Randolph Community College has received official notification from the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association on Colleges and Schools that its accreditation has been reaffirmed, and SACS has removed the College from the warning status imposed in July 2010.
"This is great news," said RCC President Robert Shackleford, after receiving a phone call from SACS with the news in late June. "Our follow-up report was excellent and exceeded all of their requirements." The College received the official notification earlier this week.
The only remaining SACS requirement is to submit a follow-up report clarifying the credentials of four faculty members, "but that is a separate issue, one we can easily address, and is unrelated to our being removed from warning status," said Shackleford.
All institutions are requested to submit an "Impact Report of the Quality Enhancement Plan on Student Learning" to SACS as part of their "Fifth-Year Interim Report" due five years after their reaffirmation review. For its Quality Enhancement Plan, RCC has implemented Write NOW!, an initiative to improve student written communication skills for academic and career endeavors.
RCC remained fully accredited after SACS completed its reaccreditation process last year, but was placed on warning status for a single compliance recommendation. The recommendation had been to "hire more full-time faculty and reduce teaching loads to ensure quality of instruction."
RCC's response to SACS was reducing teaching loads for 82% of the faculty in the spring 2010 semester; hiring nine additional full-time faculty members; eliminating overloads in all but four critical situations where they were unavoidable; clarifying the teaching load policy, consistent with the state norm; and clarifying the College's overload policy, eliminating overloads in all but the most critical situations. Because of deep budget cuts at the time due to the economy, RCC was unable to reduce teaching loads further without limiting the number of students enrolling or cutting faculty salaries.
The SACS' committee visit had coincided in September 2009 with the worst budget crisis in North Carolina history, when the College was making decisions to "get us through a time when the budget had dropped out from under us," said Shackleford. "We increased enrollment by 16% while our budget was cut by 11%." He noted that, while the SACS visiting committee recommended a 15-hour teaching load for full-time faculty, "N.C. community colleges are simply not funded for their faculty to teach 15 hours."
Under the budget crisis in fall 2009, "the only viable option was to increase faculty teaching load for one semester, assign professional staff to teach classes, and hire more adjunct instructors to cover other classes as needed," he said. The 15-hour teaching load is also not part of the SACS standards. In spring 2010, RCC reduced the full-time faculty teaching loads back to 18-21 hours, which is normal for N.C. community colleges. There was no option to appeal the warning status.
Shackleford pointed out that RCC recently received notification that it had again achieved "Exceptional Institutional Performance (EIP)" standards, according to the 2011 Critical Success Factors report from the North Carolina Community College System. RCC was one of only two community colleges in the state to earn the designation three years in a row.
Shackleford said, "I believe we made the right choice at the time. The evidence indicates that we are one of the top-performing community colleges in the state of North Carolina." RCC's next reaffirmation will take place in 2020.
