the advising model, enhance university retention efforts, and increase support to the Office of Academic Support. In collaboration with academic support services, retention and advising liaisons will be responsible for tracking high-risk (DFW) courses, creating specific academic support interventions, organizing specific student and faculty development activities, coordinating student advising, and gathering retention data. With the aid of a retention management system, liaisons will manage early alerts, collect and report retention data for each college, and monitor at-risk populations, such as those failing to make timely progress toward the degree. Liaisons will be responsible for overseeing the progression and graduation data of cohorts after the first year by creating retention and graduation reports, conducting degree audits, documenting change in majors, and contacting un-enrolled students and assisting students with re-enrolling in Kentucky State University.

There are three major initiatives in progress at this time to promote student retention that include:

1. intentional collaboration with each College, to follow curriculum ladders that promote successful understanding of progression and a decrease misadvising. The first of a series of meetings will be held October 29, 2015.
2. intentional collaboration with the Dean of the University to improve advising for students with 31 or more credit hours. Advisor training for faculty will be conducted on October 27, 2015, before pre-registration.
3. The office is organizing an academic and behavioral intervention team. The K-Cares Team is a group of key faculty and staff members dedicated to effectively managing and resolving student behavior and academic issues through early intervention to prevent attrition from the University. The Team will solicit referrals through an online form, meet regularly to address referrals, investigate concerns, create interventions, and follow-up until issues are resolved. The first team meeting will be conducted on October 30, 2015.

Accomplishments—The Academic Center for Excellence (ACE) has identified 36, 100- and 200-level courses as the most high risk (DFW) courses from the fall 2014 and spring 2015 terms. Some of the program areas showing repeated courses on the list include Psychology, English, and Spanish.

The ACE office has obtained Supervision Certification for International Supplemental Instruction (SI) Program. Supplemental Instruction (SI) is an internationally recognized support model that is proven to increase course grades, retention and graduation rates by decreasing course failure rates. A trained supervisor improves the program quality as the supervisor has gained extensive knowledge on program implementation. Research has shown that quality implementation of the SI model positively influences student performance.

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