Dr. Monaco’s Fall 2024 Colloquium Speech

Fall 2024 Colloquium Speech
Pamela Monaco
August 29, 2024

Welcome to the 2024-2025 Academic Year. Thank you to the many of you who participated in our day of service, which is a brilliant way to begin the new academic year.  I’d like to thank the members of the Colloquium Committee, who planned today and made all the connections with our community partners (Slide 13).  I heard from Joe Konopka and Alexa Beshara-Blauth about the connections they made at Seeds of Service and the discussions that will take place to discuss collaboration, as well as from Ilene Cohen about the amazing work being done by Harbor House.  Through our collective efforts today, we acknowledge that we belong to other communities and should serve other service organizations that support the people of our county.  Thank you for your hard work and commitment to helping others succeed.  I also need to say that the outpouring of donations this morning was awe-inspiring.  Through your individual efforts, the collective, the college, will impact many humans and pets.

I need to thank our sign language interpreters this morning, Eileen Thigpen and Sheila Eletto.  We appreciate your presence with us today.

It is an honor to stand here with you today to talk about what we can learn from the last year and how we can work together collaboratively to create a successful, enjoyable year ahead.

And thank you, Mr. Dasti and Judge Fall, for joining us this morning.

Let me begin by welcoming the many new employees who have joined us during the 2023-2024 academic year.  You read their names as you entered the Grunin Theatre, but I ask all these new employees to stand so we may acknowledge them in person.  Thank you for joining Ocean County College.  You also read the names of employees who retired and those who changed positions (Slides 1 through 11).  Congratulations to all.

You may also remember that we made the decision to announce the 2024-2025 Outstanding Teaching Awards at a time and occasion when peers would be more likely to be in attendance.  I am delighted to share these three outstanding individuals with all of you.  We provide these awards “To acknowledge dedicated, engaged, enthusiastic, and exemplary faculty members.”  I ask that as I call the honorees’ names, the honorees proceed to the stage to be recognized by their peers and receive their awards (Slides 15, 16, and 17):

• Nathaniel Bard—In the category of Full-Time Faculty. Nate teaches art in the School of Arts and Humanities.
• Sharon Scrofine—In the category of College Lecturer II. Sharon teaches in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences.
• Melissa Mocarski—In the Adjunct Faculty category. Melissa teaches in the School of Business and Social Sciences.

Nate, Melissa, and Sharon were nominated and supported by their deans, faculty, staff, and students and then selected by the Award Review Committee.  These three individuals have earned their peers’ respect for the dedication and enthusiasm they bring to working with students.  Their colleagues judged them to demonstrate effective and imaginative teaching; to continue to engage in their discipline; and to serve students, their school, and the College.  In addition to the physical awards and our collective gratitude for their hard work, these three teaching staff members will serve on the Cabinet this year.  Please make sure you interact with Nate, Melissa, and Sharon so they can bring your ideas to our meetings and to see the beautiful apple awards they received.

During last year’s speech, I emphasized several goals, including addressing the Middle States warning; building community; engaging students; continuing to address enrollment and improve retention; beginning strategic planning; and continuing to work on opportunities to increase our diversity, our inclusion, and our equity for all.  I would like to share some of the accomplishments in these areas, as well as some additional highlights:

We celebrated—and continue to celebrate—the 60^th anniversary of the College. This is a milestone in the state as the first New Jersey community college, and we are fortunate to hear from alumni who remind us of the value they found in and the commitment they feel toward Ocean County College.  Thank you to College Relations for the design work today and throughout the year.

Thanks to the leadership of Alexa Beshara-Blauth and the core team, we successfully demonstrated compliance with Standard VII of the Middle States Standards for Accreditation. Being placed on warning provided us the opportunity to consider how we practice shared governance.  The many changes we have put into place include:

• The College Senate chair participates in Board of Trustees meetings.
• Three faculty members serve on the Cabinet.
• The Vice Presidents and I regularly meet with students.
• Regularly scheduled Cabinet Connection discussions.
• Regularly scheduled meetings occur between students and the Board.
• Board meeting times have been adjusted to 3:30 p.m., outside of peak class times.
• Public comment is now requested at the beginning of each Board meeting and at the end to allow comment before actions are taken.
• The Bylaws Revision Committee is revising the bylaws of the College Senate.
• We have a new public-facing webpage that provides faster and easier access to all shared governance documentation, including the Senate bylaws, meeting agendas, minutes, and exhibits for discussion at each Senate and Shared Governance Committee meeting.
• The College has revised the Board of Trustees bylaws, creating the Student Experience Standing Committee, which will begin meeting this new academic year.
• And our work continues.

We have just begun making progress on the college’s strategic plan, which will be supported and informed by several focused plans. Under Jerry Racioppi’s leadership, a team has developed a Strategic Enrollment Management Plan to contribute to the overall strategy. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, led by Eileen Garcia and Ken Malagiere, developed a mission and has implemented the plan for ongoing work in these crucial areas, including the recent completion of the second Social Justice Academy. Joe Konopka and his team created a strategic plan for Workforce Development and Strategic Partnerships, previously known as WPE.  A team led by Jim Calamia and Lincoln Simmons is also working on a sustainability plan.  Under Sara Winchester’s leadership, we have a robust Facility Master Plan going through a revision. We also have a Technology Plan overseen by the newly formed IT Governance Council, with support from four standing committees.  All of these efforts will shape the College’s strategic plan, which is just beginning to take form. More on that shortly.

Before we look forward, it is important to celebrate the college’s many accomplishments this past academic year.

Under the leadership of Ken Malagiere, his team, and Foundation President Mike Manzo, the Foundation awarded $98,000 to graduating students this May.  In June, the Foundation held its Scholarship Celebration, where we honored Ilene Cohen, Lincoln Simmons, and the Citta Foundation as we raised $250,000 to support our students.  The Foundation continues to help current students through foundation scholarships, our global study program, and the baseball team’s trip to Cal Ripken’s Experience in the spring, to name a few examples.  We also bid farewell to the many sculptures that brightened our campus this past year, thanks to the Foundation.

OCC continued to work on retention efforts in multiple ways, including developing and implementing a new orientation program that also includes an orientation of families of our students, and a new Student Success course that will be fully implemented this fall.  We continued providing the crucial support students need through tutoring, counseling, and the Helping Hands food pantry.  We also launched the First Gen Project under Alison Noone and Kate Mohr’s leadership and welcomed Ocean County Social Services to our college.  Kate Mohr and the success coaches have been vigilant in reaching students who demonstrate the need for encouragement or intervention, and the Care Team responds to all CARE reports.

We committed to ensuring students had a voice and were listened to.  They used their voice powerfully.  Several times, our students traveled to Trenton with Ilene Cohen, Jen Fazio, and Michelle Youngs to convince the legislature not to cut $20 million from the community college budget—and they were successful. On our campus, students were persistent about wanting something different for food services, and they were heard.  All of you just experienced the culinary talents of Pomptonian, our new food services partner.  Pomptonian is a New Jersey company that started in 1959 as a restaurant and soon transitioned to providing school meals.  As a local, female-owned company, it is a perfect fit for us.

We demonstrate in numerous ways our symbiotic relationship with our various communities in Ocean County.  It is easy to take for granted the beauty of this campus, but the facilities team continues to plant flowers, shrubs, and trees that create a lush landscape for all to enjoy and be proud of.  Our facilities team and College Relations worked alongside Brian Schillaci to rebrand our Southern county site, now known as OCC Manahawkin. Our library renovation has resulted in a gorgeous new space for all of us to use and enjoy, and we are excited about the official ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 11.  We have new signage on Hooper Avenue that will project a new image.  We also welcome VoTech students enrolled in their pre-nursing program to our campus as the VoTech program moves to the Russell Building, giving those students the opportunity to learn on a college campus and take courses with us as we help relieve some space constraints VoTech has experienced.  Members of the community come to campus to enjoy the incredibly successful Free School program facilitated by Chris Ruth and Mark Westmoreland that was offered during the evening this last year, or they came to attend the Eclipse event, hunt for Easter Eggs, bring their children to camp, attend our OCC Repertory Theatre productions, hear our student recitals and concerts, listen to the NJ Symphony perform on campus, support our student-athletes by attending a game or traveling to one of the several national tournaments our student-athletes participated in, see a production of the Improv Club, attend the Supply Chain Expo or the Great Debate, or support our community ambassadors and attend their conference.  Through Tom Gialanella’s work with high schools, we host more than two dozen workshops on our campus for our educational partners.  This is just a small sample of the outreach we perform through the work of faculty, staff, and students.  In many ways, we live our mission of being a college of and for the county.

So, where are we as we begin our new academic year? Our colleagues in enrollment, advising, financial aid, and success coaching have been invested in their efforts to enroll students, new and continuing.  The fiasco called FAFSA challenged students, but Robbin Haynes and her team and Sheenah Hartigan and her team provided support, positive messaging, and availability here or in the community to make registration easy.  We are feeling the pinch of a good job market, loss of confidence in higher education, and increased interest in career programs.  These teams were relentless in making enrollment accessible and easy for students, but potential students have options (Slide 20).  The challenge is not just that our enrollment is FLAT or DOWN, but that the credit hour production is down.  Our credit hour production equates to fewer than 11 credit hours per student and a higher percentage of part-time students than full-time students.  This impacts our budget significantly.  This shift reminds us of our students’ many obligations and how the higher education sector is changing.

Let’s look at this over time.

We have relied heavily on traditional high school students, but that demographic cliff people have discussed for years is here.  On August 15, we hosted a roundtable with three county superintendents:  Mike Citta of Toms River Schools, Nicole Pormilli of Jackson Schools, and Tom Farrell of Brick Schools.  We asked them to provide some insight into how their school districts may be changing.  Here are some of the stunning numbers they shared with us:

• Brick went from serving 90 multilingual students four years ago to 690 last year.
• In 2023, Jackson served 440 multi-lingual students, and 1,000 in 2024.
• In ten years, Toms River went from fewer than 8% multilingual students to 41% Hispanic last year.

They confirmed what we are beginning to see here at the College, and our enrollment numbers of multilingual students would be greater if we deliberately recruited this population. Right now, they find us.

In addition, a substantial portion of the students served by these districts receive free or reduced lunch, and like our students, their students work, take care of family, and are very focused on the family unit.  As Superintendents Farrell, Citta, and Pormilli shared with us, these families are hard-working and want success for their children, but they have no idea what a community college is or what it means to be in a US college.  This population is also growing in a county where fewer school-age children reside (Slide 21).

• Slide 22 – First-time new and stop-out student enrollment—overall credit decrease in five years.
• Slide 23 – The breakdown of enrollment by race—a slow but steady increase in diverse student populations—more if we were better prepared for these students.
• Slide 24 – The most significant decline is in white males – as Jerry Racioppi says, “the disappearing white male.
• Slide 25 – Part-time vs. full-time—changing increase in PT students.
• Slide 26 – Fall-to-fall enrollment over the last five years—the percentage of change.
• Slide 27 – The county and the college will see the continuing change in population.

What does all of this mean? Our enrollment is declining, our increasing population is part-time, increasingly from a non-white demographic, and we have work to do to welcome and support this changing population.

Our students need and will need more support. We only recently began to track first-generation students, and we already see that this is a significant portion of our students. As a college, we need to provide additional support, including personal and verbal support and encouragement, as we also work to educate families on what going to college means.

We also know that students nationally are still dealing with learning loss from the pandemic.  We see this in the usage of tutoring services at OCC (Slide 28).

Increasingly, our students are more vulnerable in terms of their financial status and their emotional health (Slide 29, free and reduced lunch), (Slide 30, first-time students with financial aid; the drop in AY 2022 reflects the loss of CARES money, not a decrease in need), (Slide 31, Helping Hands, and (Slide 32, FIPSE).

What does all of this mean for Ocean County College? Fundamentally, our county is changing, who is coming to college is changing, and the reasons students enroll in our college are changing.  We must be nimble and meet those changes.  We must focus not on remembering how we have performed but instead focus on revisioning ourselves.  Some of the work we must undertake:

• Development of new programs and certificates. We are in the process of developing new programs in dental hygiene, radiography, and veterinary technician. If we are to have additional new associate-level degree programs, we need programs like these that prepare students for good-paying careers and not for transfer.
• We need many more short-term certificate programs that allow students to learn to earn quickly. Ideally, these are stackable and enable students to enroll again in the future to advance the career they have begun.  An example from Sheenah Hartigan: We have run three Google IT courses for Ben Huddle Memorial Trust, which, thus far, is an extension of their current contract.  Forty-four unique students have taken Google IT in three separate courses.  This is a big change from the science courses that the organization usually offers to their employees.  They are expanding their partnerships because the demand is changing.
• We need to rely much more heavily on the Workforce Development and Strategic Partnerships team to provide customized training to small businesses, to develop more career certificates, and to increase the ability to provide ESL instruction at a larger scale. More students seek ESL instruction, and more are looking for career training for a specific career.
• We need to build bridges between our non-credit and credit units to collaborate on how to move students seamlessly between these areas depending on the student’s needs and interests. We have a model in progress right now as we work to increase the capacity to serve ESL students.
• We need to continue to monitor when, where, and how students want to learn and shift our schedules accordingly. As we serve more Latin students, for example, we may see the need for more Saturday morning classes, as this is a time when they are not working or caring for a family.
• We need to create an inviting, supportive campus culture that welcomes students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
• We need to continue to offer affordable, accessible, and relevant education to our students as we provide the support they need to be successful.
• We need to increase the number of bilingual faculty and staff, and we need to welcome the students who may be struggling with English.
• We must acknowledge that the students we serve are different from the past. They want different programs, they have different needs, and we must adapt ourselves to this new population.

And this takes us back to the vital work of strategic planning that the college is engaged in.

As you may recall, a solicitation was issued in spring for those interested in participating on the Strategic Planning Taskforce.  We received many names, and I appreciate the enthusiasm and interest in this vital work.  We wanted the taskforce to be a lean team that brings new voices to the table, represents different areas across campus, and is willing to make potentially difficult recommendations to the college.  These people will be meeting regularly, representing your interests, and sorting through feedback and suggestions (Slide 34).

Alexa Beshara-Blauth surveyed the campus to collect feedback on our current mission and guiding principles, and we are using that feedback to inform our revision work.  On August 8, the taskforce spent a day in a retreat learning about trends in higher education, completing a SWOT analysis, and working on a very preliminary draft of new mission, vision, and values statements.  We are moving from using the language of guiding principles to values, in keeping with other institutions and organizations.  We wanted to bring the first of many, many drafts of these documents to you today, and we have already scheduled Cabinet Connections meetings to bring everyone into the SWOT analysis and the drafting of the mission, vision, and values.

To get us started, here are the first versions:

Mission:  Ocean County College is a student-centered, innovative institution that provides high-quality and affordable education, empowers diverse learners to achieve their educational, professional, and personal goals, and enriches the communities it serves (Slide 35).

Vision:  To inspire our students and community to learn and grow together (Slide 36).

Values:  Ocean C.A.R.E.S. (an acronym, easy to remember). We are (Slide 37):

• Collaborative: We foster a culture of teamwork and mutual respect, encouraging open communication and partnerships within the college and with the wider community.
• Accessible: We commit to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment that is accessible to all, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to succeed.
• Responsible: We act with integrity and responsibility in all our endeavors, maintaining transparency and accountability in our actions.
• Empathetic: We strive to understand and be sensitive to the experiences and needs of our students, staff, and community, fostering a supportive and caring environment.
• Student-Centered: We place students at the heart of everything we do, empowering them to achieve their personal and professional goals.

Please know that these are the roughest, roughest drafts, and we eagerly await feedback and improvements. And this is just the beginning.

Let me share with you the timeline Alexa is managing (Slides 38 and 39):

We have many important decisions to make as we anticipate these changes in the higher education landscape, changes within our county, and changes in who will be an Ocean County College student.  The ways we collectively work together will profoundly impact how we support Ocean County.  We will have to revision ourselves while maintaining the standards we are known for: high-quality learning experiences, robust student services, and the understanding that we educate the whole person, the whole family, and the whole community.  As we collectively shape our future, I ask that we all continue to think of our work as a sacred vocation, to remember that the way each one of us everyday treats others will have a profound impact on people’s sense of belonging and confidence.   It won’t be easy work, but it can be fulfilling.  Let me share with you a comment from an economist, Nathan Grawe, of Carlton College (Slide 40).

So, finally, I would like to leave you with a story.  This summer I read an article in the New York Times titled “Notes from a Formerly Unpromising Young Person.”

Years ago, this young person was expelled from high school for truancy.  She was, by her own admission, a rough kid, and she had a very rough home life, prompting her to run away more than once.  After expulsion, she had a series of jobs, but one boss saw promise and helped her with skills and more stable work.  Finally, he challenged her—do you want to be a loser all your life? If not, you need to go to college. After some thought and time, she applied to North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.  Here is what she wrote about that experience (Slide 41):

“But what made getting into college particularly significant for me was not just the opportunities a degree afforded, but also the sense that I was there because someone had taken the time to meet me, to listen, and to ultimately believe I had potential.  When Mr. Spencer sat in the admissions office of North Central College and said, ‘I’m going to take a chance on you, Rachel Snyder,’ those were probably the most important words of my life.  The language matters.  He wasn’t just giving me a chance; he was also staking himself on my fulfilling whatever promise he must have seen in me.  Chances always work two ways.  Someone gives; someone else takes.  But the risk is shared.”

I’d like to finish this story by telling you something about Rick and Rachel. I don’t know Rachel, but I can share that she is a published author, experienced journalist who used to work at the Chicago Tribune, war correspondent, and professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

And Rick?  Well, Rick was a colleague of mine.  I first met him when I was hired at North Central, where he was the Vice President for Advancement.  He had worked at North Central all his life.  He continued to believe in individuals and make good things happen for others—because he believed in people.  And all of us who had the pleasure of working with him felt like better people in his presence.

I hope that we – collectively and individually – will take a chance – on doing something differently and will take a chance – on the students we will serve.  And may we have the joy of inspiring many more Rachel Snyders.

Thank you.  I believe we have time for questions, comments, and insights.