Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Enrollment up, crime low at CCC, says president

Editor's note: Clovis Community College President Becky Rowley discussed several topics as part of a periodic series checking up on issues related to the university.

A 2015 report showed Clovis Community College as having minimal campus crime. How has CCC fared in terms of incidents in the last two years, and how is the campus' continuing safety ensured?

We have continued to have the same extremely low campus crime rate. One of the things that I think we have sort of in our favor — we are not a residential campus.

We have hired more security officers in the last three years, so we do have more full-time security, and I think that's contributed to keeping our numbers low, and we also have a lot more cameras on campus. I think that makes a big difference. In the very rare event that we have a theft or something like that, a lot of times we are able to get some kind of information on the person by looking at our cameras.

Our students have expressed concern in the past, not about the lack of safety in our campus, but I think it's been more of a response to national events. When campus shootings occur, they express concerns for their safety, and so we've tried to really respond and do everything that we feel like is reasonable within our power to keep our students and our employees safe.

After being named a 2017 military friendly school by Victory Media, how do you believe CCC earned the designation? How has the university lived up to the title?

We've earned the designation by the number of graduates that we have in areas that are considered in high demand for the military, and for the supportive services that we provide to military students. I feel like we've earned this distinction by really focusing on our military students, and realizing that they are a special category for us.

Our faculty know that we have high numbers of military and military dependents within our student population, and — especially for our active duty, deployed students — we really try to work with them and their schedules as much as we possibly can, and look at the circumstances that they're serving in — like sometimes, they may be in a really strange time zone — and let those things come into consideration in terms of due dates and assignments and things like that.

We also have employees who work here who are affiliated with the military, and I think they really understand the circumstances for active duty personnel, and can provide support for them, and we try to provide that.

How dire do you believe the state budget is going to get for the university? How much has your budget been cut so far? Do you anticipate staff cuts becoming a reality?

Up to this point, we've been cut a little over 7 percent, and that's a lot for us. It's around $700,000 for us. Our total budget is around $34 million and our state appropriation is just under $10 million.

We've prepared for that along the way, because we've always known we were going to get the cuts that we got. I've never really felt surprised by anything that's happened. I didn't like it, and wish it wouldn't have happened, but I always felt like we knew this was going to happen, and we tried to prepare for it as well as we could in advance. I think that so far we have been fairly successful, although we have had to cut back on things, just like every other campus.

We are hopeful going into this session that the cuts will be minimal. I think there is an understanding, and we're trying to work with our legislators to convey this information that we have been cut to the point where further cuts are really going to impede the kind of services that we can provide to our students, and we do not want to get into that position.

I feel like we are very efficient. We keep our tuition low, and we've kept it low, even though I don't know how much longer we're going to be able to avoid a tuition increase. I feel like we really try to justify all of our expenses, and we're very good stewards of taxpayer money, and we provide a very high quality education for our students, while keeping the price low.

What will happen is that, as positions become vacant, they may not be filled. That's hard, because somebody has to do that work, so I don't like doing that. We've done that in the past a few times, and then, maybe in two or three years, when the money picks up a little bit, we'll be able to fill positions and give everybody some breathing room. We've already done some consolidation, and we will do more as we have to over the next couple of years.

CCC's enrollment is up by 183 students for the spring semester. To what do you attribute that increase?

I would attribute some of it to better recruiting, and I think that we've really tried to recruit more realistically, and bring our name and our programs to students that are in our geographic area and are interested in the programs that we have.

We also have a new full-time program — our physical therapist assistant program — and so, we're starting to see some actual growth from the students in that program, because they're all full-time students.

Our numbers are high in our nursing program right now, so it's a multiplicity of things; it's not just any one thing.

— Compiled by Staff Writer Eamon Scarbrough