Sierra College Board Retreat
Our board held its annual retreat this past Saturday, July 19, at the beautiful Lincoln Twelve Bridges Public Library, which is a joint partnership between the City of Lincoln, the Western Placer Unified School District, and Sierra College.
It was a busy day, and frankly, it seems to me that we would do well to hold these retreats two or three times a year. Fundamentally, my goal for this retreat was to see us establish an integrated and cohesive plan for resource development. We didn’t get all the way there — but we did get quite a bit accomplished, and I thought I’d try and fill you in.
First, we had a great presentation from Howard Rudd, Kris Mapes and Bill Halldin of the Sierra College Foundation. We agreed unanimously to request a staffing and infrastructure plan to allow the Foundation to generate $5 to $10 million in new funding every year within three years.
We also discussed the tremendous potential of acquiring federal government resources, focused particularly on economic and workforce development, firefighter training, green collar/solar job training, and increasing America’s competitiveness in science, technology, engineering and math.
We had a very extensive discussion about the draft of our strategic plan. The college is in the process of establishing four key goals, and specific strategies to accomplish them. The four goals are educational effectiveness, organizational effectiveness, resource development and focused access.
We spent a great deal of time on strategies to achieve educational effectiveness, and affirmed the direction we are headed to strategically focus our educational programs so that Sierra College has a more narrow and deep focus, rather than being a mile-wide and an inch-deep (my analogy: we won’t teach underwater basketweaving just because one of our instructors happens to know the skill — rather, we’ll strategically choose what programs to resource based on what our community needs).
We also revisited two key points of policy for our district, which were first established four years ago, when the college was in danger of running its fourth deficit in a row.
The first is our reserves policy, which calls for maintaining a reserve of 8% to 12% (if you dip down to 5%, you go on the state watch list…slightly lower than that, and the state will take the district over). The board unanimously reaffirmed the wisdom of this policy.
We then moved on to the balanced budget policy, directing staff to ensure that ongoing revenues exceed ongoing expenses, unless the Board of Trustees explicitly directs otherwise. Of course, there are most definitely times when you might need to use your reserves and spend more than that year’s revenue — but only in times of severe fiscal crisis. The board voted 6-1 to reaffirm our balanced budget policy, with Trustee Bill Martin expressing opposition and voting against it.
So we made quite a few very solid decisions this past Saturday. Making decisions at this level is all about creating clarity for our leadership team to go get things done. And clarity is very important, because without it, you waste resources pursuing courses of action that simply won’t work.
In August, I think we need to take the next step and tie together all of the individual pieces on resource development, and adopt a three year integrated resource development plan. We ought to be able to provide our leadership team with the clarity they need to know what options and strategies the board is behind for the three year time horizon that we can look ahead to.
If you have an idea or comment, I hope you’ll share those with me. And a special thank you goes to Jeannette and Jene’ in the President’s Office for putting together such a great retreat (and working all day Saturday, too!).
