Crimson and Gold Connection; Monica Murnam

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. This week on Crimson and Gold Connection, I'm joined by Monica Murn and one of the recipients of the 2016 Dr Ralph J. Thomas Distinguished Service Award. Monica has been a City Commissioner recently mayor of Pittsburgh and is currently director of Student Support Services at the Southeast Kansas Education Service Centre, familiarly known as Greenbush, and has been in the past executive director of the Family Resource Centre in Pittsburgh. She's been involved with the United Way, the Community Health Centre of Southeast Kansas, Pittsburgh Sunrise Rotary, the Board of the Pittsburgh Public Library, and National President of the PSU Alumni Association. Her bachelor's and master's degrees were from Pittsburgh State University and we happy to have her in the studio today. Hello Monica. Hello, thanks for having me. This is obviously quite a prestigious award. How do you feel about being the recipient in 2016 or one of the recipients should I say? Humble, the folks that have been involved with this award in the past and have received it.

I truly feel that I not even on the same planet as them and I am just very honored that anybody thought that I should be included in the list. When I came to school at Pittsburgh State University several years ago from a little town of Erie, Kansas, I didn't intend to be an educator and after I was here for just a few months, I realized it was the path for me. I've been lucky enough to have many different career opportunities in education, but really believe the backbone of the education I received here at Pittsburgh State University gave me the skills I needed to do some things that are traditional classroom, but really focus on equal access to education for all. I feel really honored to have been part of the movement to recognize the need for investment in early childhood education, that whole theory that investorly paying off later on, and so the trend has definitely changed, it's now just a standard way of doing business that we recognize that kids and families are all different and that the infrastructure has to have many different interventions in place to help everybody succeed.

You've been Director of Student Support Services at the Southeast County Education Service Center for about three, three and a half years now? That's right. So those of us who aren't really too familiar with some of the educational aspects of what you do, what does Green Bush actually do? Right, that's kind of the million dollar question. In the late 70s, there were a group of people who got together and jumped on a wave of education service centers in the state of Kansas, and we were lucky enough to have some very visionary folks in Southeast Kansas who formed the education service center located outside of Gerard. The original idea was to pull resources to get things to small school districts that they couldn't access themselves. Today we have over 450 employees all over the state, we have 90 programs, and we really focus on providing to school districts and to communities things that they can't get on their own or that it just makes more sense in pooling together. So everything from cooperative purchasing to providing special education services to children who have more complex issues that a local school district may not be able to

provide. It's a great place to be creative and to focus on kids and also to focus on how the collective can really make an impact. So my reading the name as the Southeast Kansas Education Service Center is actually not completely accurate given that you served the entire state. That's right. Again, anytime a good structure is built, everybody wants to be part of it. And so we have over the years at Green Bush worked with lots of different types of organizations and really built bridges for kids in all parts of the state in places that people would never imagine. Very recently, I think it was fairly recently you stood for public office and you've been a city commissioner and more recently mayor of Pittsburgh. How does that fit in with your personal plan some of the time? I have encouraged over the years different friends to run for office and believe in that idea of giving back civically. I had done that pretty consistently through community service and I decided after my kids left for college that I probably needed to put my money where my mouth was.

And I was so pleased with the direction the city of Pittsburgh was going and really liked the positive transformation that was happening. I wanted to be part of that. So I was willing to serve and lucky enough to be part of the city commission. Serving as mayor of the community is a fun thing. It really gave me a lot of opportunities to interact with people I didn't know at all. And also is an exciting time because of the collaboration with the university that was going on at that time and continues to go on. So it's a great way to give back a little bit to the community that has provided so much to me and my family. One of the things that is a driver for me is being aware of the people in the community and how the trends and the data really can help us make sure that we're building communities that are serving the folks that are there currently. While honoring the past and planning for the future, one of the things that I have found myself doing is really studying poverty and how it impacts kids and specifically kids

learning. And unfortunately, I see more of that than I wish there was in our part of the state. But I feel very strongly that through educational systems, through healthcare systems and through good civic systems, we can really build families up and make that move out of poverty. So as far as changes, lots and lots of positive changes also. One of the things that I'm so pleased with is that we are really looking at how we can work regionally more than we had in the past. I think anytime we pool our resources as evidenced here by the university that they do it every day, we can really move so much faster because we are in a part of the state that sometimes does have limited resources and isolation, but when we pool them, we can get a lot done. The person this award is named after. I have only heard of in my time since I came here to PSU, but everything that I hear is it's all about giving back and what an honor to be in that category.

I very rarely think of myself as giving back to the university. I think of the opportunities that I have had and what I have gained from my interactions with university staff and university students over the years at the center, now that I've had time to reflect the amount of time that I had at the Family Resource Center and all the college students that I employed and also who had children at the center, I didn't realize what an impact that had on me when they would come back and say, I'm a better parent because I worked here at the center or I'm a better student because I saw how other students learned. Then the all-time favorite was whenever a university student who had a young child had been with us for several years and would come in and say, I graduated, we're moving back home now. Thank you for helping me through this time in my life. That was such a gift to me, while the award is so nice, I will always have those gifts too.

Monica Manayan, thank you very much for joining us today. That was a pleasure, thanks. For KRPS and Crimson & Gold Connection, this is Robert Smith. Join us for Crimson & Gold Connection Wednesdays at 8.50 and Fridays at 350.