Committee Ponders Third College

In other business during the Community Colleges of Spokane board of trustees meeting:

An outside consultant has been working with a task force to look into the possibility of creating a third college within the district.

CCS could receive more state funding if it added one more college, Charles Taylor, CCS chancellor and chief executive officer, said during the meeting. The initiative has been a contentious issue since it was mentioned by Taylor in April. Faculty and staff have expressed concern that a third college would drain resources from the two existing ones.

CCS still has “a large selling to do to many of the faculty,” said Carla Naccarato, who represented the faculty during the meeting. Some are “leery” and there’s little trust right now, she said.

If it did become a reality, the creation of a third college wouldn’t take place for at least another five years, said Diana Van Der Ploeg, Spokane Falls Community College president and co-chairwoman of the Third College Task Force.

For now, the committee is still working on “vision exercises,” she said, to imagine what a third college would be like and what it could do, without taking away from SCC and SFCC.

“This is a long-term, ongoing project,” said Helen Malone, head of the board of trustees. “It will involve every aspect of the college system … and input from everyone.”

Spokane Community College will contribute to the new Joint Safety Training Facility Center by allowing its sponsors to build and maintain a 400-space parking lot on SCC land.

The parking area, east of the college, will be shared by SCC and the facility, which will be a joint venture between the Washington Army National Guard and local police and fire agencies. In return, SCC will have use of six classrooms at the facility.

The agreement will last 25 years. After that, ownership will revert to the community college.

The board approved the purchase of a 2.13 acres next to SFCC, on the south side of Fort George Wright Drive. The area, worth about $158,000, is owned by the Fort Wright LLC Corporation and will be used for future parking space or a building.

Spending of up to $125,000 was approved by the board to renovate several Head Start program locations. The Institute for Extended Learning, which is under the umbrella of CCS, serves as Head Start’s lead agency in Spokane County.

Renovations will take place at the Hillyard Center, the SCC Bigfoot Child Care Center and the Early Learning Center in the SFCC Human Services building. Most of the work will involve building walls to replace movable partitions between classrooms, providing storage space, and fixing electrical units and underground plumbing.

Funding for this work comes from the federal government’s Head Start project.

The Inland Northwest Technology Education Center just launched a new Web site: www.intecenter.com.