If you can’t do something right, then don’t do it at all.
Lately, the Pierce College administration and offices seem to be doing plenty of things that just aren’t right.
We have a Web site that students are encouraged to use for all sorts of needs, including registering for classes, that is frequently not working.
We have a campus e-mail system that is currently under conversion that is often inaccessible to faculty.
We have a brand new “Future Village” that boasts an electronics classroom without Internet access, which is critical to their lesson plans and student presentations.
Many of the other classrooms just received Internet within the last few days, more than three weeks into the semester.
We have winning men’s and women’s basketball teams that were both disqualified from the Western State Conference playoffs because the proper paperwork wasn’t filed for the team.
We have a revitalized counseling department that put together an entire calendar of workshops that were not followed through on.
What does all of this confusion, lack of information and organization amount to?
An increasingly frustrated staff and student body that is spending time scrambling to make things happen instead of focusing on the reason this college exists: education.
How can instructors focus on lessons and their students when they spend so much of their time making phone calls to administration and Infotech, trying to get the tools that they need to teach?
They can’t.
This college has spent so much time trying to make Pierce technologically savvy, and yet all they have succeeded in doing is making the campus as a community dependent upon technology that Infotech is either too understaffed or too inept to maintain.
Over the winter break, they began a conversion of the staff e-mail system to what will allegedly be a more user-friendly program.
Unfortunately, no one notified the staff until two weeks after the project was begun, when it was too late for instructors and employees to save existing e-mails or notify students in winter session that their e-mail accounts were inactive.
During this process, e-mails sent to school-based accounts didn’t even bounce back, leaving students to think that their professors were ignoring them.
No date for completion of the project has been given, and problems persist.
With the move to the Future Village, Infotech waited until all of the classrooms were filled before attempting, in no discernible order or sense of urgency, to begin giving some of the offices Internet access.
Taking away Internet access from a college student in 2007 is akin to taking pen and paper away from a college student in 1947.
In fact, all of the fact-checking and research that is normally done on-line for this newspaper in the newsroom was done on personal computers at home until yesterday.
Until this week, all of the assignments and production was also done outside of the newsroom.
In what was already a delayed process of moving from archaic bungalows to new facilities, the electronics department was also hit hard when they discovered that their new rooms were not connected to the college network.
While many other rooms were also affected, this is crippling their ability to teach on the most basic level.
This weekend, the women’s basketball team, performing better than they have in years, was forced out of the WSC playoffs because their paperwork failed to list several players who had played on the team throughout the season.
This was a bumbling mistake that cost these athletes the chance for recognition, and, most importantly, showed them that they can work hard day after day and that their college doesn’t care enough about their success to cross the proverbial “t”s and dot the “i”s.
The men’s basketball team met the same fate two weeks ago.
What, then, is the incentive for student athletes to come to Pierce and have the thought of being disqualified constantly in the back of their minds?
There is none.
With attendance topping 19,000 this semester, more students than ever are using Pierce as their starting point for their college career.
The counseling department seemed to be stepping up to the challenge, distributing a calendar for “Student Success Workshops” for the semester.
Unfortunately, and ironically, the same day that the entire student body received an e-mail reminding them of the workshops with dates and times, not one of the three took place.
In fact no one in any of the scheduled meeting places had any idea that they were supposed to be hosting a workshop.
What is the sense in any of that?
There isn’t any.
While this may seem to be an indictment of the administration, from the top down, it is really much more of a plea.
Pierce College is the gem of the L.A. Community College District. We continue to attract more students than our eight sister colleges.
We are a bench-mark for community college education, with outstanding specialized programs.
Don’t let us lose that.
*Hire more people in Infotech, people who are trained in all the computer technology that this campus needs. Create a system by which to hold them accountable.
Currently, the only system to get assistance from them is to call, leave a message, cross your fingers and hope that someone in there feels like helping out that day.
This is unacceptable.
*Find a more effective way of managing the counseling department. If this means creating a more distinct job description and responsibilities checklist, then do that.
*Find people whose sole job it is to coordinate the anticipated moves of classrooms and departments throughout our anticipated construction and renovations. How can administrators, most of whom hold degrees in education or subjects they used to teach, be expected to know about electrical wiring and the intricacies of moving?
*Most importantly, before we move on to projects like the proposed food court and the restructuring of the farm and the farm road, finish something, and get it right.
Or don’t do it at all.
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