On Wednesday morning, officials from Flint Hills Technical College will speak against a proposal to merge the state’s technical colleges with community colleges.
“Our position is, we want to be independent,” President Dean Hollenbeck of the technical college said at a meeting of the technical college’s board of trustees on Monday.
The proposal first came up in a 2004 study by the Northwest Research Education Center or NORED. The report said that while the cost of giving a student a technical education was high, the funding system for technical schools and colleges was inadequate. Smaller schools were of “questionable viability,” it said, but had no incentive to change.
It didn’t go much further than that until this year when the state’s technical colleges and community colleges reviewed how their “clock hours” and “credit hours” would be defined for funding purposes. According to Hollenbeck, one Wichita school lost some funding as a result.
“That caused some legislators to look at the technical colleges,” Hollenbeck said. “So it rose out of an equity of funding issue.”
The issue will be one of the items discussed by the Commission on Technical Education, which meets Tuesday and Wednesday. At a later date, the Kansas Board of Regents will be able to make some recommendations to the commission, but the commission has the final say on what gets proposed to the Legislature.
Hollenbeck will make a presentation to the commission at 10 a.m., along with Kent Heermann, chair of the college’s board of trustees. The presentation focuses on the role Flint Hills Technical College plays in the community and the importance of its independent status.
The technical college was formally under the governance of the Emporia school district before separating in 2004. It was recently recommended for accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission, which gives the potential for the college’s credits to be interchangeable with those of other public universities.
“We are doing an excellent job in preparing students to be successful and to be gainfully employed,” part of Hollenbeck’s statement reads. “...The college is doing an excellent job in the overall management of the institution. And most importantly, we are responding to the ever-changing labor needs in eastern Kansas and the Emporia community. We are very proud of that.”
Whatever happens, it won’t happen soon. Even if all the regents, commissioners and legislators agreed a change was necessary, Hollenbeck said, it would probably take at least two to three years to get things going.
“If not everyone agrees, it could be several years before anything happens,” he said.
It’s not necessarily an all-or-nothing situation. One possibility is that the state’s five technical colleges would be left alone while the smaller technical schools were required to either merge or downgrade to high-school status.
For now, Hollenbeck said, the important thing is for the college to keep its eye on the essentials.
“If we focus on our students and our mission and our role in this community, we’re going to be all right,” he said.