Community colleges share legislative priorities

Southwestern Community College’s board of trustees learned Tuesday about the Community Colleges for Iowa’s legislative priorities for the school year. Community Colleges for Iowa Executive Director Emily Shields explained the priorities and their importance.

“Three priorities, pretty similar to what we had the last couple of years,” Shields said. The first priority is an “increase in state general aid, which this year we’re asking for a $12 million increase, and that is to continue what we’ve been doing to equalize public funding across the state for the colleges.”

Shields said the organization has been working to bring all colleges up to the same funding levels. “We started to lay the groundwork with legislators on that, make the case for a larger increase than what we’ve gotten in recent years, so we definitely need all of your support with that,” she said.

The second priority for the Community Colleges for Iowa is for an increase in funding for the Workforce Training and Economic Development Fund and concurrent enrollment, or the enrollment of high school students in community college classes. Shields says much of this funding comes from state gambling revenue.

“Around concurrent enrollment, we’re continuing conversations about how to ensure that the funding that goes in the K-12s is creating the intended incentives,” Shields said. “The other thing is, the funding they get for career and technical isn’t necessarily enough to cover the costs the colleges have, and that weighting hasn’t necessarily kept up with costs in that area, so really just making sure that concurrent enrollment funding matches what we have today and our goals today.”

The final priority mentioned is one Shields says is on the docket every year.

“Our final legislative agenda item is always focused on maintaining local decision making with our locally elected trustees and reducing red tape and bureaucracy that gets in the way of providing high quality education across the state,” Shields said. “We’re focused on getting the word out about those things.”

One way of keeping in contact with legislators this year is through a new email platform the Community Colleges for Iowa have worked on.

“We’re introducing another additional way, should you chose, of communicating with legislators, and we’ll be providing some tools for that,” Shields said. “Quorum Grassroots is essentially just a platform that allows us to both track our interactions with legislators so we can have a better sense of who we are and are not communicating with going into the legislative session, but hopefully also making it easier for our advocates to reach out.”

In other SWCC news...

Fall enrollment is down 3.8%, with 1,570 students enrolling in 14,222 credit hours for the semester. While the numbers are down compared to last fall, SWCC Dean of Student Services Kim Bishop said this lines up with the slight decrease in high school students.

“Even though enrollment is slightly down, we are pleased that we’re staying above 1,500 students this semester,” Bishop said.