Higher education notebook

UA System board elects new leaders

The University of Arkansas System board of trustees has elected new officers.

Ben Hyneman of Jonesboro is the new chairman of the board, replacing Jim von Gremp of Rogers. Von Gremp will continue to serve on the board. Reynie Rutledge of Searcy has been selected vice chairman.

Trustee David Pryor, a former state governor and former U.S. senator who lives in Little Rock, is the board’s secretary. Morril Harriman of Little Rock is the board’s vice secretary.

The four will assume those roles during the trustees’ next scheduled meeting March 17 and 18 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

ASU-Beebe to wrap facility expansion

Arkansas State University-Beebe will finish an expansion of facilities for its Agriculture Equipment Technology program in April.

The expansion includes a 5,270-square-foot “main shop” building for lab space. It will also include six bays to house equipment and a 3,920-square-foot storage building.

The first facilities for the two-year program — also known as the John Deere Ag Tech program — were built in 1996 but were expanded in 2013.

Deere & Co. and ASU-Beebe partnered together to begin the program and design the curriculum, which includes classroom learning, lab work and internship experience. The company provides the school about $1 million of equipment for lab activities.

UALR unit awarded grant worth $4.9M

The Arkansas Department of Human Services has awarded a four-year grant totaling nearly $5 million to an arm of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s School of Social Work.

The grant will go to MidSOUTH, a community service unit of the school, to help establish a parenting education program for families statewide “with an active in-home protective services case,” according to a news release. The program will give parents a “competency-based curriculum with built-in assessments” to see if they are learning the new parenting skills, the release states.

MidSOUTH received about $1.2 million for the first year this month and will receive approximately $4.9 million over four years.

The community service unit will also hire 15 new employees to train parents and hold training sessions for children, the release states.

Ebony lead editor to speak at UAPB

Ebony magazine’s editor-in-chief will give a keynote address for the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff’s black history celebrations.

The editor, Mitzi Miller, will deliver the address at 11 a.m. Tuesday in the J.M. Ross Theatre of the Hathaway-Howard Fine Arts Center. The New York native previously worked for Jet magazine, where she led a cover-to-cover redesign of the 62-year-old brand.

There, she also launched a new website and led the magazine to increase its social media presence. She has also co-written five books during the past 10 years, including The Vow: A Novel and The Angry Black Woman’s Guide to Life.

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