The Albright Learning Center (ALC) will expand its services to offer a cooperative full-day kindergarten/first grade classroom to begin fall 2005.

“We wanted to expand our lab school for the College’s purpose,” said Darla Timberlake, director of the center. The Albright Learning Center serves as a hands-on teaching tool for education majors. “We want to make sure that Albright students have enough opportunities and this felt like the next natural step,” she said.

Benefits of the program include: Pennsylvania certified teachers, curriculum designed to meet Pennsylvania academic standards, low student/teacher ratio, multi-age learning experiences, foreign languages, art appreciation and science education. “Students will get a lot of exposure to languages and the sciences,” Timberlake said. “They don’t get that in a regular elementary school classroom.” Students will also be exposed to college activities, college departments and innovative ways of teaching.

In addition to kindergarten and first grade, the center offers full-time childcare, year-round pre-K and pre-school and a Special Education School open to special-needs school-age children from Berks County and the surrounding area.

Eventually, Timberlake said, ALC would like to grow to become a full elementary center.

The Albright Reporter won a silver medal for “Magazines: Four-Year Colleges & Universities, 1-3 color,” in a competition conducted by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), District II.

District II includes 600 institutions from Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and West Virginia.

The Service Excellence initiative at Albright is launching its second phase this spring with ustomer service training for administrators, support staff and faculty.

A facilitators team of 15 administrators and support staff completed a customer service “train the trainers” program and will lead the three-part training program for employees. The program, advanced Connections by Noel-Levitz, is designed specifically to address issues and situations in higher education.

“Our aim is to have all 450 employees of the College, as well as student workers, complete the service excellence training,” said Barbara Marshall, associate vice president for college relations and marketing and chair of the SE Team. “We could not afford to hire outside trainers to do that, and we really want the program to be peer-to-peer, so we enlisted employees with training skills and a lot of energy and commitment.”

David Stinebeck, interim president, is enthusiastic about the training program. “The vice presidents and I will be the very first people to take the training,” Stinebeck said. “We want to show everyone on campus that service excellence is real, and is expected to become part of our campus culture. In fact, completion of the training will be noted on employee evaluations, and our goal is to have a service excellence objective as part of every department’s annual plan.”

The first, intensive wave of training will take place through the spring, summer and early fall.

“Once current employees have taken the training, we will gear down and offer it for new employees as they join Albright,” Marshall said. Employees who complete the training will receive a small, framed certificate designed to be displayed on their desktop.