The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s State Energy Office recognized thirteen state agencies, universities and community colleges for their significant energy reductions and progress towards Executive Order 80’s goal. 

Haywood Community College Construction Technology students recently helped the Waynesville Housing Authority add much-needed storage behind several homes in the Ninevah housing community. 

To the Editor: 

I read your article regarding Guaranteed College Scholarships with an enthusiastic interest. I fully support financial assistance to students; however, it is my belief that any qualified student can attend one of our community colleges if not a four-year university. Financial need rarely prevents a determined student from an education.

North Carolina Community College President Peter Hans says his main goal is to advocate for more funding for the state community college system, including working to boost the salaries.

Though community college leaders aren’t allowed to take an official position on whether they support the $2 billion Connect NC Bond initiative, the proposal could mean $350 million for community colleges across the state.

A budget-trimming effort in Macon County has leaders in multiple counties talking about what’s fair when it comes to community college funding. Charged with proposing an as-small-as-possible budget in advance of expected hard times ahead, Macon County Manager Derek Roland eyed a $200,000 line item for Southwestern Community College.

Local and state leaders in Western North Carolina are vigorously opposing a cost-savings plan to consolidate administrations of 15 of the state’s smallest community colleges, including those of Haywood Community College and Southwestern Community College.

A joint state legislative committee on government efficiency has recommended merging the leadership of community colleges with fewer than 3,000 fulltime students. The group said this would save taxpayers about $5 million a year.

“I’m still not clear in my own mind about what exactly we are try to accomplish through this, except to save a little bit on administration,” said Bill Upton, a Haywood County commissioner and a retired educator of 38 years. “But what is it going to cost? Ultimately, I think it would be the staff and students who would suffer.”

Scott Ralls, president of the state’s community college system, agreed with Upton, saying what isn’t clear on a simple spreadsheet “is the role of community in community colleges.”

SEE ALSO: Are community colleges efficient?

“HCC, for example, is the best community college in the nation — for Haywood County,” Ralls said in an interview last week at Haywood Community College. He was in town for a meeting of the state’s community college presidents.

Over the decades, counties and schools such as Haywood County and HCC have together created this community-unique college, Ralls said, with the programs and the instructors tailored to fit the needs of Haywood County’s residents. Start lumping the leadership of various community colleges together, and you risk destroying what is arguably one of the best community college systems in the U.S., he said.

“The nature of these colleges would not be as colleges anymore, but as the campuses of other colleges,” Ralls said.

Any potential savings would be negated by the heavy toll, in terms of the loss of its colleges, to the communities involved, Ralls said.

HCC President Rose Johnson serves as an example of what intricate roles a community college leader plays in the lives of residents. Johnson became president of HCC in January 2006.

She helped start a green initiative through the chamber. She has volunteered on the elk project in Cataloochee Valley. And Johnson has worked directly with local businesses such as Evergreen Packaging to tailor employee training.

President Ralls said the smaller, rural colleges listed in the report for consolidation provide education and training in 36 counties with an average unemployment rate of 11 percent, compared to the current state average of 9.7 percent. They include nearly half of the state’s 40 most economically depressed counties.

Additionally, 23 percent of the funding for the state community college systems comes now via the support of local county commission boards.

On a practical level, Ralls said, how willing will those community leaders be to keep chipping in dollars if local control is jerked away?

Local support could erode, but savings could mount

Probably not very willing at all, said Conrad Burrell, chairman of Southwestern Community College’s Board of Trustees and a former Jackson County commissioner.

“The state’s system was created to serve the needs of the community, and this would be taking away from the community,” Burrell said. “We’re all different, with each of our colleges responding to the differences in the communities. I feel this would be detrimental, and it would be wrong.”

But on paper, and given the difficult economic times, the proposal would appear to have merits. Additionally, SCC seems to exist as a perfect model of how multiple counties actually can be served — and served very well indeed — by a centralized administration. SCC is headquartered in Sylva, with facilities in Macon, Swain, Cashiers and on the Cherokee Indian Reservation.

Twenty community colleges in North Carolina, such as SCC, already currently serve more than one county.

“The high level of local control that allows colleges leeway in how they implement administrative structures and activities is staunchly supported by college administrators, but it reduces the efficiency of the colleges and the system office,” the report notes. “Back-office functions — administrative activities that do not necessarily require face-to-face interactions, such as payroll or receiving — are performed at every college, resulting in 58 iterations of each activity.”

It’s cheaper per student, too, the larger the college, with the report finding that cost ranged from $447 to $1,679 for each student. As for administrative costs at colleges with fewer than 3,000 fulltime students, the cost per student averaged $983; this compared with $647 at larger institutions.

“Larger colleges benefited from economies of scale,” the report notes.  

The mergers would involve combining the administrations of two or more colleges into one, creating a multi-campus college. The government group suggested such functions such as senior administration, financial services, human resources, public information, institutional information and information technology could merge.

In turn, the newly merged administration would determine the staff needed at each campus to ensure smooth operations of the college.  

The State Board of Community Colleges would be responsible for determining the actual number of mergers based on the groupings of colleges selected. The government group noted that, assuming each merger involves two schools within 30 miles of each other, at least one of which is a small school, there would be 15 mergers. However, the system could opt to merge three or more schools to create one multi-campus college under the recommendation.

Not so fast

But those educators actually working in the state community college system warn to look deeper.

“If you’re just materialistic in looking at the numbers, maybe it looks good,” said Donald Tomas, who became SCC’s president just at the beginning of this month. “SCC is sitting at 2,800 students right now, with double-digit growth (over the past few years) — are they projecting all this out a few years?”

An apparent lack of projecting into the future contained in the report, and of getting into the nitty-gritty of the numbers actually used to compile the recommendations, is what Tomas said disturbs him the most when he looks at such sweeping recommendations.

“What is the criteria that they are using?” he said. “If you just look at the savings it all sounds good. Until, that is, you get behind the scenes and really try to understand what they are looking at.”

Tomas seems to make a valid point: the report, one that if adopted would make irrevocable changes in the name of saving dollars to North Carolina’s community college system, is just 32 pages in length. It does not assess the rapid growth currently being experienced by the state’s community colleges and how that will play out in the future, nor does it discuss more abstract concepts, including whether there would be continuing local funding support if the recommendations were adopted.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the community college system in North Carolina: The state’s community colleges serve some 243,854 fulltime students, with enrollment over the past few years (since the recession started) increasing by 28 percent, with no drop in numbers anticipated, according to President Ralls.

Jackson County Manager Chuck Wooten, who served as the vice chancellor of administration and finance for Western Carolina University before retiring after a 30-year career as an educator, said he believes there are too many unanswered questions to take such a huge gamble for relatively small apparent gain.

“Obviously, the identity with a local community college is important to each county and its citizens,” Wooten said in an email. “I believe commissioners will not be as interested in allocating funds for a community college if the local identity is lost. Certainly, there are some efficiencies to be gained by eliminating duplicative administrative positions; however, the local county will be impacted by losing jobs.”

Johnson, president of HCC, believes merging colleges — say, HCC and SCC, though the report doesn’t specify particular mergers, only in broad terms merging the ones that are “too” small — would be bitter pills for the communities being pinpointed to swallow. Each community pushed for a community college, usually provided the land needed for the colleges, handed over many dollars over the years, and have taken enormous satisfaction in the colleges that were built.

“I believe it would remove the pride of having a higher-education institution, that was created by the community and sustained by the community for all these years,” Johnson said. “I believe the greatest danger is of losing that community involvement.”

Thom Brooks, SCC’s vice president for instruction and student services, also believes consolidating college administrations would have serious local consequences.

“Our success as a community college is directly attributable to responsive local leadership that ensures that we meet the unique needs of our students and communities in a timely and effective manner,” Brooks said in an email. “I am unaware of many models where education is enhanced through added bureaucracy and long-distance decision making.”

N.C. Rep. Ray Rapp, D-Mars Hill, said he’ll oppose any move to merge community colleges, terming the report “pennywise and pound foolish.”

“It is a bad idea,” Rapp said, “and it would undercut local autonomy.”

That said, Rapp also emphasized the report points out some areas for increased efficiencies in the state community college system, particularly through combined purchasing power.

President Ralls said there has been movement in that direction, and noted that in recent months the community college system has sought private-sector advice on saving money through collaborative purchasing.

Ralls said while he did not want to dismiss the importance of potentially saving $5 million a year, the truth is the potential savings through mergers represent just .04 percent of an overall education budget of $11.9 billion.

He wrote in summation to the Program Evaluation Division’s recommendation that compiled the recommendations, “I would hope that there may be several places state leaders would want to look first before tackling the costs, both tangible and intangible, that would come through such a drastic change to our state, our citizens’ access to education, our communities and our colleges.”

Faculty and staff at Southwestern Community College will take part in a daylong session this week on how to identify and deal with troubled students.

The program has been in the works since last fall, but the Arizona shootings have added new urgency to officials’ need to be proactive when it comes to campus security, said Phil Weast, SCC dean of student affairs.

The shooter in Arizona, police say, was a former community college student who had been expelled from the school for bizarre behavior. Officials at Pima Community College, where Jared Loughner was a student, had told the 22-year-old and his parents that he could not return to classes without completing a mental-health evaluation.

Arizona law, unlike in most states, probably allowed school officials to force Loughner into mental-health treatment. Arizona permits anyone to register concerns about someone else’s mental health with local or regional health authorities. These health authorities, in turn, are required to follow-up on such complaints.

Much of the security now in place at SCC, Haywood Community College and Western Carolina University was in reaction to an earlier massacre: The April 16, 2007, shooting deaths of 32 people at Virginia Tech by a student, Seung-Hui Cho.

“We’ve been concerned about being prepared for these types of things since Virginia Tech,” Weast said.

Rose Johnson, president of Haywood Community College, said the college created “a very comprehensive” management plan that would kick-in automatically in the event of an emergency. This plan was developed with the help of local emergency management officers after the Virginia Tech shootings.

WCU has not made any changes as a direct result of the Arizona shootings, spokesman Bill Studenc said. The university uses a “case management” approach to identify and reach out to students having issues, he said, before a situation progresses to violence.

Among other intervention efforts, Student Affairs at WCU sponsors an “early alert” email service so that those on campus can alert authorities to concerns.

Studies show more students are arriving on campus with mental health issues, according to the Associated Press, which cited a recent American College Counseling Association survey finding 44 percent of students who visit college counseling centers have severe psychological disorders, up from 16 percent a decade ago. One in four students is on psychiatric medication, compared to 17 percent in 2000.

In related news, the North Carolina Community College Board unanimously voted last week not to except potential students who pose a significant health or safety risk. Local colleges will determine exactly who, and why, warrants a denial of admission. The UNC system already allows universities and colleges to bar admission.

North Carolina’s community colleges may have flung open their doors to illegal immigrants once again, but only a handful of undocumented students are likely to trickle into area colleges next fall.

Most undocumented students face a practical dead-end after graduating from high school.

The State Board of Community Colleges’ requirement that undocumented students pay out-of-state tuition, along with the state’s refusal to grant them professional certification, have deterred many from moving on to college.

Only one or two undocumented students have applied to Haywood Community College for its fall 2010 semester, said Jennifer Herrera, director of enrollment management at the college.

According to Herrera, charging out-of-state tuition has kept the number of undocumented students to a minimum.

“The fact that they have to pay out-of-state tuition regardless is a hardship,” said Herrera.

Currently, HCC charges $7,700 for out-of-state tuition, while in-state students pay only $1,600.

Similarly, Southwestern Community College enrolls only one or two undocumented students each year, according to Phil Weast, dean of student services at SCC.

At SCC, an in-state student now pays $52 per credit, whereas out-of-state students hand over $243 per credit.

Other than the markup in price, both colleges said that undocumented students go through the same admissions process as any other in-state applicant.

Randall Holcomb, spokesman for Western Carolina University, said he was not aware of any undocumented students at the school.

Out-of-state tuition at WCU stands at about $7,300 this year.

In general, more undocumented students show up to adult and continuing education classes at local colleges.

Laura Leatherwood, executive director of continuing and adult education at HCC, said the college does not keep track of how many undocumented students take those courses.

Undocumented students pay the same fees as everyone else and are allowed to take most classes, excluding those on law enforcement.

While state policy prohibits professional licensing of illegal immigrants, students can still enter a number of fields with a college degree.

Attending college could still help undocumented students learn how to repair computers, manage hotels, become a professional cook, or begin a business, Weast said.

Constantly changing policy

In the past nine years, the state board has flip-flopped four times on this particular issue. The most recent reversal came in September when the board overturned a May 2008 ban on undocumented immigrants from community colleges.

Gov. Beverly Perdue has said it is ultimately up to the federal government to decide how to handle illegal immigrants, but for now, she does not support allowing them to enter U.S. colleges.

“It doesn’t make sense to me that we would educate students in public universities who are not legally allowed to work here,” Perdue said to Raleigh TV station WRAL.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ray Rapp, D-Mars Hill, said the board’s decision must be reviewed.

“We need to revisit that policy change,” said Rapp. “I think we need to look at it and take into account all the factors that go into undocumented students in the school system.”

Rapp would not provide further comment.

Rep. Phil Haire, D-Sylva, said the decision is obviously up to the state board, but he hopes the board will consider that allowing illegal immigrants to attend college and join the work force legitimately would mean they could begin to pay taxes in exchange for the benefits they already receive.

Haire said the board should also take into account that many undocumented workers work long hours and have a good work ethic.

“They do some of the dirtiest work that you can’t get other people to do,” said Haire.