A Boise State program started in 2020 has made in-roads with rural communities in ways institutions haven’t before: helping students grow roots to stay, lead and make an impact. But the program was nearly axed this summer after former university President Marlene Tromp left Boise State. It has since been ordered to continue, but the search for funding is still in progress.
The Community Impact Program was Tromp’s signature initiative, the evolution of a program she started while at Arizona State University.
“We built it in rural communities with the communities themselves,” she told Boise State Public Radio in an interview this spring. “We asked them what they needed. That’s not something that universities have done in recent history very much at all.”
It was administered within the College of Extended Studies, alongside more traditional remote learning and continuing education programs. Extended Studies is also the academic home to Boise State Public Radio, though our newsroom operates independently.
The program could appeal to a wide variety of students, but is focused on non-traditional students who never started nor completed a degree, and now need college to meet them where they are.
Robyn Warner’s life turned upside down in late 2021. Her son Colton, who’d struggled with traditional education and dyslexia, took his own life. Her family’s home in Council burned down a few months later. She closed her bakery to step back and reset. Then a friend asked for her help at the local school.
“I realized I wanted to teach,” she explained. “The sixth grade teacher quit. They threw me in, and I've been here ever since. So I needed to go back to finish my bachelor's,” Warner said. We spoke in February.
Boise State’s Community Impact Program was the right fit. Warner joined a CIP cohort in McCall, which is a group of students from the area. CIP is online, but cohorts meet in person for two days each semester. Classes cover leadership, collaboration techniques and emotional intelligence.
To earn the certificate, students have to create a community project in one of their five semesters. Warner shared how her story moved her group to action.
“When we finally settled on needing mental health resources and specifically in Council, we just started doing a lot of research into, ‘what did that look like, what resources are available, what ones would be applicable not only in Council for students, but also just in the community,’” she said.
Their research led to connections with Ignite Idaho and the Youth Advocacy Coalition, and a program called Hope Squad, “a peer-to-peer, evidence-based suicide prevention curriculum,” Warner said.
“We know that kids talk to kids,” Tam Larnerd, Hope Squad training director, said in a video published by the group.
“Seven out of ten kids who have taken their own life said something beforehand that could have led to intervention,” Larnerd said. The Utah-based organization now has squads in thousands of schools nationwide, but there wasn’t anything like it in Council.
Warner’s CIP group successfully pitched Hope Squad to the Council School District, which started the program in the high school last year. Warner is the facilitator, and has continued to work toward a master’s degree after completing her CIP certificate.
This summer, Council’s Hope Squad helped conduct a community survey to get information on how kids were struggling with mental health. That action led directly to new grant funding from a separate group, Communities for Youth, to support comprehensive youth mental health education.
“They said, ‘we see a need and we want to help you guys.’ And this was all because we started Hope Squad and took that survey,” Warner said. “We hope to implement the middle school [Hope Squad] curriculum next year, and by the following year we'll have elementary in there,” she said.
The Communities for Youth coalition and outreach is another layer Warner’s excited to bring to Council.
“Obviously this is a very personal journey for me, this would not have come to fruition without the CIP program.”
Warner’s story in Council stands out, but she isn't alone in turning her studies into community impact. About 150 students have enrolled since CIP began in 2020 and the vast majority have completed the certificate. That now includes 40-year-old Gonzalo Valdez. When we spoke during the spring semester, he shared why he left college behind in his 20s.
“For almost 15 years, I went into the professional world of dance, through Idaho Dance Theater,” he said.
His work would take him across the globe as a cruise ship performer, but after retiring about five years ago, Valdez realized he wanted to finish his path to being a teacher. The CIP program will be part of his bachelor’s degree, which he’s working toward while working at Emmett High School.
“It's felt like a lot of luck, just because everything that is coming from this program is very practical,” he said. “But in my case, I can apply it right away, which is just incredible to me. So the aha moments happen all the time.”
For many students, an aha moment is the scholarship that covers the full cost of the CIP program, plus about $1,800 to use if they want to continue their education at Boise State.
“We hear often, ‘well, I joined for the money, but I stayed because of the people and the program itself,’” said Alicia Griffith, the now-former interim Director of Community-Based Education in the College of Extended Studies. The Community Impact Program was under her direction; she said the scholarship was a critical piece of recruiting.
“I think it's very true that we are making, I think, a larger impact than we can actually measure because people are continuing to engage with us. They are finishing their degrees. They are being engaged citizens, which I think is really what our rural community needs.”
Forty-five CIP scholarships cost the University about $250,000. FTromp touted the program’s success publicly, including mentioning it multiple times before state lawmakers. It was, by all accounts, a popular program within the statehouse. Tromp told Boise State Public Radio before her departure, enrollment from communities where they planted CIP cohorts was noticeably on the rise.
“We saw a 20-50% increase in all the communities where we planted that program, that was not counting the students who participated in the program,” she said.
Tromp left Boise State in June for the President’s office at the University of Vermont. Her office at Boise State had funded the CIP scholarships, but the funding would not be renewed after the 2026-27 school year. Emails obtained through a public records request show external grant funding that had been penciled in for CIP starting next year did not materialize as expected. It's not clear why.
My reporting earlier this year was planned as a profile on CIP and its students, but when I contacted Griffith with a few final questions in July, she said things had changed, and CIP was now set to end after the current cohort completed the program. Griffith seemed shocked by the news, and referred me to the new interim Dean of Extended Studies, Niki Callison.
In an email to me this summer, Callison wrote that, without funding, CIP didn’t have a viable future, as it was non-revenue generating.
But email records suggest the university’s interim President Jeremiah Shinn didn’t weigh in on the decision to sunset the program until after the public records request was made. When he did, in a email dated July 17, Shinn wrote, “Serving rural Idaho communities remains a priority, as does honoring the work our community partners have contributed.”
He directed Peter Risse, the now-former University Director for Government and Industry Relations, and Jen Schneider, Dean of the College of Innovation and Design, to collaborate on a path forward for CIP. Meanwhile, Griffith left extended studies to move to a new role in Boise State’s College of Business.
“We're thinking of this as a fresh start,” Schneider said in October. “A way to redesign the program so that it continues to serve those communities.”
Schneider said that Griffith, despite leaving her previous role, has been brought on as needed to help consult on the best path forward for CIP. They’ve also been meeting or plan to meet with business and community leaders in Emmett, Payette and Cascade to continue to ensure that CIP curriculum meets local community needs.
“They're really interested in things like having training in AI, having training in cybersecurity, having training in conflict management. And we have that expertise on our campus. So is there a way that we can redesign this program so that we get the right experts from campus out to those communities,” Schneider said.
But Griffith’s hopes this spring of expanding CIP to embed full-time staff in communities like Payette, Emmett and elsewhere has now taken a back seat to simply finding enough funding to support some level of scholarship. Donations through Boise State’s existing scholarship funds are likely to be key.
“A big focus of the interim president [Jeremiah Shinn] at Boise State right now is on student scholarships and making sure that every student who wants to come to Boise State has scholarship funding,” Schneider explained. “I'm seeking to see if we can potentially tap into that momentum and into that desire to provide funding for those students,” she said.
Schneider is optimistic they’ll get that done so they can start recruiting the next cohort of students, but she admits the scholarships likely will not continue to have the extra amount for additional credits beyond the CIP certificate.
A university spokesperson characterized Callison’s direction to sunset the CIP program as a misunderstanding in the leadership transition after the now-former Dean of Extended Studies Mark Wheeler retired in June. Callison was not made available for additional comment, because, the spokesperson said, CIP was no longer under her leadership. Specific questions about when Shinn was informed the program was going to be sunset were not answered.
Wheeler did not respond to an attempt to contact him. Tromp did not return a request for comment made through the University of Vermont. Risse has since left Boise State to lead the Idaho division of Career Technical Education under the state Board of Education.
Schneider downplayed any suggestion of turmoil, saying the staff within the College of Innovation and Design has experience standing up similar programs, and she’s retained the Community Program Manager, Matt Spelsberg from Extended Studies. They’ll have to get more efficient, Schneider said, but she hopes to get funding lined up in time to start recruiting the next cohort of students this coming spring.
“When I talk to, you know, whether it's a 18-year old who's just coming to school or it's a 50-year old who's coming back to school, the opportunities that this creates for them and the way that it changes how they view the communities they're from is transformational,” Schneider said. “That's what makes me want to keep going with this. It's what makes me want to fight for this program and figure out how we make it work.”
