The Las Cruces City Council held a work session on April 27, 2026, beginning at 7:18 PM (ET). The meeting featured three agenda items: a presentation from New Mexico State University’s College of Health, Education and Social Transformation, a legislative update from the city clerk, and an update on the internal Metropolitan Redevelopment Area committee. Council members engaged in discussion, asked questions, and received updates on ongoing projects and partnerships.
Your life. Okay, well, welcome back, and we'll start our work session now. We'll start with the agenda items 1.1 NMSU College of Health Education and Social Transformation. That would be you, Dr. Marlett. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Distinguished members of the council. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be with you this afternoon. Appreciate very much and an honor to have been invited. My name's Rick Marlett. I'm privileged to serve as the Dean of the College of Health Education and Social Transformation at New Mexico State University. We love our acronyms and higher ed, so we're HEST, if you've heard of us. We are driven by a uh by our mission, which is to pursue social change and transformation through education, research, and outreach. Our vision is to be collaborators and leaders in the discovery of innovative solutions in healthcare sciences, allied health, education, and social services, all of which lead to social transformation in New Mexico and beyond. We welcome the opportunity to serve all students and invite all community members in the borderland and beyond to join our academic communities. As a college, we are incredibly proud of who we are, our contributions to NMSU's land grant mission, and our robust engagement with communities and students across the state and region. Our students uh become experts in their fields. They get great jobs right away through hands-on experiential learning opportunities, and they are the benefit beneficiaries of cutting edge scholarship from our faculty and our amazing alumni and donor networks that support our college. Our students graduate, get those great jobs right away, and become strong leaders who are difference makers for their families and change agents in their communities. So just to some brief overview of the college, uh, we did have our highest enrollment on record in fall 2025. HESS served over 4200 students across undergraduate and graduate enrollments. That includes uh all-time high of 4,224 enrolled student headcount, and then an all-time high approaching 38,000 student credit hours, which was very exciting. HEST is NMSU's second largest college. We support over 200 faculty members and nearly 200 staff members. Uh, we're 17.5 million. And uh we've been a the beneficiaries of uh a tremendous amount of support from the state uh in terms of our higher education endowments and uh those have us supported our areas of social work, nursing, and teacher education in particular. Uh we do have several priorities that uh kind of run as a through line through our college and bring together our disciplines, which on paper seem to be somewhat far apart when you think about nursing uh being in the same college as say kinesiology or uh public health. But what really brings us all together is some of those foundational through lines, such as ensuring that providing training and workforce development around mental health and wellness, social emotional working, social and emotional learning, workforce development, and high quality instruction across the board. We have nine academic units in the College of HEST, including three schools and six traditional academic departments. Seven of our nine academic departments are accredited at the state and national level and lead to licensure in a professional program. So I have uh listed our departments and schools here on the next couple of slides, and also added the uh accrediting uh again acronym there for you. Uh, but just just to point out that you know um our our programs are professional licensure leading pathways, whereby students have an apprenticeship and clinical experience out in the field, and most of our students, especially if they're willing to stay in New Mexico, which we highly encourage and incentivize students to do, they're gonna have a job right away in their in their professional field. We have a number of new uh notable academic pathways in the college that just went online this last year. As you can see, we're really attuned to aligning our programming in the college with the needs and the high demands of workforce out in the state. Um, just just briefly want to point out again, the enrollment is pretty much across the board in our uh in our college. So of our nine academic units, nearly all are showing um growth over the last several fall semesters. Um, increases in student enrollment for headcount, as well as uh the total accumulation of student credit hours, which is exciting. Those are the numbers across the college, as you can see, growing on the uh undergraduate side as well as the graduate side. They're in crimson and in silver. You can see we're continuing to serve that mission to expand our capacity and to train more highly qualified, culturally competent professionals for the state of New Mexico. Uh, in addition to our academic arm of the college, we also pride ourselves on providing experiential learning and research and outreach for a huge community engagement mission. A number of our sites across the college are testaments to that, to that public-facing community service aspect. We have the nursing skills and simulations lab for which we did a ribbon cutting in the fall. Very exciting there in the old HSS building. We have a number of clinics on site in the college, including the mental health clinic for clinical psychology and school psychology, the Papin Open Dramos Autism Diagnostic Center, the Edgar R. Garrett Speech and Hearing Center, and the Glass Family Research for Early Childhood Studies. When the O'Donnell Hall expansion is completed, which which I'm told as of this morning is on track and should be ribbon-cutted there in the fall. Um, all of these clinical public serving uh entities will be together on the ground floor in O'Donnell Hall, facing public facing, accessible for uh children and families and clients across the board. So it's very exciting.