Pierce College needs to improve on overall planning, student learning outcomes and internal cash control mechanisms, according to findings from a team of educators who spent nearly a week on campus to make judgments on the institution’s performance and effectiveness.
The 11-member team’s visit last week is the latest step in a two-year-long process of reaffirming the college’s accreditation for the next six years.
Set up to give closure to the visit and to give the accreditation team a platform to inform administration, faculty and staff of its members’ findings, an exit report was presented in the Great Hall March 14.
The three areas in the school’s institutional efforts that were given recommendations for refinement were determined after the group made trips to at least 30 classes and offices to interview students, faculty and staff, according to Accreditation Team Chair Peter Garcia.
Coincidentally, Pierce President Kathleen Burke-Kelly said even before the team revealed their findings that the school’s overall planning could be one of the aspects singled out by the accreditation team.
“I think that our integrated planning process is still relatively new,” she said in an interview on March 12.
Still, Garcia seems confident in Pierce’s ability to take the recommendations in its stride.
“This is a committed college that is doing the right work and seems to be in the right direction,” he said during the exit report. “We found not an angry, bitter college. What we heard was a college willing to make itself better.”
For the most part, Garcia, who spoke on behalf of the group for the exit report, gave compliments to Pierce.
“We’ve come to know you. We’ve come to have a sense that the Brahma spirit is alive here. This is a good college doing really good work with students,” Garcia said. “The most frequent phrase [heard during the interviews was]. ‘I love this place. It’s like home.’”
In addition to the three recommendations, Garcia imparted several commendations to the faculty, staff and administration present during the exit report–an agreeable college climate and culture, the success of the Summer Bridge Program, and an improved library website, to name a few.
Paula Paggi, head of the library department, says that the new library website was discussed during her interview with team member Kim Morrison.
“We were really excited [when the website was recognized],” Paggi said.
Now that the visit is over, the team will be reporting their findings in an evaluation report to the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. The ACCJC, in turn, will be meeting in June in order to discuss how to move forward with the accreditation status of Pierce.
The college will be notified of any additional apprehension to the way the school is being run, as well as whether or not Pierce will be reaffirming their accreditation, according to an email circulated by Burke-Kelly following the exit report.
In the meantime, Pierce will continue making improvements to its system, said Mia Wood, faculty accreditation coordinator.
“It never ends,” she said. “What we try to do is integrate [the recommendations] into existing procedure.”
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mission College, another LA Community College District school that was visited by an accreditation team this March, was found to have issues with “significant gaps sometimes between policy and practice” because its leadership has been turned over so many times, according to Michael Rota, the accreditation team chair.
“It’s hard to maintain continuity and quality with that level of turnover,” Rota said in a video recording of Mission College’s accreditation team’s exit report.
Other recommendations made to Mission College also include putting in place an appeal process for student discipline and program review or assessment of their student learning outcomes.
Pierce and LA Mission College, along with LA Valley College, were the three LACCD campuses that were visited by accreditation teams this year. LA Harbor College, LA Southwest College and West LA College, on the other hand, were visited by teams last year; while all three reaffirmed their accreditation, Harbor and Southwest were put on probation and West LA was issued a warning.
The next set of visits–for East LA College, LA CIty College and LA Trade-Tech College–will take place in 2015.
Link: http://www.accjc.org
https://www.laccd.edu/inst_effectiveness/College_Accreditations/