Higher Ed Board approves local vote on new community college

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- People from two local school districts in south central Missouri will vote next spring on whether they want a community college serving their area, one that officials say could provide a new approach to post-secondary education.

The April 6 election on authorizing a community college district in the Camdenton-Osage Beach area was approved Tuesday by the Coordinating Board for Higher Education. Voters at the same time would be able to select a six-member board for the college if the measure is passed.

The higher education board, meeting by conference call Tuesday with one member absent, voted 8-0 to authorize the election if supporters of the proposal submit letters of credit by Nov. 10 to provide $30,000 for the cost of the election.

The new Lake of the Ozarks district would become the 13th such district in Missouri, and the first new one since Ozarks Technical Community College was established in the Springfield area in 1990.

Nickie Foster, chairwoman of the Ozarks Community College Steering Committee, said she was pleased the election was approved.

"I can't begin to tell you how excited I am that we can put this issue on the ballot," she said.

New rules for creating community college districts took effect Oct. 30, and at its last meeting the board was told that the Camdenton-Osage Beach area had met all of the new criteria needed for an election on the issue.

Residents from the Lake of the Ozarks area first tried to organize a community college in 1988 but failed to meet state standards. Another effort ran into the same problem last October, primarily because student enrollment projections fell short of the state's threshold.

But this time the state decided to study and revise its rules governing community colleges.

The old rules required a community college district to have a projected enrollment of 1,250 students, plus an average daily attendance at local high schools of at least 1,600 students in grades 10-12.

Now the high school enrollment criteria have been eliminated, and projections for community college enrollment can include estimates of the local demand for such things as customized training, literacy programs and basic adult education programs.

The new rules also lower the required community college attendance to a projected 1,000 students and increase the multiplication factor used to figure that attendance.

The result is that the proposed Lake of the Ozarks community college is projected to have 1,365 students rather than the 681 projected under the old formula, even though both projections are based on the area's 2000 census population.

"This could be a real opportunity for the people in that region of the state to create something new and different," said one board member, Dudley Grove.

John Wittstruck, senior research associate with the Board of Higher Education, said in an interview after the meeting that the type of institution the people in the Lake of the Ozarks area envision would be different from the typical college with buildings, faculty and administrative infrastructure.

"There may be a modest amount of that in the institution they are trying to create," he said. "But I think for the most part it could be an electronic college, where most instruction is offered through interactive video, the Internet, and so forth."

He said the college could contract with various providers for many of its courses.

"Then if there's no longer a demand for a course, you could cancel the contract, so you don't have to be locked in to having to maintain faculty and classrooms," Wittstruck said.

He also said the planned college would probably be one serving more adult learners than students just out of high school, and that the offerings could be geared toward jobs common in the Lake of the Ozarks area in fields such as hospitality, recreation and entertainment.

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Higher Education Department: http://www.dhe.mo.gov