ACC Day comes to Neepawa

Details

Published on Monday, February 2, 2015

By Eoin Devereux

The Neepawa Banner

Teachers, administration and students from Assiniboine Community College will converge on Neepawa on Wednesday, Feb. 4 for ACC Day. Manager of recruitment and career services for ACC Lisa Huston, said this series of events is the college’s way to engage with outlying communities throughout the westman region.

“We know that a great deal of our internal ACC community, be that students or resource staff, are from the rural communities surrounding Brandon and we knew that as a college, we wanted to increase our presence in those communities, as a way to say thank you, as a way to get to know those communities better,” said Huston. “We also wanted to get some information out to potential students, so looking at recruitment. More importantly, we hoped to reconnect with our alumni as well. That is a large part of what this day is about as well. We want to connect with small business as well, There’s a lot of great connections between the college and rural communities and we just want to maintain those relationships.”

The inaugural ACC Day was held in Dec. 2013, in Virden. The second was in February of last year in Dauphin, where ACC has a full-time campus. Huston said both of those days were very well received and they hope to have a repeat of that success in Neepawa.

“Neepawa is a great community. We’ve had, through our enterprise development department, our continuing studies department; we’ve had a presence in Neepawa and the community for quite a few years. So, we already were there but we’ve had quite a bit of interest from the Neepawa area,” said Huston. “The recruitment team, you know, when we’re doing presentations and talking about the college, we do speak quite often with high school students that come from the Neepawa area, so for us, this was a no brainer. It was simple. We knew there was demand for that information. And, as well from an alumni standpoint, our alumni co-ordinator has an extensive database and it tells us that there are alumni in Neepawa and surrounding areas that we’d love to reconnect with.”

The day starts at 8:00 am with ACC president Mark Frison and other college staff serving up coffee at Tim Hortons. From 11:00 am to 1:00 pm, the college will host a free lunch for local business owners, to offer an introduction to human resources and teach tips to better manage staff. Huston noted that one of the most important parts of the day is set for the afternoon and will involve ACC staff and instructors engaging with grade 10 and 11 students at NACI.

“We get to come in [to NACI] and we bring a nice cross section of our facility, our instructors and some current students from a good cross section of our programs,” said Huston. “They’ll come in, set up in the gym and we’ll have nine different stations set up. And, this is where they can give a very interactive demonstrations of what the classroom experience is like for our programs.”

The day concludes with members of the ACC Cougars women’s hockey team offering a skating seminar for children ages five to 10, an alumni and friends reception from 6:00 to 7:00 pm at the Yellowhead Centre and finally, ACC’s sponsorship of the evening game between the Neepawa Natives and the Waywayseecappo Wolverines.