New Business —

1. Introductions
   1. Committee members introduced themselves and their connection to Athletics at KU.
2. Ryan King presented issues identified by Student Athlete Support Services as affecting student athletes. These are their priorities for the academic year, and they hope that the Athletic Committee can help address them.
   1. There is a federal requirement that student-athletes must be enrolled in half in-person classes. A lack of in-person classes over the summer is creating challenges for international student-athletes. These athletes arrive in the summer and cannot begin training right away.
   2. We are also seeing a lot of graduate student-athletes transferring to KU for only a year. Since there are not a lot of graduate certificates offering in-person classes, the students cannot earn any sort of degree or certificate. Office of IA and Student Affairs are both aware of these issues, but they do not know how to resolve them.
   3. Q: Is this an issue at other universities across the country?
      1. A: Not sure. Folks are considering having international student-athletes arrive in the fall rather than the summer. Ryan will bring this up at the monthly Big 12 meeting to see if other universities are having a similar issue.
   4. Q: There is lots of encouragement from CLAS to not have summer in-person courses. We need to tell academic units of this issue.
   5. We currently have 52 total international student-athletes. About 15 of these students (combination of graduate/undergraduate) had the issue of summer courses. These were mostly new or transfer students.
   6. KU could potentially schedule a specific course for this purpose. It would need to be applicable for students at all levels, such as a core course not in a sequence. I can be hybrid, but just needs to require at least one day in-person. This would ideally be a session 2 course, as that’s when student-athletes are arriving. Alternatively, it could be an 8-week course. Internship classes are possible, though independent study probably wouldn’t work.
3. The students and student-athletes on the committee presented some issues.
   1. Student-athlete schedules
      1. Instructors have been mostly accommodating to student-athletes’ schedules. The Excused Absences Policy has helped.
      2. Students need instructors to be very clear about attendance grading policies in their syllabi so that the students can decide if the course will work for them. This is challenging because students often don’t get their course syllabi until just before the semester starts. Instructors could submit syllabi to Athletics to provide students guidance. Perhaps some of this could be solved with the HLC accreditation since that has guidelines about syllabi submission. Likewise, students need to share their travel schedules with their instructors ASAP and to try to makeup work with instructors beforehand rather than trying to catch up.
      3. Q: Can we find out trends in student-athlete enrollment? Are there courses that have a history of high student-athlete enrollment?
         1. A: Courses in the Business School and the Sports Management Program tend to enroll a lot of student-athletes. We could target the resources for these courses, and this would also help advisors.
         2. The committee could gather data so that we can provide resources and ideas for both instructors and students on how to handle flexible attendance. This issue overlaps with attendance issues outside of the student athlete sphere that have emerged with the Excused Absences Policy. Governance is working on gathering data on this as well. They are trying to figure out how to best address the issues and provide support.
   2. Student-athletes need there to be more interfacing between Athletics’ advisors and the schools’ academic advisors, especially for careers that have prerequisites that aren’t necessarily aligned with program requirements (e.g., pre-med). Most student-athletes only see their Athletics advisors. Students in Business and Engineering are encouraged to see school advisors. With the JAA model, it often seems unclear as to who students should go to.
      1. Q: Should it be a requirement for student-athletes to get their schedules signed off on before enrolling by a school advisor? Or should school advisors be assigned to student-athletes so that they are up to date on both areas of needs?
4. The committee will review the charges and assign work to individuals at the next meeting. In the meantime, Jana will put together some suggestions of tasks to complete between now and the next meeting and send these out to the committee.