News & Updates

Washington State University (WSU) announced this morning the selection of Elson S. Floyd as the tenth president of WSU.  Floyd, who is currently president of the University of Missouri will succeed V. Lane Rawlins, who announced earlier this year that he would step down at president at the end of the current academic year.

Floyd has served as president of the University Missouri since November 2002.  Prior to that he served as president of Western Michigan University and has held several administrative positions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  From 1993 to 1995, he was the executive director of the Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Here’s a story on Floyd from The Seattle Times.

With the recent reorganization of the Senate and House of Representatives, a number of changes have been made that will affect staffing for higher education.

The creation of a separate Higher Education committee in the Senate, chaired by Sen. Paull Shin (D-Edmonds), has resulted in some committee staff assignment changes.  Susan Mielke, who had served as coordinator for the combined Early Learning, K-12 and Higher Education Committee will be assigned as coordinator for the new Early Learning and K-12 Education Committee to be chaired by Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe (D-Bothell).  Longtime Senate Judiciary committee counsel Aldo Melchiori has been selected to be the new lead staff person for the Higher Education Committee.

In the Senate Democratic Caucus, higher education policy counsel Heather Lewis-Lechner will relinquish her higher education responsibilities to focus on early learning, K-12 and government operations.  Her higher education staff replacement will be Mark Rosen who has previously served as caucus policy counsel for judiciary, government operations and elections.

Governor Gregoire plans to formally release her 2007-09 biennial budget proposal on Tuesday December 19.  During the next week, she will spend each day highlighting some of the most important aspects of her spending proposal.

Yesterday, she unveiled a $197 million math and science initiative at Garfield High School in Seattle.  Improving math and science education was a key strategy in her Washington Learns report.  Garfield High School was chosen as the site of the announcement because of an exciting new partnership in math education at the school between the UW College of Education, the UW Department of Mathematics and the Garfield High School math department.

Here’s a copy of the Governor’s press release unveiling her math and science education initiative.  On Thursday, the Governor will visit Spokane to talk about higher education.