Dr. Valencia Browning-Keen came to this program after 10 years in clinical settings and 5 years in community and nutrition programs and with program director experience,  For the past three years, she has been a strong advocate for this stringent and growing accredited program.  There have been increases in numbers of students enrolled in the program, and also in the number of program graduates under her direction.  This year saw a substantial increase in the number of program graduates admitted to Dietetic Internship programs (75% for 2011-2012 as compared to 46.6% for 2010-2011), an important marker for program success as seen by ACEND, the accrediting arm of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association).  Areas needing improvement are in relation to administration of Exit Surveys for tracking successful attainment of knowledge and skills on an annual basis, and database management for the computer literacy criterion, although these program graduates, as a group, scored better than any other group of program graduates from the department in the area of computer literacy.  Dr. Browning-Keen is working to develop more corporate bridges in food manufacturing and distribution and corporate donors in the food industry for scholarship and program resources.  She is seeking more collaboration in coordinating knowledge requirements of DPD courses and is working toward identifying grants for ongoing research with student involvement.  Her overall goal is to enhance cultural competency of DPD students throughout the DPD curriculum.  This small program is seeing unprecedented success and is becoming well-known as a successful program for nutrition an dietetics in this region of the State of Texas.

This program underwent a highly successfully self-study and re-accreditation process during the 2012-2013 cycle.  We achieved the re-accreditation for the next 10 years, confirmed by a letter dated May of 2013.  We plan to continue tracking Exit Surveys, tracking employers' responses to program graduates, and to continue the high quality of work that students from this program do in regard to computer literacy.  The FACS 4373 course Cultural Foods was taught in the Summer of 2013, along with the addition of cultural competency in several other courses within the DPD curriculum.  This small program is making an impact throughout the State of Texas and the nation.

We are planning to work with Jeffrey Roberts of the Assessment Office to align the Plan for Continuous Improvement with the information supplied to the accrediting body (ACEND) in the self-study document.  We plan to continue to work with students so that their packets will help them to be admitted to Dietetic Internship Programs and also to prepare them so that they will have the background to pass the Registration Examination in Dietetics and become well-prepared professionals in this area. The Didactic Program in Dietetics at Sam Houston State University is an inclusive program whose mission is to provide quality, scholarship and community service opportunities to a diverse student body in order to complete the knowledge requirements set by the Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics (ACEND) so that graduates are competitive in the Dietetic Internship application process and eligible for a global marketplace meeting individual and family needs in the food or health care industry.