The President's Report
to the
State Board of Community Colleges
July 16, 1999
The legislative session has continued to dominate the work of the senior leadership at the System Office and many of their support staff since our last meeting. We are very pleased with the operating budget which has been approved and by the passage of House Bill 275 which has funded a number of our operating initiatives.
Many observers feel that this is the best community college budget session in many years, perhaps ever. This success is the direct result of the unified approach to our legislative agenda by you, Trustees, Presidents, faculty and staff. We have struggled in recent weeks with the capital funding initiatives which have been considered for the universities and community colleges. We have gone back and forth with many proposals on the table. The matter is still not resolved. I regret that this has made it difficult to keep you informed on an hour to hour basis as those changes have been made in the proposals. I have been careful to never characterize our response to these various proposals as having the endorsement of the State Board, since it has been impossible for us to obtain that kind of endorsement or reaction in the time made available to us for a reaction. In some cases we have been asked to respond immediately to ideas. We have tried to respond within the parameters of your general policy adopted many months ago in support of the capital needs and repair and renovation needs of our colleges. We have tried to move the process forward without overstepping our bounds as staff. I apologize if we have gone too far in any of our reactions to proposals.
During this month I have met with several industry prospects and groups meeting to develop training programs to respond to industry specific needs. It is this kind of responsiveness that led this week to our being honored once again as having the best workforce preparation program in the country. We were nominated for this award by the Governor of Kentucky who used our system as the model for reorganizing higher education in his state. It had been my intention to go to the meeting of the Education Commission of the States in Denver to receive the State Innovation Award. However, I did not feel comfortable leaving Raleigh during the last week of the legislative session, so Dr. Scott Ralls and Stephanie Deese represented our System and accepted this prestigious award.
Work continues to move forward in the organization of the Foundation campaign which will begin this fall. Most of the Foundation Board members have been visited and have made personal or corporate pledges. Several of you also have made gifts or pledges, for which I am grateful. Contact has been made with one of North Carolina's most outstanding public relations firms with regard to "re imaging" our System in support of that fund drive and to better market our programs and build support for them. I continue to be amazed by the energy and commitment of Greg Poole in these efforts.
Dr. David Pierce at the American Association of Community Colleges requested I set up a meeting for him, Dr. Ray Taylor of the Association of Community College Trustees and others interested in our Associate Degree Nursing Programs across the country with Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Togo West. I accompanied them to the meeting. You may recall that Secretary West was formerly Secretary of the Army when I was an Assistant Secretary. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a new policy initiative of Veterans Affairs to limit the professional opportunities of Associate Degree nurses in the Veterans medical system. We believe encouraging dialogue that will address this and other allied health policy issues which may come before the Department of Veterans Affairs will result from this meeting. We also discussed a recent limitation in the use of Veterans Hospitals as clinical sites for community college nursing programs which have not been accredited by the National League of Nurses.
While in the Washington area, Dr. Scott Ralls and I met with community college leaders in Northern Virginia on an information technology partnership. This program may be a model we will want to replicate to encourage our community colleges to train more information technologists for North Carolina. We met also with Dr. Edyth West of the National Skill Standards Board about how North Carolina Community College programs might become more focused on skills certification, a growing demand by business and industry. We met with Phyllis Eisen of the National Association of Manufacturers with regard to programs that they have in workforce development and ways that we can tailor our programs to more closely fill the needs of industry in North Carolina. Ms. Eisen was also interested in programs which we have in place which might be replicated in other places. At the request of Carolyn Harmon, I met with Dr. Dun Ren Zhou whom she met during her recent trip to China. He is interested in how community colleges in North Carolina might become more involved with similar training programs in China. Like Kentucky and other states, China looks to us as having the model workforce development program in this country.
You may have heard me recently on any one of many radio stations across the state which are owned by Don Curtis and his group. I was live on WPTF one morning and recorded a 30 minute program which played all across the state last Sunday.
I represented our System at the memorial services for Chancellor Michael Hooker in Chapel Hill. You may recall that Chancellor Hooker, on his hundred-county tour, often spoke about the importance of community colleges in workforce development and as a partner with the University in higher education. We have lost a good friend.
I met with a new group that I will be a part of called the Partnership for Trust in Government which is funded by the Ford Foundation. I also began my work as a part of the North Carolina Rural Prosperity Task Force which will be chaired by Erskine Bowles. I will chair a working group of that Task Force on human resources/education issues.
Having been in Congress in the early stages of the consideration of moving the Hatteras Lighthouse and having headed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers when initial planning for the move was going on, I was eager to go to Hatteras to see the lighthouse move in progress. I almost missed it, because it went so smoothly and so quickly. However, it was a fascinating experience.
While in the area I had an opportunity to visit the Dare campus of the College of The Albemarle and to visit with faculty and staff there. Dr. Sylvester McKay and I also met with members of the Dare County Task Force on Higher Education with regard to their concerns about community college programs offered on that campus and their desire to have degree completion programs offered by various colleges and universities in Dare County.
On July 1 we had a staff wide ice cream social to celebrate my second anniversary. Last week 30 members of the System Office Staff and their families enjoyed a Durham Bulls baseball game in Durham. This kind of fun is enjoyable and morale building. The hard work of recent months made these events especially timely and beneficial.
This is the busiest time of year for Kennon Briggs and his staff. They are simultaneously dealing with the end of the legislative session and providing information to the colleges about the budget impacts of legislative action, closing out the books for last year, realigning budgets for next year and allocating the budgets to the colleges. If that were not enough, the State Auditor has just arrived for his audit this week and the Presidents' Association annual meeting is next week! Significant hours of overtime have been logged by many of the personnel in the Business and Finance Division working with various bond bill scenarios and doing the other work just discussed. The good news in all of this is that final budget allocations should take place before the end of July, the earliest allocation in recent memory. This did not happen without a Herculean effort on the part of everyone in that division.
Since that division did not have enough to do, they have guided our System Office through a conversion to a centralized mail system which is supposed to save money, but has greatly complicated our lives. If you do not receive your mail on time from us, understand that we are dealing with an entirely new delivery system and many bugs are already evident.
The Information Services Section of the Division of Administration has had their hands full this month, too. We are completely overhauling our Web Page which should be of immense value to our entire System. They are also working on the Data Warehouse Project that will make data available to users through easy to use query software. This is part of the Management Information System Project for which we received funding from the General Assembly this year. The Planning and Research Section has been working on the implementation of the new Performance Measures. Particular commendation is due to the people in the Personnel Office who have worked so hard this year in filling new positions created by the General Assembly and dealing with the heavy turnover in personnel throughout the year. We fear that this heavy workload may be something we will have to deal with for a long time as more and more people retire and their positions are filled through promotion and new hires. They have also worked on reclassifying positions to make possible pay that more accurately reflects responsibility. In range equity studies have resulted in further adjustment in salaries.
The Academic and Student Services Division has been busy with their comprehensive revisions to the various Programs of Study, their review of State Board Reserve proposals, their review of new program requests, and the preparation of a report on the decline in nursing exam scores. Dr. Johns spoke at the dedication of the new JobLink Career Center located on the Pender Campus of Cape Fear Community College in Burgaw.
Academic Program Staff initiated a program analysis service for colleges desiring a comprehensive evaluation of programs offered and potential educational markets those programs might serve. This effort has been well received by faculty and college administrations. To date colleges participating include Asheville Buncombe, Catawba Valley, Halifax, Johnston, Lenoir, Mitchell and Montgomery. For our staff this is a labor of intense effort.
A three day statewide training program for HRD coordinators was conducted in Raleigh. Tech Prep Administrators, Substantive Change Committees, the Distance Learning Council, the Virtual Learning Community Project, and the Placement Committee met during the month of July, all in Greensboro. Forty five new Continuing Education coordinators participated in training at the System Office.
It is with a great sadness that I report the departure of two senior staff: Dr. Beth Johns and David Sullivan. Dr. Johns has submitted her resignation with a request that it be effective at the end of August. However, Dr. Russell is leaving at that same time and there are several significant events scheduled for the early fall in which Dr. Johns has been actively involved. Therefore, I have asked her to remain in her position until the end of October, and she has agreed to do so. This will help greatly with the transition in Dr. Russell's position and will make it possible for us to have a good person in place to replace Dr. Johns when she leaves.
As you may know, Dr. Johns has not been successful in convincing her husband to leave his community college job in the Maryland suburbs of the District of Columbia to join her in North Carolina. After two years of separation and weekly trips back and forth to the D.C. area, Dr. Johns has decided that it is time for her to return to the area to be with her husband and to have more normalcy in her life. The other departing senior administrator is my Executive Assistant, David Sullivan. David's last day was yesterday. He will enroll at Campbell Law School in the fall. David has been an invaluable right arm to me. Of course, we wish David and Dr. Johns well in their new endeavors.
There is a bit of good news, of which you are already aware, having approved the hiring of Dr. Steve Scott as Barry Russell's replacement and Clyde Higgs as David's replacement.
We are all excited about Dr. Scott's coming and believe that he will be an able successor to Dr. Russell. As you know, he will come to us from his position as the highly respected President of Southeastern Community College.
We will all miss Dr. Russell. He has been the perfect Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer during my first two years in office. Much of the success we have enjoyed during my brief tenure is directly a result of Barry's system wide respect, effective leadership and liaison with the entire community college family. He has been an invaluable partner in all that we have done with our colleges and with the General Assembly. I know that I speak for all of you in wishing him the very best as he becomes President of Midlands Technical College in Columbia, S.C., in September. Clyde Higgs is a recent Master's Degree recipient at East Carolina University. He is also a participant in the Governor's Public Management Internship Program.
It is also with regret that this meeting marks the end of our Chairman's tenure as chair. Governor Wicker has been a great chairman. He has brought to the table and effectively used his clout and contacts as Lieutenant Governor to benefit our System. He has unfailingly and enthusiastically backed me and your staff at the System Office in all that we have done. He has demonstrated over and over again his strong personal commitment to community colleges in North Carolina. We will miss his leadership, but are blessed that he will continue to serve on our Board.
I think it is appropriate to note that with the swearing in of Misty Tart as a new State Board Member, this Board now has seven women on the Board. This is one third of the total membership. We believe that this is a high watermark for this Board and among the highest proportions of any state wide board. With the approval of Dr. Mary Wood as President at James Sprunt Community College, our System now has five women Presidents, also a high watermark.
This meeting marks the end of my second year with you. Alice joins me in thanking you of the opportunity and the support you have provided.
This page maintained by Chancy Kapp.