H. Martin Lancaster, President
North Carolina Community College System
Board of Directors
NC Association of County Commissioners
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
September 6, 2006
Thank you. I always appreciate the chance to spend time with our closest partners in our mission to prepare every North Carolinian to succeed at home, at work and in the world.
I particularly appreciate the timing of this invitation -- as you are beginning hard work on the details of a new strategic plan. Your staff has shared with me your focus areas and my first reaction was -- where did they get a copy of OUR draft strategic plan? The issues on your minds are very much like the issues we will tackle at our board retreat this fall. I understand that you are working on:
- Public perception of county government
- Leadership development
- Partnership between counties and state
- Advocacy, especially for rural areas
- And local relationships with each other, with municipalities and with other entities concerned with local services
I would like to focus on your third item -- partnership between counties and the state.
I understand that a partnership like that brings at least as many challenges as it does satisfactions. I am president of a system that includes 58 community colleges. Each of those colleges has a president, and each of those presidents works for a board of trustees, not for the State Board which signs my paycheck. Thus, I understand that when some of you think "Raleigh," you aren't always thinking good thoughts! That said, let me explain why I called your our "closest partners."
The good folks who set up our community college system more than 40 years ago made it a partnership on purpose and wrote laws with clear boundaries between state and local responsibility and authority.
The most important boundaries define MONEY and POWER -- that is, finances and governance.
On the money side, generally the State pays for instruction -- the faculty, staff and materials required to deliver education and training.
Again generally, local sources -- read, counties funded by your decisions -- pay for facilities and the costs associated with building, maintaining and operating them.
That translates to an annual operating budget for the whole system of about a billion dollars -- about two-thirds from the state, about 14 percent from local sources, about 15 percent from tuition, and the balance from federal, private and other sources.
On the power side, local entities -- especially COUNTIES -- have a huge advantage by sheer weight of numbers.
Each of our 58 community colleges has a Board of Trustees, which governs the college and supervises the president. Each board has at least 12 voting members (a few in multi-county service areas have more than that). The Governor appoints four members from the community. County Commissions elect four, and school boards elect four. That's about 700 people, a third of whom are tied directly to your membership, another third with a strong appreciation for local budgeting, and the rest at least tied to your communities.
The State Board of Community Colleges is charged by law with equitable distribution of state funds and fiscal accountability; establishing and maintaining state policies and priorities; and educational program approval and accountability. The board has 20 voting members -- the Lt. Governor and State Treasurer; four each elected by the State Senate and State House; and 10 appointed by the Governor.
Clearly, the purpose of this carefully defined partnership is to guarantee as much as possible consistency and equity while making sure that our COMMUNITY colleges respond LOCALLY to LOCAL needs.
I used the qualifiers "generally" to describe the definitions of money and power in our system because in fact our boundaries are blurring…and it gets harder every day to figure out who is doing what -- and who OUGHT to be doing what.
A lot of that blurring really helps counties. The best example is direct state involvement in paying for facilities, boosted several times in our system's history by statewide bond projects. The tremendous success of the Higher Education Bonds passed in 2000 is just the most recent example. Community colleges received $600 million of the $3.1 billion total and, unlike most other state bonds for community colleges, most did NOT have to meet dollar-for-dollar matching requirements.
28 colleges serving 42 counties had NO MATCHING REQUIREMENT, due to distressed economies or previous investment -- a number of others had to match only a small percentage.
Six years later, where are we with that huge infusion of state money? As of July 31, the State Board had approved the commitment of 92 percent of the bond money, $552 million. Of the system’s 391 projects, 199 are complete and 132 are under construction or design. Three projects are pending land acquisitions, two are out to bid, and 16 have been announced for designer services. We have 14 projects budgeted at $10 million or more; four of those are finished. The colleges’ use of Historically Underutilized Businesses (HUB), including African American, Hispanic, female and other minority contractors, is 12.66% percent of the total contractors employed and exceeds the state’s goal of 10 percent. Behind all those numbers is the reality of great new classrooms and labs for more students in your counties -- and lots of jobs in construction!
I think we're all glad that the state blurred that boundary. The recent session for the General Assembly did it again. This change is on much smaller scale, but it's a brand-new approach to capital funding. - a $15 million capital item for community colleges and equipment. Under the provisions of the bill, the State Board of Community Colleges will have the responsibility of awarding grants to community colleges. The System Office, in consultation with the community college presidents and members of the State Board, will develop a competitive grant application process to be approved by the State Board and to be used by it to allocate the money to community colleges for capital needs. According to provisions in the bill, the grants will be awarded on the merit of the applications received. No individual grant may exceed the sum of $1 million. Grants must be matched dollar-for-dollar by non-state funds. While most matches will be county funds, EDA and other grants may be used.
Of course I know that just as the state is called upon to help pay for some areas that fall on the county side of the boundary, so are counties called upon to pay part of the costs for instruction. Local supplements are a reality for community colleges as they are for school systems. As I was preparing these remarks, I saw a news item from Carteret Community College saying they need county help for pay raises for locally funded employees -- so they don't have equity problems with raises for state-funded positions mandated by the state. If that hasn't happened in your county yet, it probably will.
We can talk all we want about the need to MAINTAIN AND RESPECT original boundaries -- but I think we all know that the dramatic -- and recent -- changes in our state and elsewhere make that a tough position to take.
I know that you are building your plan from the premise that important issues don't stop at the county line any more -- if they ever did. The community college equivalent is the service area -- and we use counties as building blocks. What do service areas -- and county lines -- mean when on-line education reaches everyone, everywhere? Last year, North Carolina's community colleges had more than 200,000 registrations via distance learning, including more than 180,000 in for-credit courses. What do geographical boundaries mean when metropolitan areas spill across multiple counties, and even states? Those of us who grew up in North Carolina know what counties mean -- and often define ourselves by home county rather than hometown….but what about the hundreds of thousands of people who move here every year from other states, from big cities -- and from other countries?
Jim Young, who retired a few years ago after a great career as fundraiser in community colleges, used to say that the biggest barrier to progress in North Carolina's community colleges was THE COUNTY LINE. He didn’t' mean that we should abandon county organization; he preached that we had to learn to build real partnerships based on shared goals and pooled resources, especially since we have so few real cities with concentrated wealth.
I hope you consider community colleges YOUR partners, just as I consider you ours. And by that I mean TRUE partners -- where each side does something for the other, asks something of the other, and both move forward. Here are a few things that community colleges can do for YOU as your work on your strategy.
First, we can prepare the workforce you need to meet your county's critical needs. I know that you are aware of our primary task of helping recruit, retain and grow industry through New and Expanding Industry, North Carolina BioNetwork and related programs. I want to make sure you are aware of our impact on public sector areas for which you have direct responsibility.
Examples:
- Health care: Community colleges graduate more than 60 percent of the state's registered nurses, just about all of the practical nurses, CNAs, respiratory and therapy assistants, EMTs and other health technicians. I know that many of you know better than I the acute and growing shortages in this area, especially in nursing. We are you best allies in meeting this need in your clinics, hospitals, public health facilities and nursing homes.
- Public safety: Ditto for the training of police, deputies, firefighters and other emergency personnel. Allied Health and Basic Law Enforcement are by far our largest curriculum programs, and thousands of our graduates work in programs run by counties. Many of our public safety personnel are learning Spanish at community colleges to serve the exploding Spanish-speaking population. And speaking of which and related, hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speakers have learned their English on our campuses.
- Education: By this, I mean public schools, where your responsibility is at least as big as it is for community colleges. None of our counties will thrive without good schools. None of the schools will thrive without good teachers. In recent years, community colleges have stepped up dramatically our direct involvement with public schools: Examples:
Teacher prep: Research says the state needs 8-10,000 new teachers a year, universities produce maybe 3,000. We now have two-plus-two, lateral entry and professional development programs increasing the numbers of teachers and improving the quality of their teaching.
High School programs:
Huskins/Dual Enrollment/College Tech Prep established ways to bring college courses to HS students
New Schools Projects: Gates Foundation, Gov. Easley's Learn and Earn; Early and Middle College HS -- by far the majority of these schools are located on community college campuses or run in partnership with community colleges
The second thing we can do for you is help you meet the need for trained leadership. The University provides excellent training and orientation through the Institute of Government. Your community colleges can build on that foundation with specific courses tailored to your needs, just as they do for industry. If you are not now looking to your colleges for the continuing education of county employees, I urge you to do so.
We can also join you as advocates on many issues, recognizing that we share a particular interest in provided a voice for rural areas and small towns.
What do we ask that you do for US?
Get to know the community college in your county, if you don't already. Spend time on the campus, take a class, have a relationship with the students, president, faculty, staff and trustees that goes beyond annual budget hearings. I'm preaching to the choir here, but I don't want that to go unsaid.
Use community colleges for your own training -- look there first, before you sign a contract with an expensive consultant or private provider. Particularly in public safety, many counties have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars by purchasing unneeded equipment or by having national instructional vendors when our colleges could have given you much more bang for the buck in real "security" through programs tailored to threats you face.
This is very important -- choose EXCELLENT PEOPLE as local trustees. Trustees of community colleges in North Carolina are VERY powerful. They tend to serve for a long time. You hold one-third of the appointments and over the years you have chosen hundreds, even thousands, of fine people. We all know that on October 1, our state enters a whole new realm of ethics regulations. From now on, those choices become ever more important. Everyone in public life has to conscious of the need to set high personal standards of leadership, character and behavior -- and everyone who puts people in positions of power has to choose people who are AT LEAST as honest as they are.
And you know that I am going to ask for you to advocate for your community college AND for the system as a whole as we ask the General Assembly for the money we must have to prepare North Carolinians for productive work in the world economy. Here are a few issues we will probably be asking for your help with in the next expansion budget:
- Salaries: During the past few years, the General Assembly has committed to moving our faculty and professional staff salaries to the national average within five years. Our faculty members have gotten higher raises than other public employees. However, we're not making much progress, because other states are moving faster. Our baby-boom faculty members are already starting to retire, and a huge wave is coming. We're already losing faculty to our own public schools, which generally pay better, and to other states. We MUST fix this, especially in crucial workforce areas like nursing.
- High cost of health education: Our colleges lose money teaching nursing and other health disciplines. Accreditation requires small classes and instructors with graduate degrees, and high-tech equipment is expensive. We have to keep teaching the programs, and we MUST expand as health care demand skyrockets. The General Assembly did appropriate to us a million dollars in new money this year to bolster nursing programs, and that's a great start. What we need, however, is more state money per student for health programs than the general formula, and we will keep asking until that happens.
- Equipment in general: We have made a lot of progress here in recent years. Over ten years, the General Assembly has tripled state funding for equipment, and this year looked at investing taxes on lottery winning in community college equipment, but that idea was not adopted. The reality is, however, that the high-tech demands of job training mean expensive equipment which quickly becomes outdated, especially in the computer field. We can't do cutting-edge training on cast-offs, obsolete equipment, so we must have a much larger, reliable source of funds.
I'm not shy about asking for your help, because when we succeed with these requests, you will too -- because you will have well-educated citizens, ready to do a great job as nurses, deputies, biotech employees, parents, teachers and responsible community leaders.
I'll end with a thought from Alan Greenspan, recently retired as the head of the Federal Reserve and the man often credited as the brains behind a very long period of economic stability. Here's what he says about working together:
I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.
Thank you again. I welcome your questions and comments.
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