Dr Jonathan Gueverra, president and CEO of the College of the Florida Keys joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the college.
Prior to Thanksgiving break, the swimming Tugas competed in their first swim meet of the season.
Dr. Gueverra said, “This is a great warm up for them. This is usually the first one, and we had a couple of athletes that participated, and this gives us an indication of what the season is going to look like. And Lucas is already qualified in the 200 for nationals, so we have one athlete, unless something goes awry, he is going to be at nationals, so we’ll see how he does, and Victoria will continue swimming and hopefully as the season goes on, she will pick up a few more meets where she can get her qualifying times in. But congratulations to our Tugas.”
World AIDS Day was celebrated on Monday and the college remembered alumnus Julie Eckard.
Dr. Gueverra said, “Julie Eckard, a young woman who graduated back in 1987 from the college was a nursing student, and in addition to having suffered with HIV/AIDS herself, she was also a big advocate. During the time that she was at the college, she had the disease, but she still went on to become a registered nurse, and she spent the remainder of her life just caring for advocating and doing everything she can to help people who are living with AIDS/HIV, and a couple of people from her classmates revived the scholarship that we had started many years ago. Dr Kevin Mallinson, who was also a firefighter in Key West in his early days and from that nursing class that year, he and his partner, Bob, endowed a scholarship so that they can support the education of nurses, particularly for the issues related to patient equality. And this year’s recipient is a mom of two, Valerie Thomas and working full time, and her goal is to become a sexual assault nurse examiner. The Monroe County does not have people working in that field right now, so she is going to try and pick up the range so that she can help those people who are in sexually violent situations, so that they can help with the whole recovery and all the people who are victims of such things.”
The CFK Foundation, received an $80,000 gift from John Parce to fund the James Robert and Eleanor Ryle Parce scholarship for nursing, which he established in 2020 in memory of his parents.
Dr. Gueverra said, “James and Eleanor Ryle Parce are John’s parents and John is a retired naval aviator, a long time resident of the Keys. He has a passion for flight nursing in particular, so he established a scholarship, and it’s merit and need based, and it awards up to 16,000 a year to qualified nursing students over the length of the program. So this is a great, great opportunity for anyone who wants to become a nurse in general, but especially if you’re thinking about flight nursing, because that will involve doing a few more extra things to get into that field. All the information for that scholarship is available at our website under the section paying for college. So if you go on there, you will find that.”
Giving helps the college and its students.
Dr. Gueverra said, “In order to give, we have to get it somewhere. So we are asking people, we just talked about the the Parce scholarship. We also talked about the scholarship in honor of Julie Eckard, but we have to get those resources somewhere. So we’re asking people to help put stuff into the coffers. And in honor of our founding year, 1965 we’re asking you to at least consider a small gift of 19.65 or you can add many zeros as you like because there is so much need and the college is not just an entity. We are an entity that provides individuals with life changing opportunities. So it’s an investment in our workforce, in our economy, in the health of the Keys. People may not remember, but back during the pandemic, for example, we offered free courses for hospitality workers who were being laid off. So we’re just asking you to help us to be able to continue doing things like this. It’s easy to donate. Go to our website and you can make that one time donation. You can make it recurring. You can designate it for a specific scholarship or specific academic training program. But there are lots and lots of ways. So please get in touch with us. If you need to talk to me directly, I will absolutely speak with you about how you can do that.”
The spring term for CFK is starting on January 9.
Dr. Gueverra said, “Today, Wednesday, December 3, we are helping all prospective students to get on track real quickly. So if you have not applied, or if you applied years ago and you just never followed up, today is a good day come into our Key West Campus, or go into our Upper Keys Center. We’re here from 11 until 7pm tonight, and our employees will be there to connect you with the pathways, the information you need, financial aid, information, payment plans, the application process, and again, we spoke earlier about the importance of giving, the college will give a $30 application fee waiver for anyone that comes in today and applies and gets into that pipeline. We will also give you a $100 what we call a Kickstarter Scholarship. So when you consider that the average class is three credits, and it’s about $300 per credit, we give you that $130. That covers nearly half the cost of that first class. So we encourage you to come and bring as much information as you can put together, sealed official transcripts from your college or high school, two forms of proof of Florida residency if you want to have in state tuition, any test scores. Just bring what you have, and we will tell you what is needed and what is not.”
The commencement ceremony for the fall class of 2025 will be on December 12.
Dr. Gueverra said, “We have commencement coming up relatively soon, next week, Friday, we will do our first of two special 60th anniversary celebrations. As part of that special celebration, we have invited our alums from our first graduating classes to come back. For this fall ceremony, we will have at least two of them, Mr. Bill Wickers and Mr. Bill Pearson. Bill Pearson has also agreed to be the keynote speaker for commencement, so we will hear some great stories from him. He was born and raised in Key West, and he got his start at what was then Monroe Junior College, before he went on to University of Florida to earn both a Bachelor’s and Master’s. He’s had a great career specializing in Spanish shipwreck coins. So we will hear from him, and he will regale us with some of those stories. Then our student speaker, who is Megan Regotas and Megan is a student at the Upper Keys in criminal justice technology, a single mom who has overcome many, many challenges, but also remains a honor student in the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, as well as a Dean’s student, and she served us as a student ambassador in the Upper Keys, in addition to all of her duties as a mom and everything else that she did. So we’re looking forward to hearing from both of those speakers at commencement next week, Friday. So folks, if you have people who are graduating, come out and support them, and your neighbors, your friends, obviously your family, and I need to say this because somebody asked me recently if they could buy two tickets. We do not sell tickets to commencement. They are free of charge.”
The holiday break for CFK is December 18 through January 2, with the college reopening on January 5.
Dr. Gueverra said, “We will be shutting the doors for a few weeks, getting time to repair, getting time to relax with families, for many years, my children used to say to me, Dad, where are you going? It’s summer or it’s Christmas or it’s spring break. And I said to them one day, I said, do you think something magically happens the night before you all show up for classes, some of us do work during those break periods. So we use that time to retool, a little painting here, a little spackle there, a little piece of carpet that needs to be repaired there. So some of us might still be doing things, but we do wish everyone a wonderful holiday season, and we look forward to seeing them on the way back.”
For more information, click here: https://cfk.edu