Another view: Aspen victory is great news for college, community, as work continues
Dear Amarillo,
Amarillo College just won the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence! This is a BIG. DANG. DEAL! We knew we were in the Top Ten for the Aspen Award, again, and found out April 20th at the luncheon event in Washington, D.C. that we are co-winners with Imperial Valley College in California. I say we knew we were in the Top Ten again, because in 2019, we also held that position as well, and we ended up a Rising Star and at the number five college in the nation. And now here we are, a top community college in the nation! That is great news for our college, and for our community!
Who the heck gives out this prize that includes a million-dollar award, which we will split with Imperial Valley College? Why do they care about community colleges? How do they judge them? Why AC?
As current board chair of the Amarillo College Board of Regents, and someone who cares a whole lot about education and our community, I’ve watched our community grow in its understanding of the importance of education for the economic viability of our community’s future. When I started Panhandle Twenty/20 twenty years ago (that’s a lot of twenties, I know!), along with Russell Lowery-Hart, then at WTAMU, and with many other local leaders, no one talked too much about educational attainment and its connection to our economy. We didn’t face the realities of our families living in poverty and how to move them out of it through education. We just dealt with the status quo, and shrugged our collective shoulders, sighing, “Too bad, there’s nothing we can do.”
Amarillo College has shown us how false that assumption is. When I joined the AC Board in 2015, our student success rate was 19%, and now it stands at 58% and climbing. We looked at who our students really were, and they didn’t exactly look like the ones we thought we had. We faced the realities of our students’ lives and built systems of support, like the Advocacy and Resource Center, where students get help with their learning and also get support that helps them overcome life barriers. We changed our classes to better meet the needs of working students, and moved to eight-week courses, increasing both our percentage of full-time students and the numbers of successful completions and transfers. We changed our developmental ed into co-req courses so students not only learned the basics, but got course credit. And, yes, I could go on. We built a college to meet the needs of our students and of our community.
It worked.
That’s what the Aspen Prize is all about. Community Colleges of Excellence. I’m proud to be part of the successes at Amarillo College. You should be, too. Our ad in last Sunday’s paper included the names of 60 local businesses that signed on in support of AC. Let’s continue to celebrate our successes, work on the things that we need to improve as a college and as a community, and ignore the folks who are pulling out the old fear-mongering touch points that are being used across the nation to pit us against each other.
This is a conservative community and its conservative college was just named the top in the nation; we’re second to none! Some people are afraid of success, it seems. This is big and you all had a role in making it happen. Amarillo College is here for you and our region, now and for the future.
Amarillo College will continue to love our students to success. There is still much work to do. Let’s lock arms and get to it.
Anette Carlisle chairs the Amarillo College Board of Regents.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Another View: With Aspen Prize, Amarillo College is second to none
