Chancellor's Corner
A Message from Chancellor Erma Johnson Hadley
Over the years, many of you have read and enjoyed TCC’s magazine called Projection. And, those of you who have been part of our TCC family for a while know that we are always looking for opportunities to improve, including how we tell our stories about student success, institutional excellence and community impact.
In this spirit of this continued improvement, I’d like to welcome you to our inaugural issue of REACH, named and designed to reinforce that making “Success Within Reach” for current and future students lies at the heart of everything we do at TCC. We help our students REACH to achieve what success means to them, and we REACH through our commitment to developing and maintaining a college-going culture, an educated and trained workforce and a nationally recognized institution that generates meaningful economic impact in Tarrant County.
This inaugural issue represents one of many changes we’re making at TCC. In addition to the new programs, partnerships, agreements and facilities featured on the following pages, I’m proud to say that we have developed a new institutional master plan to ensure that every investment we make delivers the greatest possible return on student investment (ROSI). Ideas for new programs, facilities… anything that could benefit our students and our community…now go through the Innovation Forum, where the initiative receives a DREAM score that rates how the concepts deliver on our commitments to Diversity, Relevance, Engagement, Access and Metrics (DREAM).
Through this very efficient, but thorough, new process, we will be able to evaluate more ideas for improvement, environmental enhancements and projects in a more objective way. Our Academic Affairs folks worked closely with our Real Estate and Facilities folks and others to develop, as part of the institutional master plan, the Innovation Forums, which are located on each of our campuses and soon, online. To our knowledge, TCC is the first institution of higher education in the nation to put into place such a process for institutional planning. I believe it will allow a greater number of people to come to the table with ideas that will help drive student success. While it represents a significant change from how we have worked in the past, it poises us for a stronger and more relevant future for our students and community.
You’ll notice that the first metric in the DREAM score is Diversity, which shows just how important diversity is to us at TCC. It’s not enough for us to have a diverse workforce or a diverse student population, though. We absolutely must create and sustain an environment in which individual differences are not just respected, but valued and embraced, so that we foster a culture conducive to the best teaching and learning opportunities possible. That’s why we instituted an Office for Diversity and Inclusion along with a steering committee and committees at each of our campuses. Thus far, these committees have hosted sessions to present the plan’s content and district-wide data as well as the campus’ data from our 2012 diversity and inclusion survey (upon which the plan is based). This work is critically important and I’m pleased that more than 120 people are actively involved in moving us forward.
Finally, I’m pleased to say that TCC is one of only 72 Achieving the Dream Leader Colleges in the nation. We earned this national distinction just three years after joining the ATD movement. The full story of our journey with ATD is inside, but we were recognized for achieving tangible results including:
- Increased successful completion of developmental math for Hispanic students from 25.49% in 2008-09 to 30.98% in 2011-12, and
- Increased successful completion of developmental reading for Hispanic students from 47% in 2008-09 to 53% in 2011-12.
What does it mean for us to be a Leader College? First, it means that other colleges will look to us for help because we have valuable experience they need to drive student success on their campuses. And, it means we will continue to pursue the ATD Student-Centered Model of Institutional Improvement and strive for even higher levels of student success.
I hope you enjoy this first issue of REACH and, as always, I appreciate your confidence in Tarrant County College.
Erma Johnson HadleyTCC Chancellor