Meeting & Agendas

● Court Norton - alumni from ACC HART department. In the Navy for 5 years, oil field experience. Worked for Way Service then started working at Train Technology after meeting an employee from there. Gave big praises to Train’s culture and home/life balance. Part of the 286 Union. Does service, tear-downs, installations, roof-top units, splits/mini-splits. etc. Has contracts with Tesla, Apple, Samsung, etc. ● Paul Slack - runs an HVAC business NW of Austin. Primarily residential, and doesn’t gravitate towards new construction. Company is Arrow Design Systems. ● Mark Willett - with Austin Industrial Refrigeration. Went to college in Corpus Christi. Went to work with his father’s company. Worked throughout Texas, Arizona and Western US. Returned to Texas and started working in local refrigeration shops. Started up Austin Industrial Refrigeration in 1998 independently. ● Dana Gutierrez - friend of the department. ● Lars Helman - Been in business for 20 years and teaching with the HART department for 16-17 years. ● Josh Hackney - General manager at Houk Air Conditioning here in Austin. Started with TCC in 2012 then came to ACC and completed his degree. Opened Houk in 2019. Residential design background, and taught that for 2 years at TCC. Has employed 2 graduates from ACC so far for the residential design shop and is looking for more. ● Alan Scarborough - Adjunct professor in the HART department and chief engineer at San Jacinto center at a property. Has been in business for a little over 10 years. ● Kevin Willis - Went through ACC’s 2 year HVAC program in the 90s. Finished up an Electronics degree and a Business degree, but the HVAC classes had the most impact on him. Currently works for the Texas Ed system as a trainer. Says he owes his successes to the program here at ACC. ● Chavez, John - Technical Sales Manager for Johnstone Supply here is Austin. Has 37 years in the industry. Both residential and commercial experience, but specializes in VRF, mini splits, CRVs, outdoor air systems, ventilation strategies and problem projects. Texas Licensed Contractor. Used to have an HVAC consulting firm - would help identify and navigate issues. ● Patrick Escamilla - Currently research building for Dell Medical School - builds automation systems and maintains them for all four buildings. Went through the program at ACC and has a brother involved in the HVAC program at Del Mar in Corpus Christi. Really enjoys the program here and hopes to contribute as well. ● Heath Redfearn - Project Manager at Trane in the contracting division in Austin. Has been in the industry a little over 20 years doing everything from install to technician work and worked his way up through the ranks. Believes there are not enough controls out there, and says knowing and having part in what is going on at ACC is important to the future of HVAC, especially with the technology in Austin. ● Dominic Gonzales - Adjunct here at the ACC Hart department who also went through the program. Is excited to see how the board can help the program grow in the right direction. Made a career change around ‘07 or ‘08 and fell into air conditioning. Started learning all the ins and outs of duct work, then decided to get into the program at ACC. Received his contracting license during his 4th year of work and put off finishing his degree. Came back in 2020 to finish up and later was offered an adjunct teaching position here. ● Jim Baughn - Senior Chief Engineer for Newmark. Main office is up in Cedar Park. Got started in the industry through a friend’s family and worked his way up with on the job training.

Next, the meeting went over the purpose and responsibility associated with being an Advisory Board member. A copy of these items were provided to the board members for reference. A copy is also included in the shared Google Drive folder for the Advisory Board members. The purpose of this board is for us [ACC HART Department] to receive advice in these areas; matters of curriculum, instructor qualifications, equipment and facility requirements. The board is the professional input that ACC depends on to get real live data to fine tune our program. Responsibilities of the board include: ● evaluate goals and objectives of the program curriculum ● establish workplace competencies for program occupations ● suggest program revisions as needed ● identify local industry leaders that will provide students with external learning opportunities (internship opportunities) ● assist in the professional development of the faculty

Tolly James Jr. explained as part of the full time faculty of the program, we (Tolly James Jr., Jake Leo, and Fereidoun Bakhshi) can not hold officer positions within the Advisory Board as that would be seen as the college steering the direction of the committee. There needs to be elected a Chair, a Vice Chair, and a Secretary. Only the Secretary may be an internal person. Brandon Whatley (Dean over Applied Technologies at ACC) welcomed everyone and thanked them for their time. He then explained the responsibilities of the chair members: ● Chair - this individual helps the department create an agenda based on the context of the previous meeting(s). The department will advise and bring up specific needs to be discussed, but the Chair ultimately decides what the meetings will be over. This person will lead the meetings. ● Vice Chair - just stands in when the Chair is not available for any reason. Mr. James motioned for a vote to be held to nominate Chair and Vice Chair. Josh Hackney Nominated himself for Vice Chair. Court Norton also nominated himself for Vice Chair. Alan Scarborough nominated himself for Chair. This was seconded by Mr. Hackney and Mr. Norton. It was clarified that Full Time employees can not take part in voting, but Adjunct faculty can. Mark Willett jokingly motioned for a 2 minute dissertation by the Vice Chair nominees to present themselves to the committee before voting. They decided to do so. Josh Hackney already performs administrative functions for his current company and has the right contacts to be able to delegate so he can dedicate his time to the responsibility of being Vice Chair. His company is heavily ingrained in new construction in the community and in Texas, and he can bring knowledge of needs to the table. He is a heavy reader and explained he would keep up communication with the Chair to stay up to date on the issues being presented in case the Chair can not make a meeting. Ultimately, he can offer his time and his experience to the team. Court Norton started by saying that he thinks Mr. Hackney would make a great Vice Chair based on what he presented to the board. Comparatively, he is a service technician right now with Trane technologies which is in the union. Has taken part in quite a few initiatives. Has led the Technician Advisory Committee in the Chair position for a year and was involved with them for a year and a half. The committee is formed with a technician from each area that meets together to discuss needs from different areas and come up with solutions. Now heads up the new Technician Development Council which is heavily involved with similar items to this ACC HART Advisory Board. It involves early outreach, learning development, etc. Mark Willett motioned to vote for Vice Chair. Mr. Scarborough seconded. By show of hands, there was a unanimous vote for Josh Hackney being Vice Chair. Alan Scarborough presented himself for the Chair position. He has been in the industry for 10 years and graduated from ACC’s program in 2018. He is currently the Vice Chair for another organization. Has been dealing with a wide variety of units throughout his career as an engineer. He currently teaches Electric Heat and Gas here at the ACC program on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mr. Scarborough then asked if anyone else would like to nominate themselves for Chair. A member spoke up saying he had a question about the time commitment associated with being Chair. In particular, how often are meetings going to be held. He would love to be the Chair, but is concerned with how much time it may take up. Mr. Leo replied saying that, especially at the beginning, there is a lot of work to be done so they are looking at potentially meeting once a quarter. Then, once the board has reached a maintaining stage, meetings can be more of a one-a-semester arrangement. Mr. James agreed with Mr. Leo, stating that the department is looking at doing a large amount of curriculum updating, where the Advisory Board input is vital. The department is preparing to move to the new Southeast Travis location when it is built and the Round Rock expansion which will hopefully be Fall25. The next meeting will most likely be at the beginning of the Fall semester. The Chair position runs from September 1st to September 1st. Brandon Whatley explained that it is really up to the Board when the next meeting will be. He mentioned to keep in mind that if there are large changes needing to be made, that there is an internal process needing to be followed that takes a significant amount of time to put together necessary documents for approval. Court Norton brought up that, considering the nature of the Board member’s industries, summer is the busiest time of year. There would definitely be more opportunity for participation in the Fall as opposed to meeting again this summer. Mr. Leo clarified that this is a democratic process with the committee voting members, so the next meeting time is completely up to them. As far as the question about Chair time commitments, the majority of the time needed would be with the board meetings themselves. Dominic Gonzales nominated Mark Willett for Chair. Josh Hackney seconded the nomination. Mark Willett presented himself for the Chair position. He is from Austin Industrial Refrigeration. Mr. Willett has the time available needed for the position and also “wears many hats” in his office such as bookkeeping, parts, inventory. Socially, he says he can be a little intimidating because he is outspoken when he feels like it. Has experience on the floor of the State GOP convention. Stated that if he is chosen for the position that he will do the best he can and “just roll with it.” Has been in the industry for 40 years and self employed going on 30 years. Alan Scarborough motioned to vote for Chair and Josh Hackney seconded. By show of hands, there was a unanimous vote for Alan Scarborough being Chair. There was a reminder that in the folder everyone received is a copy of Robert's Rules.

Mr. Leo started by introducing himself to everyone. He graduated this program in 2018 and owes a lot to ACC for how much it changed his life. Was a chef for 9 years and decided one day that getting paid $9 an hour for severe grease burns wasn’t worth it anymore. Three people in the meeting have employed Mr. Leo - Paul Slack, Lars Helman, and Jim Baughn. His time with Mr. Baughn gave enough leeway to become an adjunct professor with the HART program and find his love of teaching. Mr. Leo expressed how much the program has changed his life and is glad that there are so many people here to work on something that means so much to him. He is currently working on getting his Bachelor’s degree in education. The Board took a brief overview of the curriculum of the whole department with the help of a PowerPoint presentation. The folders handed out to everyone included a packet with the state outcomes put forth by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board as well as our current program map. Mr. Willett raised his hand asking what the last two columns on the outcomes packet are where it says “Min Cont Hrs” and “Max Cont Hrs”. Mr. Leo answered explaining what each column means and also brought up the different degree maps on the board for Occupational, Certificate, and Associates plans. The “Min/Max Cont Hrs” shows the minimum and maximum number of hours students can spend in that specific course. On the presentation breakdown, core subject classes were not included so that the meeting could focus on the HART classes specifically. As a student moves through the program, the classes stack. For example, a student wanting to earn an Associate’s degree would start taking the Occupational courses and move their way up. The packet of outcomes has the classes in order of how students would take them in our Program. The Board will be asked to go through and state which outcomes are more or less important than others. There was a Google Drive shared that also has courses the HART program does not currently hold that the Board members could decide needs to be implemented into the curriculum. In total, the program must reach and can not go over 60 credit hours. Therefore, if more classes are implemented, the degree maps will need to be adjusted to match the 60 credit hour total for the Associates. It also needs to be in mind that the 60 hours include the core subjects, which will take up 15 hours of that time. Other colleges may have 8-week courses that will be worth 3 credit hours instead of the 16-week courses worth 4 credits. Therefore, they are able to hold a greater number of different classes to fill up that 60 hour requirement. Mr. Whatley explained that one of the most important aspects of the packet is the course descriptions and outcomes that outline exactly what is being taught in each class. You must keep in mind that this is the bare minimum that courses must follow - you can add to these but you can not take anything away. A short list of outcomes does not mean that is all that is being taught in the course. So the process will be figuring out if we are offering the right courses, then evaluating what can be added to each course. As an example, an adjunct brought up that we currently offer both 1401 Basic Electricity and 2431 Advanced Electricity as 16-week courses. It could be a possibility to condense both courses into 8-weeks since one is a continuation of the other. This would leave room to be able to add a Controls course, which many people are asking for. These are the types of decisions that the Board is going to be in charge of making. Extra electives can be suggested, but it may make it hard for those classes to actually make. We also want to make sure that the courses provided are going to be relevant to the jobs available in the area. Other trade schools have handed out a survey to their surrounding areas where the participants rate the different industry aspects from 1-5 based on how important they thought each thing was to know exiting the program. This would create a nice metric for the program to use while working on adjusting courses. Mr. Leo mentioned that he was already working on something where once a week or so, he could send out a Google Form with one of the classes on there asking what of those outcomes is most important to you. Mr. Willett suggested that there is a need for the Board to have more detail than what the outcomes describe of what exactly is being taught in each course. Since these are the minimum outcomes, there is no way of knowing through just this packet what all is being supplemented into the course, such as possible coverage of controls. John Chavez spoke up saying that the term “controls” is also a very generalized term for many things and asked for clarification of what exactly is being discussed. Mr. Leo was using the term as something related to commercial air conditioning like BAS systems. Mr. Bakhshi asked Mr. James if we have a curriculum board that will decide on what curriculum will be used. Mr. James said there is not currently a curriculum board, but we are currently creating the process of how this will take place. He reminded everyone that this is the very first meeting, so any changes being made will take a lot of time to be implemented. A board member referred back to the Controls conversation, clarifying that the term may be confusing because it can mean something different in one part of the industry than the other. For example, in Building Automation it has to do with BAS while on the other side of the industry it could refer to the circuit boards on a unit. Overall, the Advisory Board will have a major impact on the courses offered and what exactly is taught in each course as well as the flow of how the courses fit together.

The internship is an opportunity for students to be able to get real work experience in the field. It is at least 80 hours where they get plugged into a position and the person that takes them in gets to examine a prospective employee. This is good especially to Advisory Board members so that they can see the outcomes of the program. A Board member expressed concerns about liability if something happens to the student during their internship time. Mr. Whatley expressed that we do advocate that the student gets paid for their work. ACC is trying to move away from unpaid internships. If something were to happen to that individual, ACC does have agreements and insurance in place to cover. This also covers high school students (like the ones at Leander High). If you hire a 17 year old as an intern, it is covered under ACC insurance, and there is also legislation that has passed that also has to do with it. Some companies modify the internship for high school students so that they are not doing as much dangerous work.

The next meeting will be more substantial in terms of actually making decisions and getting things moving. It was brought up that the survey could be held to determine what is important and then at the next meeting, the department could have mapped out what is covered where. Mr. Leo can send surveys intermittently and have the information ready to go for the next meeting. He suggested that September sounds like a good month for the next meeting so that all of that data can be accumulated and ready to go. Someone suggested September 1st as the next meeting date, since it falls on a Friday. The motion was seconded. The suggestion came to a vote. By show of hands, the vote to meet on September 1st was unanimous. A backup meeting day of September 8th was motioned and seconded. The suggestion came to a vote. By show of hands, the vote of the backup meeting day being September 8th was unanimous. The next meeting will be offered as a hybrid as well. Both in person and by Zoom at 10:00am. Motion to adjourn the meeting was seconded. Lunch was served after the meeting.