Break out the birthday cake – Shoreline Community College will turn 40 this year.
The college kicked off the celebration at its ninth annual Shoreline Salutes reception Sept. 18. As staff and faculty prepare for classes to start Sept. 22, college officials are celebrating, and say they have weathered past storms well, and the future looks bright.
“I think there’s so many new opportunities on the horizon,” college spokesperson Judy Yu said.
When the college first opened its doors in 1964 it had 867 students enrolled and it only offered weekend and evening programs. At the time, the college was based out of Shoreline High School. Today, Yu said, the campus inhabits 83 acres in Shoreline and is working to meet the demands of an ever-increasing student population – the college has approximately 9,000 students enrolled for fall 2003.
“We’re about twice the size we used to be – when I first stepped on campus, it was only about 4 years old. The number of full- and part-time faculty was significantly less … and we had a relatively small number of buildings,” said 30-year faculty member Tom Curtis. “Now we are a more seasoned college.”
Aside from general education opportunities, the college has also grown to offer work force education programs and degrees in nursing, dental hygiene, automotive services and biotechnology.
The staff has had its share of growing pains over the years as well.
The most recent example is the Campus Master Plan. Predicting a 19 percent increase in enrollment numbers within the next decade, the college has been developing a plan to build an outdoor amphitheater, an NCAA size baseball diamond, a soccer field, approximately 700 additional parking spaces, and updated water retention systems on the campus.
But the plan was not well received by many of the surrounding neighborhoods.
The major concern from community members was traffic congestion, and after a contentious public forum in July of this year, the college eventually dropped the initial mitigation plan and the traffic engineer who designed it.
“From the time that we first saw it we did not want the mitigation plan in there,” SCC president Holly Moore said in August. “And we have asked for another traffic consultant to be hired.”
In 1999 and 2000 the college weathered a storm when then-president Gary Oertli led the college to sign a $350,000 contract with a dotcom firm to develop an online bookstore and registration system for students. But the college got in trouble for signing a technology contract over $100,000 without state approval. Oertli got in trouble for helping award the contract to a personal friend and resigned to take a position at the dotcom firm. He was later fined $40,000 for breaking state ethics laws – the largest penalty ever brought against an individual.
When Moore took the helm after Oertli’s resignation, she brought with her an open style of management that is helping lead the college on a positive track, officials said.
This experience “caused the college to tighten up some of the administrative policies with regards to purchasing such that we hope this would never happen again,” Yu said.
“And with the master plan … we have learned that the community really is interested in what goes on here … that was all very good.”
Enterprise editor Pamela Brice contributed to this report.
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