's taken progressively

larger voluntary cuts over the last three biennium to stay in budget and without additional funding they say deep and painful cuts start in the next few weeks. The agency claims travelers will soon experience a less reliable transportation system. Leaders of the greater Oregon movement are disappointed the legislature didn't take up two bills aimed at relocating Oregon's border calling it a failure to listen to the people of Eastern Oregon. The movement introduced bills in both the state house and Senate requesting talks between Oregon and Idaho or a study of a potential interstate compact neither bill received a hearing. Just before we go into the 4th of July weekend the Oregon Department

of Forestry is raising the fire danger to high in Josephine and Jackson counties. That'll affect nearly two million acres of private county, state and federal Bureau of Land Management property across the two counties. Bill Lunnen, KMED. With SRN News, I'm Rich Thomason in Washington. They're still going. Members of the Senate continue their work on their own version of President Trump's big beautiful bill of spending and tax cuts. Senators work through the night, taking up a series of Democratic amendments one by one in a process they call a votorama. Families of the victims say that Brian Koberger has agreed to plead guilty to murdering four

University of Idaho students, part of a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid a death sentence. President Trump is in the Florida Everglades today, visiting a new holding center for illegal aliens pending deportation, that detention center nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. Israel's prime minister says he'll visit Washington next week and meet with President Trump, among others. On Wall Street, the Dow is 94 points higher and the Nasdaq down 70. More details at SRNNews.com. Malik Construction has been a general contractor for 40 years. For the last 20 years, they've specialized in foundation repair and replacement. If you have sloping floors, cracks in walls, and windows and doors that are hard to open, you have a foundation problem that's only getting

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That's 541-930-6655. There's plenty of entertainment at the Jackson County Fair, but we're looking for homegrown talent, too, for the Big A** Talent Show. This isn't just for singers. If you've got a talent that will electrify the crowd at the center stage, submit your short video at TheExpo.com. If it makes people cheer, laugh, or stare in amazement, we want to see it, and maybe you'll compete in the Big A** Talent Show for $1,000 in cash prizes. Animal acts welcome. Visit TheExpo.com and click the Participate tab.

Deadline for entries is Tuesday, July 1st. This is News Talk 1063 KMED, and you're waking up with the Bill Meyers show. Some pretty darn good things going on over at Rogue Community College, and the president of that fine institution, Randy Weber, joins us in studio. Good morning, President Weber.

Morning Bill, thanks for having me. Glad to join you and your listeners. Yeah. You ended up getting a new ranking not too long ago, just a few weeks ago. And it just has to do with what your, well I guess it's the Carnegie foundations. Now Carnegie or Carnegie? Well so if you're in the Pittsburgh area, I think they call it Carnegie. Everybody else seems to call it Carnegie, so I think both are acceptable. OK, that's what happened. See, when I grew up in Pittsburgh, it was Carnegie. And then I came out here and nobody says it right. I'm going, what's going on here? But still, we'll just talk about this. Carnegie Foundation, I'll try to do the West Coast pronunciation,

New Opportunity College classification and Rowe Community College got it. What does this mean? Yeah, so Carnegie Foundation for decades, 50 years has been classifying post-secondary institutions whether we call ourselves doctorate institutions or regional universities or community colleges and what they've determined over the last several years is that that classification became kind of stale and outdated. And so they came up with a new classification system and within that they came up with a

specific classification called opportunity college or university. And to be an opportunity college or university, your enrollment needed to be as or more representative of the community you served, and your former students need to be earning for community colleges at least 25% higher than the median average in your region. And when they came out with this, it was determined that less than 17% of all institutions in the country earned the distinction, and only one public institution in Oregon, college or university earned it, and it was Rogue Community College. This seems to indicate then that

what's going on at Rogue Community College, people are getting training here and they're going to work and they're earning for themselves and their family. That's right. That just seems to be the takeaway. This is not just something where you have a huge degree and you're a barista, not that there's anything wrong with being a barista,

but you know what I'm getting at, the old stereotype, I guess. 100%, yeah. I mean, the vast majority of the students who come to us come because they want a better life. They want to earn more, they want a better lifestyle. And what this distinction does is it says come to Rogue Community College, you're on that path. So getting this validation from an external source with the reputation that

they have, we've known we've been doing this for a while, industry's told us this for a while, but to get that external validation has really been a feather in our cap. And it's a three-year distinction. They'll do the classification every three years. So we hope to earn it again in three years. And I think with the addition of programs like adding a nursing cohort, adding dental hygiene, bringing in other programs that are leading to good paying jobs in the Valley, we have no reason to believe that we won't continue it.

Now, Randy, is it one of those things where they they send people here they kind of comb your books or is it something that you're able to do just from the stats from your people here? Yeah it's all access to data that they have externally so we had we had a little understanding that they were changing the classification but we had no idea who that we were to receive would receive it or that no one else in the state public, there are a couple of privates up in the metro area that were able to obtain it as well. But we had no idea until they said, hey, congratulations, as we've come out with our new classification

system, this is how you've earned this distinction. Yeah, so it was all done via distance. Why do you think you've been so successful? Well, you know, at our core, community colleges are supposed to be responsive and nimble. You know, we exist to serve the needs of our local community. And sometimes that can be difficult to do. You know, when I came to the region three years ago, what really drew me to the Rogue Valley was there are a lot of colleges

and communities that coexist. There are fewer that are co-dependent. And I truly saw co-dependence between our community and our college in a way that our community needed us to provide workforce, and we needed workforce development efforts in order to get students. Brandy, what are some of the biggest courses

that you have here or the most taken courses that we have that are kind of speaking to this? Yeah, our highest enrollment programs, our core departments would be science, humanities, writing, and math. And that's because essentially every student pursuing every degree would need those core courses. So if you're doing a transfer degree humanities, writing, and math. And that's because essentially every student pursuing every degree would need those core courses.

So if you're doing a transfer degree and you're gonna go to SOU, you would need those courses. If you're gonna get your associate's degree in a CTE program or you're gonna be a nurse or early childhood educator, you're gonna need those programs. So those are our highest enrollment programs. Programs that are

probably more considered signature for us that people are like, oh, our nursing program has received a lot of great positive response and reputation, a lot of support from the community on that. We just wrapped up our first year of a dental hygiene program. That's a really neat program where probably dental hygienists might be, excuse me, dental assistants, which is a program we've had for years, might come out and earn about $40,000 a year maybe. But now that they get their hygiene certification, which is desperately needed in our valley, they're going to be able to make double that. And so you think about the change for a household when somebody is able to double their income

with two years of education for many years to come, that's lifestyle changing. So those are a couple of programs, transportation technology and manufacturing or others that we're really starting to see some positive momentum with. And we still have such programs now. Do you have like HVAC, diesel mechanics, all those kinds of things too? So we don't have HVAC, we do have diesel mechanics. So we have a program that is actually being modified for a relevance standpoint.

We have transportation technology. And so historically we've had independent tracks for automotive and an independent track for diesel. And what we're doing is we're gonna combine a program because we're hearing from industry that it's gonna help people to have exposure to both auto mechanic and diesel mechanic to work in the region and that and then they can go a specialty area if they so decide. So we're going to actually as part of

support from state capital bonds that were approved years ago and some other efforts we're going to build transportation technology blend those together so we'll have auto and diesel in both Grants Pass and White City. Okay, very good. And you know, when it comes right down to it, I think it's wise to combine both of them because, let's face it, both of them, yeah, I know there's differences between, you know, gasoline and diesel, but still there's a lot of computer control and a lot of common issues with this, a lot of programming, a lot of microprocessors. I mean the same knowledge transfers from from one to another then. Now speaking of the

funding, now the bond that was earlier in one of the election cycles did not pass, we knew that, and does that put a crimp in any of your plans or what are you doing now to regroup and move forward? Yeah, it's definitely required us to pivot. And the challenge from the bond measure with it not passing was embedded in that bond measure were specific needs that we had, as well as some thoughts, some desired projects to help us make sure that our programs would be sustained for decades to come. Because it didn't pass, some of those things that we thought, like for example, a centralized enrollment center in White City as that campus is growing, we felt was a really wise project. That's something that we're not going to be able to prioritize, but the current state

isn't acceptable either. So we've got a project going over this summer to try to address that and redesign the current space. Yeah, what does that look like? Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. I'm sorry, I was just going to interject. What does that look like though? So what it looks like now is there's really no front door. And so if we have a large former manufacturing building that's become our primary campus center building there, and it's difficult

for people to find where they would seek services. And there's a lot of schools of thought around the front door philosophy on colleges and universities. You think about a lot of the students who come to us and they have a lack of confidence and certainty, like do I belong here? Well, one of the, you know,

there are stories about students who are like, I never got out of the car. I drove up, I couldn't figure out where to go. And I was like, I don't belong. So they just turn around and go back because they can't figure out the first step of how to become a student. You know that's really interesting. It's almost as if is this even a real college? It doesn't have a front door, right? Is that kind of where you're coming from? Well a little bit of that, yeah. Or even if it's a real college or I failed the first test, right? Like as a student, like I failed the first test. I don't belong here because gee whiz, I can't even figure out like everybody else

knows how to do it but me. And that's, that's that syndrome, kind of that imposter syndrome when you're dealing with a lot of first generation, you know, 26, 27 year old, I've got young kids, I'm trying to balance 19 things. Do I really need one more versus that sense of like, welcome, come in, you know, the sense we want to give them is come in, we've been waiting for you all day. You know, we are ready to support you and your needs because we know that those students who come to us with trying to balance all that life,

those are our hard workers in the ballot. They're the ones we want working these jobs that we want to get filled. What is probably the biggest demand from a workforce in Southern Oregon, which is not being filled at the moment and RCC is looking to help out? Well, so when I look at a list of the top five growing jobs in the next five years in the valley, clear number one is health care support. And then clear number two is health care practitioners.

And so those two are 3,000 of the 5,000 jobs that we're going to need the next five years. And 2,400 of them are the healthcare support. And so trying to figure out what those are, how to help fill those. So for example, a lot of these programs that are practitioners require really specific training. And for us to go

through accreditation program is kind of a heavier lift. And we've been asked for years to help with surgical technicians, like we need more surgical techs. Like we can't do surgeries in the valley because we're using nurses as surgery techs, the surgeons can't. So we're going to add a program, at least for the time being, while we go through accreditation, we're partnering with Linn-Benton Community College, bringing their program here, working with Providence and their facilities so we can have more search techs and that's our ability to be responsive. Like it's helping us with some general ed enrollments, but more importantly we told our provider like if that's what you

need we'll work with a partner in the state because we all know that we want to rely on those needs in our Valley. So those are that kind of thinking is really what's helped us propel the college the last couple years. World Community College president Randy Weber with us with me this morning rather and a great story I mean you're having great stories to tell. I'm kind of curious I know that that there have been other institutions here in southern Oregon that have federal funding that have found themselves sideways in the situation right now. I know RVTD is an example.

I know it's not an educational institution, but they're going toe to toe with the current administration, the Trump administration over funding tie. And they're saying, well, you're not helping out with the immigration issue, so your money goes away. Does RCC face any kind of similar situation like RVTD? Yeah, we have two programs. We have a number where we've received federal aid in some forms, but the two right now

that I'm watching most closely are our federal financial aid program where students either receive grants or can take out loans and the conversations around whether Pell grants will be capped in that. And I shared with our senators and our other elected officials that this, if they cap Pell grants, it will have a negative impact specifically on Oregon and other states that have what we call a quarter system instead of a semester system Assuming that what they'll do is they'll award aid when they run out they run out What happens is all the schools that start their spring term in January and end in May will have already awarded their aid

But we have a spring term that starts in April and if that there isn't money available But we have a spring term that starts in April. And if there isn't money available, then those students won't have access to that aid. They won't finish their program on time. They won't enter workforce on time. So there's this residual fact. So the federal aid is one. The other one is TRIO support services,

which is programs targeted at first generation and low income students to help narrow the gap so that way they can graduate at a closer rate to other students. Do they have, or is there a component of that which requires citizenship, or is this something that we don't know? I don't know if you have an RBTD kind of problem or not, or just the potential. Yeah, so to be eligible for both federal financial aid and TRIO, there is, I mean, there's, it does necessitate citizenship. And so you can't be eligible for either.

So you're not having exactly the same kind of problem that RVTD is having though. That's correct. This is probably just the general, hey, we're trying to cinch in spending on a national basis. And so you could see how some of that could spill over into RCC possibly. Yeah yeah I mean I to be candid you know the the populations that we have served historically to try to narrow the gap and and helping our folks who you know, so here's an interesting stat for you. Families in the highest quartile of earnings in the country have four times a likelihood of earning a bachelor's degree

as families in the lowest quartile. Does RCC deal with a lot of the lowest quartile? Yes, that's exactly it. So because we are serving and putting students in workforce programs because our tuition point is lower because historically the way a community college is designed is that our students stay here. We serve disproportionately more of those students than you would see in other post-secondary settings. Speaking of secondary, what is the

relationship with SOU? Because I know Southern Oregon University has had some real challenges on enrollment, but they may be... I mean, are you taking enrollment from them or are you kind of partnered in one way? What's that relationship like? Yeah, so we've been very mindful of having a really strong relationship with SOU. Their president, Rick Bailey and I have, we both started about the same time, he did a little before I did, we both committed to saying it does us no value to

compete. Like what we're competing is together against non-participation, either against direct workforce or against the couch. And so what we want to do is make sure that people value, you know, colleges and universities, post-secondary education in the Valley. So we've worked together and I know that they're on some tough times now, they're working through, but their transfer numbers, which would be students that we send to them as well as others, is one of their enrollment brighter spots right now. So they're excited to see us serve more students who are transferring to SOU. President Weber, is there any,

if you were going to evaluate K through 12 education, a lot of it to me would seem to be like, what are the more medial courses like at RCC? Are we having a lot of people that have been served by K through 12 or are still having to go through more remedial math, let's say, in order to be able to move forward in their education. Do you know? Yeah. So, you know, one of the things I'm very mindful of is not to stick my nose too far deep under

somebody else's tent in that. I know that they're facing their local and unique challenges. What I can say is that we're redesigning our developmental ed remedial courses in a way that we putting students on paths for those is not helping them earn a credential. So we're doing what we call co-requisite where they would most likely be enrolled in the college level course along with the co-rec and they're coming to us. And so we find is that, you know, there's a difference between developmental and remedial. Developmental maybe means you never really got that support and we need to help you develop it. Remedial is maybe,

I'm 30 years old, I'm coming back to college and I do not remember the Pythagorean theorem. Right. So that's remedial. Like bring it back to me. Yeah, many of us would be challenged on that. I'd be nervous to take a college algebra class today, even though I took it years ago. So that tends to be pretty quick, like, oh yeah, I learned that, I know how to learn it, it needs to come back to me. So because we serve a lot of adult students, that's exactly it. So it's not necessarily the experience that they had in K-12 as it is, they're removed

from that experience. Okay. The reason I bring this up is that Oregon's K-12 public schools ranking have been very poor. I would have to imagine it's afflicting what happens within community colleges and also higher education. And if anything has changed to that, I know everyone's trying to work that to improve it, but it took a long time to get here. It'll probably take a while to... That's it. I tell you where our focus is on that right now and we work closely with our K-12 and our, you know,

we went from under 800 dual credit, which is high school students enrolled in college classes three years ago, to over 1,400 now. So if they can get college credit while they're in high school and see themselves as a college student, our issue right now is less about preparedness as again it is participation. We're in the bottom five states in the country and students who go for some form of what we call post-secondary ed. The scary thing there is that when you look at studies

like put out by Georgetown University in the state of Oregon, what they'll tell you is 71% of the jobs that pay a living wage in Oregon will require some form of post-secondary ed, something more than a high school diploma. So we have students who aren't even getting a high school diploma, that's a problem. And we have students who are stopping at a high school diploma, that's a problem. So we're talking about advanced degrees, but we're also talking about certificates.

If you can come, if you're going to be a welder, what level of certificate? If you're going to work in manufacturing, there's going to be specific skills and learning CAD and automation and things that you might not have learned in K-12. So workforce development is going to look a lot different in the years to come. But what we know is it's going to require some form of skills training beyond what they're trying to enter workforce with today to earn a good job. Well, you're working at working the problems and the challenges hard from all accounts of it.

And with this Crianaki Foundation opportunity college classification, you're going to have this for the next three years. Is that just does that make it easier to get grants or funding for this moving forward for your students? Absolutely. So what the way we see it benefiting us is one, right, when we're looking for external and alternative funding for grants, philanthropy, things like that,

we can say, we're a good investment. Look and see what we do to help our students in our community. Also, the value proposition for students, why do I want to go to college, continues to be challenged, and this helps us answer that. Why do you want to go to college? The reason you want to go to RCC is because we provide training to lead you to a good job in our valley.

And so I think it helps us on both ends of that spectrum. Very good. I really appreciate you coming in here sharing a few thoughts on this because it really is a positive development here in Southern Oregon. Both Josephine and Jackson County, everyone is having good things to say about this and this will only help this ranking now because what it is indicative of is that you're doing your job and you're really well you're really fulfilling your mission and and I really admire what you're doing over that. President Randy Weber once again Road Community College anything else you want to add before we take off that may have forgotten to cover? I don't know. You know I think the only thing since I'm here to

brag and can brag, I will just say that we're happy that over the last couple years we've been the fastest growing college in Oregon and that's been because of our responsiveness to K-12, our responsiveness to workforce, and just a fun fact is that over the last two falls the state average growth in community college has been about 13 percent and at RCC it's been 36% and that has been tremendous growth. Our faculty, our staff, everybody's responding hard to work to students. We're seeing this support and people saying you're offering the programs that we want in ways that we need it. I could just go on and on about

not our program saying this is what we're offering and they'll take it if they want it, is they're listening to industry, they're listening to students and say, oh, how do you need it delivered? What training do you need? We can do that in this way. And so our partnerships, which is a word people like to say a lot but don't always execute, are being delivered upon and, you know, those results are again validating to say, okay, we put the effort in and now we're seeing the results. All right, well, Randy, take a victory lap. It's okay. You can do that.

President Randy Weber, we appreciate you coming in this morning. It is 7.58 at KMED 99.3 KBXG. Hi, this is Bill Meyer and I'm with Cherise from No Wires Now, your Dish Premier local retailer. It's time to switch to Dish. If you have DirecTV or CableTV, call me today to see how I can save you money. Plus, I'll lower your internet and cell phone bills. And those offers in the mail from Dish, you can go through No Wires Now for those. Call me at 541-680-5875.

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The details can be confusing and it's easy to miss important facts or get stuck with a late fee. Come see me well ahead of your birthday so you can make sure you understand the system and have time to think through your options. So if you're turning 65 call me Lynn Barton at 541-499-0958 or find me at SkyparkINS.com and let me make Medicare easy. At Skypark, we make insurance easy. Just how clean is your water? Here's a note from Grants Pass Water Lab. The best and the only way to know your water is clear bacteria is to have a professional water lab run an

E. coli test. E. coli is famous for making people really sick, but it's also an indicator of other bacteria, protozoa and viruses. So ask Grants Pass Water Lab to test your water for E. coli. Find locally owned independent Grants Pass Water Lab online at gpwaterlab.com. Hi, I'm Randy with Diner 62 and I'm on KMED. It's 8 o'clock. This is KMED and KMED HD1 and I'm on KMED. It's 8 o'clock. This is KMED and KMED HD1 Eagle Point-Metford. KPXG Grants Pass. Wild Sam and Steve is here on Pebble in Your Shoe Tuesday, but today it's not a pebble, Steve, from what I understand. What's up?

Well, it's kind of weird. You know, I was drafted in 1969 and the Army chose me to go to Surgical Technician School, which was a six-month school three months of classroom and in three months of on-the-job training Yeah I was just talking about that with President Randy Weber at RCC in which they've expanded into that apparently there's a huge Need for it here in Southern, Oregon. Well At that time when I got out of the service I was good at being a surgical technician,

and I had all my certificates and everything. So I went to the hospitals here, and the only job categories they had at that time were nurses aid, LPN, and RN. They didn't have any, you know, they couldn't pay me enough to live on just to be a surgical technician at the time. Apparently that is a different story right now. It would have been different if you had come out right now. I still have my certificate, but I'm 78 years old, so I doubt they'd hire me. Probably not at this point. You might need a little bit of a remedial wild salmon. Another interesting thing being a surgical technician is kind of being like an auto mechanic. Oh yeah? How so? Yeah, you've got problems to solve. The surgeon's focusing on what he's trying to do.

The surgical technician's job is to keep the surgeon focused so you get everything he needs before he needs it. Are you the person that already has the scalpel ready when the surgeon says scalpel? Absolutely. Okay. And you have to quiz the doctor to find out what it is he's trying to do and find out what's important to him. And then you try to figure that out as it goes. And if you do it well, the doctor just focuses on he's doing everything is fine. I got dropped into a surgery when I was first at Fort Ord where everything had gotten screwed up and it was quite an interesting deal. A lieutenant colonel was the surgeon and I was a PFC. Anyway, I managed to solve all the

problems and that guy at first he was mad at me because I wouldn't give him any utensils. He threw them all on the floor. And one of those really fun deals. But being a surgical technician is different from what you'd think. You have to be able to, you know, there is a certain amount of blood and whatever, but it's all under control. I would also imagine some of that is, it's still, anything involving an operating room would have to be a tense or high-pressure environment of some sort, wouldn't it? Yeah, and you have to be able to handle that but it's hard to explain what makes a good surgical technician. It's like you have to be okay well we're going to take the transmission out today. What wrenches do we need to do that?

It's a surgical technician thing. It's what tools is necessary for a specific job. The one thing that President Weber made it clear though is that huge demand, huge shortage of it right now. So if you were coming out as a younger man, no doubt you'd be snapped right up. I would, yeah, it's just weird how things go, you know. And it could be the... Well, you know, and it could be the cycles of... Maybe it's the difference between now when you were coming out of that with that training those years ago. The country was a younger country, too. There may have been less surgery being done.

Well, the Vietnam War changed everything dramatically because medicine advanced dramatically because of all the wounded. And people got thrown into the battle, and if they could survive, they got promoted. If you couldn't, you got sent to guard duty. Yeah. It's interesting you bring this up. I know that the Gulf War, say what you will, as tragic as they were for many people, what happened in the wars on terror, the Great War on Terror in the wars on terror, the greater the Great War on Terror in the early 2000s, probably did more for figuring out how to deal with traumatic brain injury than we've ever had before, really?

All kinds of things. I mean, the Vietnam War, everything was kind of World War II-ish, but the advent of helicopters and being able to transport people quickly to surgical hospitals saved a lot of lives. And then the medical advancements allowed people to be healed way better than they could before. Yeah, we're saving people a lot more that would have died earlier for sure. Steve, thank you for sharing a bit of that color involving, well, at least what President Weber was talking about at RCC, okay? It is five after eight. Let me grab one more call before news. I know I'm now I'm gonna be late, but that's the way it

goes. Hi, who's this? Bill, it's Brad. Good morning to you. Hey Brad, how are you? Yeah, so this is one of those back in the day deals. So back when school districts ran their own show, Oregon had some of the highest academic achievement in the entire nation. We were always up in the top three. So college, whether it's community college or state college, whatever it was, you know,

basically you take the baseline from where you come out of high school and you go from there towards some sort of a specialty. The problem that we have today, and I'm not throwing rocks at any individual person, is this, there is such a gigantic gap between where our kids are coming out when they come out as high school seniors and what they need to be at

to be any kind of employable human being is a gigantic problem. And I'll give you a real practical example real quick. I have a family member who is a software engineer. And what he tells me is that the, and he works for a very, very large company. And most of the employees that this company you're hiring are outside the United States and they bring them here in the United States. And do you know why they do that bill?

Why it's because the kids that they have access to here in Oregon just don't have any kind of academic background that's adequate for the jobs that they have available. That's pretty scary. It's not that the kids are dumb, it's just that they have been so under-educated that they just can't compare to these kids that are being educated outside the United States. That's the situation we're in. That's pretty scary when you consider that what has really changed between the days that you're talking about back in the day and now is that the state of Oregon essentially controls everything at the local level now.

And it didn't used to be that way. You can't help but note that there must be some connection to that. You could almost make the case that these kids are being maliciously maleducated in public school. You could almost make that case. And this might be why so many parents are choosing to go a different way right now. Brad, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on that too, okay?