The Yavapai Community College has scheduled the first Board meeting of 2019 to begin at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, January 15. The meeting will be held at the Rock House on the Prescott Campus. The meeting is open to the public. Three minute public comment to the Governing Board is allowed near the outset of the meeting.
Citizens are encouraged to attend and voice their concern on any topic to the Governing Board.
The Yavapai Community College has scheduled a budget workshop to begin at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, January 15. The meeting will be held at the Rock House on the Prescott Campus. The meeting is open to the public, however, public comment is not allowed.
The workshops will most likely run until noon.
According to press reports, four members of the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board have called a special meeting to elect new officers for 2019. The election is being called even though the Board’s current president has six months left in his term as its leader.
Board member Linda Thor said “a new board ought to be able to elect its own officers.”
Voters on November 6 elected three new members of the governing board that oversees the state’s largest community college district. In an email to The Arizona Republic, Hendrix wrote, “I was elected to a two-year term that has not ended.” He noted that the ideology of the board majority shifted in the recent election, going from a board with shared conservative views less inclined to support labor unions, to one with a more liberal stance.
For detailed information about this story, please click here and go to Azcentral.com.
According to news reports, eleven African-American football players have filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Phoenix because of the decision by Maricopa Community College to eliminate its football program. In their lawsuit, the players allege that cutting the football program violates federal law because it disproportionately affects African-American students, who make up 62 percent of team rosters.
The lawsuit claims the 11 players accepted scholarships to play football with the hope of furthering their education and going on to get scholarships to four-year universities. However, because they are unable to play the sport at junior colleges after the 2018 season this may leave them unable to pursue four-year degrees.
A detailed analysis of the history of this dispute may be found on-line at azentral.com by clicking here.
Well, there’s another meeting that is to be held January 10 by the Community College to once again discuss the fate of Building “L” on the Verde Campus. Only certain unnamed folks outside the College have been invited to the meeting, we are told. The meeting is to be held at out of the public eye. The public is not invited, and the college has not informed the public of the time and place of the meeting.
Poor Building “L”, which I refer to as the Rodney Dangefield of College facilities. It gets no respect. It’s future now is being decided, it appears, in secrecy and without a clear public five-year plan for development of the College on the east side of the County.
The Building has been kicked around since it was built in 2004. The original vision was to use millions from a Federal Government grant and a voter approved bond to create a major Career and Technical Education (CTE) training Center on the Verde Campus in Building “L”. Unfortunately for Building “L” and the 70,000 residents living on the east side of Mingus Mountain, that vision was pretty much abandoned when the politicos on the west side of the County decided in 2006-07 to build an entirely new CTE campus at the Prescott airport to serve the residents over there.
Since that fateful decision by the Prescott folks, Building “L” has been struggling to find a proper use. It has been renovated for enology labs and modified in part for the Verde Campus nursing program. In the December 2013 College development plan, Building “L” was to play a central role of the shift in agriculture when the Chino Valley Campus was closed and many of its operations transferred to the Verde Campus. But that plan landed with a resounding thud in Chino Valley and has no chance to materialize.
To add to the woes of Building “L”, discussion on January 10 will take place in a vacuum in terms of a written, serious, comprehensive, understandable five-year development plan for east-county post-secondary education. I suspect there may be something about a “strategic” five year plan dumped into the discussion pot by the College. However, those of us who have carefully looked at it find it lacking in vision and clarity.
The sad fact is there is no effort on the part of the College to produce a serious post-secondary development plan for the 70,000 residents on the east side of Yavapai County. And there never has been. What I’ve seen over the past two decades is a piecemeal approach to any development on this side of Mingus Mountain. Just enough to keep the folks from too loudly raising their voices in protest of the second class treatment afforded them by the College.
In sharp contrast is the serious, focused development that has taken place on the west side of the mountain. Over the past 18 years the west side Yavapai Community College politicians and presidents working under their influence have delivered the following to Prescott and Prescott Valley residents: A new professional tennis complex, swimming pool, therapy pool, 1,100 state-of-the-art dinner theater, two renovated residence halls, renovation of all parking lots and every campus building, a new CTE Campus, a huge athletic program, baseball field, softball field, leased soccer fields, major sized gymnasium, music program, theater program, new 4-year bachelor’s degree with ASU, a new Allied Health facility, new police training building, and much more. Meanwhile, east side residents have either slept through all this selfish development for one part of the County or have been politically marginalized.
To illustrate the enormous commitment of the west County politicians to developing the college on that side of Mingus Mountain, college documents show that almost $60 million (maybe more) of the $69.5 million 2000 bond went to west County development. In addition to the bond money, the College spent other funds to build an $11 million Prescott Campus heating plant, a $20 million dollar Career and Technical Education Campus at the Prescott Airport, and around $7 million to renovate two dormitories on the Prescott Campus. If that doesn’t take your breath away, recall that in 2013 the Governing Board approved in concept spending another $100 million on the west side of the county for additional construction and renovation. (That has since been reduced to something around $65 million.)
Meanwhile, the College spent $18 million to replace the infrastructure, renovate and replace the 40 year-old falling down wooden buildings on the Verde Campus and about a half million for the poorly designed outdoor pavilion. After citizens put a halt to the idea of selling the Sedona Center, and after it was essentially closed for over two years, the College has finally and reluctantly invested around $5.5 million in renovation, a new parking lot and building a street. (The viticulture land and building on the Verde Campus were primarily the result of donations.)
It is time for a serious comprehensive Community College five-year development document for the 70,000 residents on the east side of the County. Without it, the traditional piecemeal, “’how ya Gonna Keep ‘em down on the farm” mentally will continue to rule post-secondary Verde Campus and Sedona Center worlds. Without it, any discussion of how Building “L” should be used in in the future seems pretty useless.
The Blog erred in its assumption that the convocation for this week found in the Community College calendar was for students. The Blog story posted earlier is not correct. Turns out that reliable sources have told us it is a gathering of employees where college officials give speeches.
Seems a little odd to label it a “convocation” rather than an employee business meeting. Oh well, our apologies.
The Department of Education’s GEAR UP grant program is designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. In August 2, 2018 Heather Mulcaire said in her role as Yavapai College’s Associate Dean of Student Success that GEAR UP recently received a $100k grant from Northern Arizona University (NAU). She went on to say during an interview with Verde Independent reporter Bill Helm on August 2 that NAU “invited us to apply for a part of their grant to continue to service these students.” (The Community College received an amount but how much is not reported.)
According to the August story in the Independent, seven years ago, GEAR UP was implemented to better expose young people to the opportunities of college. In Yavapai County, two high schools, Mingus Union and Prescott Valley’s Bradshaw Mountain, were given this initial opportunity. Most recently in January 2019, Dr. James Perey said that the program “began seven years ago with the Cottonwood-Oak Creek and Mingus Union school districts.”
This year, Yavapai College started the fall 2018 semester with 162 Gear Up kids, with 151 of them from the Verde Valley, the rest from Prescott area schools, according to Meghan Paquette, the Community College’s GEAR UP success adviser. (What grade levels, etc.)
However, halfway into the 2018-2019 school year, Dr. James Perey said that the GEAR UP grant “has been very successful, with 187 students participating overall, 133 completing the 18-19 application for financial aid.” (How much of grant is going to scholarships to the Community College? How much of grant is going to support middle school children and high schoolers?)
Unfortunately, the information flowing from the College about how GEAR UP is being run overall and why only Mingus was chosen to participate from the east side of the County is less than clear.
The GEAR UP initiative is one of the largest and claimed to be an effective program focused on increasing the college and career readiness of low-income students in communities nationwide. GEAR UP is a highly competitive grant program that helps empower local partnerships comprised of K-12 schools, institutions of higher education, state agencies, and community organizations to achieve three strategic goals: (1) increasing the postsecondary expectations and readiness of students; (2) improving high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment rates; and (3) raising the knowledge of postsecondary options, preparation, and financing among students and families.
The theory behind the GEAR UP program is that every child deserves a chance to pursue higher education. But getting to college is complicated and waiting until their senior year of high school to prepare them is too late.
As noted above, there are a number of questions about how the grant money is being allocated by the Community College and precisely who is benefiting.
Dr. James Perey
In an interview with Verde Independent reporter Bill Helm, the Executive Dean of the Verde Campus, James Perey, highlighted five areas as “successes in 2018 and future successes in 2019.” He pointed to the program that on five occasions brought high school juniors to the Campus as one of the five major successes. He also cited the College serving the Yavapai-Apache Nation as another.
Expanded industry certification testing, working with K-12 districts on college readiness and matriculation, plus growing the economy by presenting a dozen workshops and developing a variety of partnerships with industry in the Verde Valley rounded out his five areas of success.
You may read the entire interview of Dr. Perey by Bill Helm in the Verde Independent by clicking here.
The Community College will hold a student convocation January 9, 2019 on the Prescott Campus in the 1,100 seat dinner theater. According to its calendar, some of the College offices are closed because of the convocation.
The questions raised by the short announcement include these: What offices are closed? Only offices that are needed to run the convocation? Or others? Are employees generally expected to close their office so they can attend the student event? What about faculty?
In the eyes of some, closing college offices that are not essential to the convocation, if that is the case, is an unnecessary waste of valuable employee time? Are they wrong?
To Blog critics, I agree this is a minor, picky point. However, taxpayers are paying for the college operation and need to be assured their money is being spent wisely. Is it being spent wisely when some unnamed offices that are not essential to the running of the event are nevertheless closed?
p.s. Where are the PR announcements about the event? Rumors are that newly hired president Dr. Lisa Rhine will address the students at the convocation.
Thanks to the web site folks at the College for their effort to clean up the old District Governing Board web site? The new site is much improved. However, there remains some work to be done.
For example, when you to to the new site and click on the heading “Yavapai College News & Information” you discover the last time any news or information about the College was put there was back in spring 2017. (See below) The new site is attractive but continues to retain the same out-of-date section.
Click here to go to the new Governing Board web site. However, click here to go to the section found in the newly revised web site that still needs work.
