Susan Kelly-Weeder settled into her new role as dean of the School of Nursing last year by scheduling a 45-minute meeting with every faculty and staff member in the school — from professors to lab technicians to security guards.

She said the discussions were part of a larger initiative to grow and rebuild trust with the school’s community after a two-year era of administrative turnover and improve communication with faculty and staff. During the meetings, she asked each person what they love most about the nursing school, what challenges they see and how she as dean can help them work toward their goals, like uniting faculty and staff through building a culture of collaboration and community and expanding curriculum.

The nursing school cycled through four deans in two years, from 2021 to 2023. In 2021, interim Dean Pamela Slaven-Lee assumed the role from former Dean Pamela Jefferies, who left earlier that year, until former Dean Mei Fu permanently assumed the position in January 2023 before abruptly resigning two months later. Founding Dean Jean E. Johnson then ran the school starting in April 2023 until officials tapped Kelly-Weeder from Boston College’s nursing school for the role in May 2023, who began the position last July.

Kelly-Weeder said her discussions with faculty and staff revealed that much of the lack of communication and “undermined” trust in the school’s previous administrations stemmed from the significant turnover in leadership the school faced before her arrival.

“It’s a lot about being consistent and reliable and doing what you say you’re going to do and listening to what people say and responding to what their needs are, right?” Kelly-Weeder said. “I think if I can build trust in myself and the way I’m leading the school, I think we’ll find that we get more collaboration, more cooperation across all those venues.”

Kelly-Weeder said the insight she learned from her meetings with faculty and staff led her to find ways to bring the school together, since the school’s programs are offered virtually or in person at the Virginia Science and Technology Campus in Ashburn. She said she has opened more channels of communication by reinstating town hall meetings, altering the “format” of school-wide meetings and attending Staff Council meetings to field questions.

“The biggest challenge was finding a way to bring everyone together and to really build a sense of community within the school,” Kelly-Weeder said.

Kelly-Weeder said she also focused on developing a new 2024-26 strategic plan for the school — which officials posted publicly this month, detailing pillars of cultural transformation, student success, curriculum redesign and building toward future growth — as “nothing had been done” about the one in place when she arrived. She said she sees the plan she developed in collaboration with faculty as an interim framework aligned with the school’s current priorities as it heads into an accreditation process in spring 2025 and University President Ellen Granberg develops a University-wide strategic plan.

The school’s previous strategic plan, designed for the academic years 2022 through 2025, is not available to the public, but the school’s plan from 2018 to 2021 under former Dean Pamela Jefferies focused on pillars of curriculum and technology, health policy, research and scholarship, culture transformation, infrastructure and governance, diversity and collaboration and partnerships.

The school’s degree-granting programs are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, which verifies the school as effective in granting degrees in nursing. The school’s accreditation expires in December 2025, with accreditors planning to visit the school again in spring 2025, according to the CCNE website.

“I call it the ‘strategic plan 2.0’ because it’s an interim plan to get us to the next step and the big topic areas came from these conversations with the faculty and staff,” Kelly-Weeder said.

Granberg and Provost Chris Bracey have been developing a strategic plan since February 2024 and are now in the phase of researching and crafting the plan with a faculty committee, as well as soliciting community feedback through town halls, with the goal of presenting it to the Board of Trustees in May 2025. 

Kelly-Weeder said the school is redesigning its curriculum by developing an entry-level nurse master’s program, which she hopes to launch in spring 2026 and reforming many of its courses from lecture formats to “competency based” approaches that teach students more hands-on skills. She said these classes show students to manage and care for patients in real-world situations instead of memorizing facts and figures.

“It’s a real change in education and educational philosophy, and we’re doing a lot of work across all of our curriculum to improve and move to this competency based approach,” Kelly-Weeder said.

The nursing school currently has four male members of its 69-person faculty, according to the school’s faculty directory, and the school has lagged behind peers in its number of male faculty members since officials hired four part-time male faculty members in 2014.

Kelly-Weeder said hiring more male faculty is “very important,” but a shortage of men in nursing industry-wide is hindering how many men there are in the field for the school to hire as faculty. She said she is “happy” to see a growth in male students in the school — which has seen a rise in male students over the past decade, with 50 male students in 2013 and 134 in 2023, according to enrollment data — and its programs contributing to a pipeline of more men in the nursing profession.

“There’s obviously a need to try to recruit more male faculty, but again, it’s a small pool to draw from, so I think the biggest thing is to get more men into the profession, and then we’ll be able to get more faculty,” Kelly-Weeder said.

Faculty have said Kelly-Weeder has been effective in building a culture of communication and trust in the school and has been a proponent of the school’s programs.

Jean E. Johnson, a professor, founding dean and former interim dean of the school, said Kelly-Weeder has had a “brilliant” year through her stable leadership and reinforced connections with faculty and staff that feels reminiscent of the culture when she was at the helm.

“There are some faculty that have been, what I would say, are very committed to the school, have pretty strong feelings about things, and I think she has pretty much won them over to seeing a new way of being in the school,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the school’s strategic plan will be useful to Kelly-Weeder because the plan she formed during her initial deanship helped her build the school’s doctoral program and achieve research goals.

“The strategic plan that is developed with Susan’s leadership will be really important,” Johnson said. “Some are simply sort of done and put on the shelf. However, I don’t think that’s the way this is going to be. I think that there will be measures of success.”

Suzan Ulrich, an associate professor and the director of the midwifery program, said she “appreciated” Kelly-Weeder’s support when launching the school’s midwifery program last year as she has been a “champion” of the program. She said she has directly worked with Kelly-Weeder to promote the program and find tuition funding for students in the program through scholarships and other “unusual” sources.

“She came in while we were in this process and supported us the whole way,” Ulrich said.