BUILDING STABILITY AND SYNCHRONICITY

CApproaching the end of her first year at MHCC, college President Lisa Skari took time to reflect on what she’s learned from students, staff, and faculty, and talked about her ideas for the future of the college, with increased stability and clarity for employees and student success as top priorities.

YEAR IN REVIEW

While settling into MHCC, Skari has also been establishing life here in Oregon after making the move from her former position at Highline Community College, just outside of Seattle in Des Moines, Washington. 

“Settling in has gone really well. I feel like I’m not living in someone else’s house anymore. Most of the things are put away. I feel good on that,” she said.

While there aren’t a ton of obvious differences between Oregon and Washington, Skari said she wasn’t prepared for freezing rain (a Portland-area specialty!) as she had never really experienced anything aside from rain or snow.

She described her first year at Mt. Hood as “fast,” “challenging” (but in a positive way), and “different.”

By different, she’s referring to the variations between Oregon and Washington’s budget process, as well as learning to understand how information in data-based reports differs from state to state.

In Washington, tuition is set at the state level, and if the Legislature hadn’t made a decision about state funding for colleges, then, “We would do a continuing resolution with our board to spend. We usually then would adopt our budget at our September board meeting. We had authority to spend,” said Skari.

MHCC has to adopt a final budget before knowing what the college will receive from the state, meantime. Despite the adjustment, Skari is feeling okay about it.

“While it’s interesting trying to figure out what you’re doing when you don’t know how much money is coming in. At least I felt comfortable in the process and going through with the board and setting the priorities,” she said.

Skari was eager to dive into things when she started at Mt. Hood in July 2018 with expectations for herself that ended up being inflated, in hindsight, she said. 

She hoped to know a lot about the college by the end of her first six months to be able to put new plans in place, but now, toward the end of her first complete year, is fully understanding campus and how different areas integrate and flow.

The first-time president has had to make some hard decisions in her time her so far, with the budget often being the challenging part of those decisions. The first example she gave was in regards to her recommendation to the MHCC District Board to keep the college’s FM radio station, KMHD, in a partnership with OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting).

“My challenge was my fear of knowing where we are financially because if we brought (KMHD) back (to the campus) we could potentially kill it, because we didn’t have the resources. So, that was one of those hard ones (decisions) that I’m not sure translated,” said Skari.

Another tough choice she made, but a positive one, was the decision to move the college back toward a path of having a vice president of instruction, she said.

“I realize it’s left folks a little uncertain, but I believe having one person that’s accountable probably better serves the faculty and the employees there than trying to have it split,” she said.

That type of uncertainty for MHCC employees is exactly what she’s trying to change, she added.

LOOKING FORWARD

Skari hopes to improve clarity within the college’s organizational employee structures. She wants to be transparent with the decision making process and increase communication throughout those processes while also increasing stability at MHCC, she said. It’s important to her that employees know who their supervisor is, who’s in charge of their supervisor, etc., so that when concerns arise, employees know who’s in charge.

“I feel like faculty, staff, and managers have kind of been on this constant change (cycle), so my hope is to try to start getting a little stability in our processes and how we do things,” she said.

She also wants to make sure the college has a better long-term planning process that instills predictability for Mt. Hood employees so everyone can be more certain in their expectations for what will take place over the next few years.

With better planning, Skari hopes to better prepare the college to get to a place where it can pass a long-coveted general obligation bond, to help pay for major physical changes. She’s working on this through a community perceptions survey this year, and then projects such as academic program evaluations and a new facilities master plan that can all help set the foundation for a bond campaign. Then, if and when there is bond money to spend, the college will know where to best use it.

When it comes to academic program evaluations, Skari wants to understand how each of the college’s programs are doing, where investments could be made to grow successful programs, and how the college could do a better job of helping those programs that are struggling.

“My goal is to have every single one of our academic programs fully enrolled. That would be awesome, because then that means we’re meeting the demand of our community, we’re meeting the student needs, and we’re actually probably providing the students a much better learning environment,” she said.

Student success is important to Skari. She said she’s looking to get to the root of student success issues – whether it’s students who are failing, withdrawing from classes, or getting Ds, she wants to figure out who those students are, and understand what barriers they are facing and how the college can provide resources to focus on and better support them.

She also wants to look at how MHCC’s policies affect students because it’s been a while since the college did a policy review.

“Do we have any students who are disproportionately not served by these policies?” Skari wondered aloud. “If so, how do we change the policies or how do we adapt them so that they’re more equitable and inclusive?”

MHCC has seen many employee groups diversify over the past couple years and begin to better reflect the students they serve, but Skari explained that full-time faculty are the slowest group to see change within because most of that group is here to stay long-term.

She said there are recruiting strategies to seek out future faculty who come from different backgrounds, such as networking with graduate programs at historically black colleges and universities or hispanic-serving institutions, but she emphasized the importance of respecting MHCC’s campus culture.

Skari said, “You can do all the recruiting you want, but if you don’t create an environment where people feel welcomed and accepted you’re gonna lose them. So, I’m also mindful of, how are we doing as a campus? How do our employees of color feel? Can they be themselves and bring their true selves to campus or is there still a little bit of apprehension?”

When thinking about progress at Mt. Hood, Skari hopes to get all parts of the college on the same page. 

Using an analogy, she explained, “Everyone’s on a boat and we all have our oars in the water and people are paddling as fast and hard as they can but we’re not synchronized, so we’re kind of spinning. My goal is to try to figure out how we get it back aligned so we’re all oaring at the same time, in the same direction, which hopefully then will make it easier and we’ll go further.”

Whether it’s working on the budget, staffing structure, communication, or long term planning, Skari said that interacting with students balances out the tough parts of being college president.

“Sometimes when there’s challenging days, I look for an opportunity to interact with students or look at students’ showcase or something,  or see a student speak. It’s grounding and it’s refreshing, and it’s like, this is what it’s all about.”