President’s Report|
to the
State Board of Community Colleges
Edenton, NC
October 18, 2002
At long last I can announce that the legislature has gone home! As you know from our special meeting and media reports, we did much better than we could have ever expected given the revenue picture. We were the only agency to receive more money this year than last. Because of our almost $52 million in enrollment growth money, even with a $25 million cut in various lines of our budget, we ended up with over $26 million in additional funding or about 4 percent. Thanks to the hard work of Kennon Briggs and his staff, those funds were allocated to the colleges immediately after your special telephonic meeting.
We are hard at work on next year’s budget and on lining up support for our priorities. There have been multiple meetings with the Education and Economic Development Committees of the North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry (NCCBI) in an attempt to gain their endorsement. NCCBI will be endorsing a very limited number of issues for the upcoming session, but we hope that we will be among the favored few.
I am beginning to crank things back up with regard to the Foundation in hopes that we can wrap up our campaign by our 40th anniversary next spring. The Foundation has employed Paul Carr to assist us with the final push. Paul was the development director for the Kenan Flagler School at Chapel Hill and since his retirement from that position, he has done fund raising consulting for Elizabeth City State University. We hope that his contacts and expertise will help us complete our drive by the spring.
Fun was had by all at our annual Employee Appreciation Day in late September. Ricky Tart, Larry Vick, and Michael Farmer cooked a great pig, which we enjoyed in Pullen Park following an all-staff meeting on the 5th floor where service awards were presented to long-term employees and our State Employees Combined Campaign was kicked off. In barely two weeks we are over seventy percent of the way towards our fund raising goal. As you have heard me say many times before, you have not only a hard working staff, but also a staff with a big heart.
Though our College Information System implementation is going reasonably well, we continue to have challenges, especially with the implementation of the financial package. I have met with Harvey Braswell, the CEO of the division of ACS that is handling our contract. Numerous meetings have been scheduled with ACS/Datatel personnel to address our concerns.
At the end of September, Dr. Parker Chesson ended his four-month tenure as Interim Executive Vice President and Fred Williams arrived. We were truly blessed to have Parker in this important post during that four-month interim. It was as if he had never left the building. He stepped in and did all that could have been expected of him. Everyone enjoyed having him back on staff. Fred has hit the ground running and we are convinced that the decision on his hiring was the right one.
Dr. Delores Parker and I met with NC State University Dean Blanton Godfrey and his senior staff at the College of Textiles in an effort to created cooperative programs between community colleges and that College to boost enrollment and to enhance our role in serving the textile community.
I have been on the road a lot this month speaking to various organizations. I have spoken to the Raleigh Rotary Club, met with the Board of the NC Center for Applied Textile Technology, spoke to a workshop sponsored by Ericsson, Nortel, and Syngenta for their laid-off workers, spoke to the annual meeting of the North Carolina Electronics and Information Technology Association in Winston-Salem, attended a NCCBI membership meeting in Greensboro, spoke to the North Carolina Adult Educators Conference in Greensboro, spoke to the Trustees Association Conference in RTP and spoke to the Faculty Association Annual Meeting and Professional Development Conference in Greensboro.
Dr. Parker and I are happy to announce the arrival of Kenneth Chandler who has been employed to succeed Dr. Stephen Athens as Director of Proprietary Schools, Resource Development and SACS Liaison. Kenneth brings a wealth of experience in higher education resource development, having served on the staff of the American Council on Education in Washington, DC and on the staff of Shaw University.
The Basic Skills Department was awarded a $100,000 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to create a pilot program on employment training within the compensatory education program of study at three community colleges. Sillar Smith will manage the grant.
After 31 years of exemplary state employment, Pam Doyle retired from her position as Director of Library Resources at the end of September. Pam will be missed by all, especially by her staff who is picking up her responsibilities because of the current hiring freeze.
Keith Brown has been selected by the National Center for Education Statistics to serve on a national Technical Review Panel to review the current IPEDS data collection and to recommend changes that would more accurately portray community college education in the United States.
Bob Blackmun and Cindy Pannill continue to work with the Presidents’ Association Technology Committee on the wireless communications project.
Earlier in this report I reported that we are already working on next year’s budget. Since we last met, Kennon has met with the Finance Committee of the Presidents’ Association, the Trustees Association and the Faculty Association, laying out for each of these groups the budget package under review so as to obtain their input and to begin developing consensus on the next biennial budget.
I want to commend the organizers of this year's Adult Educators Association for their conference and professional development activities that just concluded last week with over 370 in attendance. Excellent professional development activities were the centerpiece of this year’s meeting.
Work has begun on the Human Resource Development reorganization and the first presentation of this work was made to you at this meeting.
We have completed an inventory of equipment now stored in a warehouse in Kernersville. We are going to make this equipment available to community colleges across the state and surplus that which is not spoken for. This equipment has been in storage for some time and is costing us $20,000 a year in facilities rental. We cannot justify that expense and the equipment sitting in a warehouse is doing no one any good.
We have our work cut out for us in the next few months as each of the divisions work with Kennon and with you in putting together the budget package for the next two years. Significant revenue shortfalls will continue to plague us until the General Assembly either makes dramatic cuts in other state agency budgets or finds additional sources of revenue. We will feel the pain, especially in the System Office as we try to do more with fewer people and with fewer resources. Fortunately you have a dedicated and hard working staff who will continue to do more with less as we have always done.
This page maintained by Chancy Kapp.