A Great Campus Visit

Hello Colleagues,

I had a great campus visit this week. What made it so great? Well, I had three good ones, but my visit to Columbus State Community College stood out because it gave us a challenge that is new for NCHERM. It was engaging and compelling. Saunie Schuster and I visited on Monday, for the purpose of helping CSCC to assess and overhaul its admission process for those with histories of criminal activity or misconduct.

We've never had a chance to re-envision such a process from scratch and our charge was aided by the administrators at CSCC who are really proactive and looking to design a new process that is fair and protective of their community. They don't want to do just enough, they want to create a process that will be a model for the other community colleges in Ohio, and I think that is just what the end result will be.

Some community colleges are open admissions with no exceptions. In Ohio, community colleges have more latitude for excluding those who may not be safe, and for placing restrictions on those who are admitted, but on whom restrictions are needed. The campus has both a day care center and an adjacent high school, which are complications for the admission of sex offenders. So, we're creating objective criteria and a secondary admissions process to help screen and make admissions determinations.

Key to this effort is that CSCC has recently put a Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT) in place. By broadening this team to a second tier, each BIT member will have a backup and that backup will also serve as the primary member of the newly named Enrollment Review Committee. Why is this key? Because the training skill sets are similar. Both teams need to know how to do threat assessments, and need to be able to address issues of pattern violence, recidivism, rehabilitation, criminal background screening, and more.

It is efficient to parallel their efforts, and once our proposal is submitted, Saunie and I will return in May to spend a day training both teams on these key topics. We'll blog about that then. Happy Easter and Passover.

Brett Sokolow