A few years ago, my
dean approached me about serving as the Student Success Coordinator for Pellissippi's English Department. The Student Success Program
allows faculty members to send the names of struggling students to a
Coordinator, who can then connect these students to resources that might help them
navigate whatever difficulty they have encountered. My work in this capacity has given me the
opportunity to learn a great deal about the PSCC student body.
Pellissippi State is an open
admission institution, which means anyone with a high school diploma or GED
will be accepted. This fall, our total
enrollment is approximately 10,000,students spread over five site campuses
located at Hardin Valley, Magnolia Avenue, Division Street, Strawberry Plains,
and Blount County. As you can imagine,
the students who make up this number represent a wide cross-section of the
greater Knox area community:
* some are fresh out of high school and some
are returning to college after time in the military or workforce;
* some are focused solely on schoolwork, and others
work up to 60 hours/week while in school;
* some live at home, some are
self-supporting;
* some are in a partnership or marriage, and some
are parenting one or more children;
* some students’ have parents or siblings
familiar with the expectations of college level work, and others are the first
in their families to enroll in college;
* some students come from affluence, others
are barely getting by financially;
* some
have ACT scores which indicate high academic preparedness; others—many—are in
need of courses that will prepare them for college-level work.
By providing any
high school graduate with an opportunity to get a college education, Pellissippi and
other such schools are meeting a significant need for our community. And our students have tremendous promise and
potential. As I tell them at the end of
each semester—whether they recognize it or not, every one of them bears the
loving fingerprints of a God who has created them with unique gifts and
abilities that they can offer to their families, friends, coworkers, and
communities.
However, like each
one of us here today, these students are a mixture of abundance and lack. Many of our students—so full of potential—also
come to us as “the least of these,” which creates challenges for them as they pursue
their academic goals.
Some of those
challenges stem from insufficient economic resources. Specifically, last year at Pellissippi, just
under 40% of our students received the Pell grant, which is need based
financial aid. This year, that number
has increased to just over 46%. That
means 4300 Pellissippi students qualify for need based aid. In addition, 3300 students fall into the
“zero expected family contribution” category.
This number is up from last year’s 25%. In addition, an estimated 18 students have faced homelessness during the Fall 2014 semester. Clearly, a significant number of PSCC students face real economic hardships.
Although many of our students' difficulties stem from low economic resources, their struggles are
also connected with other kinds of deficits including
* poor academic preparation (going by ACT
scores, in 2013, only 21% of Knox County high school graduates met all four
College Readiness Benchmarks. This means
that 79% of our high school graduates were not fully prepared for college level
work.);
* inadequate connection with friends and
family members willing and available to provide relational and practical
support;
* still-developing communication and
interpersonal skills that are so vital for interacting with members of a
college community and in the workplace;
* an incomplete understanding of the time and
energy it takes to complete college level work.
And this is where
our partnership with Compassion Coalition comes into the conversation.
Through a series of
events that I couldn’t have orchestrated if I’d tried (which, at least to me,
looks suspiciously like God’s hand) I was asked by a colleague to meet with Compassion Coalition
about strengthening the partnership between CC and Pellissippi. This makes sense for two important reasons:
1). Pellissippi has a growing Service Learning program,
which allows students to earn college credit while volunteering for existing
organizations in our community. Because Compassion Coalition has its finger on the pulse of
justice and compassion ministries that already exist in our community, it is an
excellent place for our Service-Learning students to locate organizations for
whom they would like to volunteer. This
not only allows students to give their time to Christ-centered organizations,
but also increases the chance that they will encounter and be impacted—perhaps
in a life-changing way-- by the volunteers who are living the Christ-life day
in and day out.
2). As I mentioned earlier, a significant number
of Pellissippi students find themselves needing the kinds of services Compassion Coalition partners
provide. And Pellissippi is in the process of becoming a “hub” for Compassion Coalition, so that we can
more effectively connect our students with needs to the appropriate Compassion Coalition resources. In order to make this a
possibility, Compassion Coalition graciously shared two of its staff—Jessica
Bocangel and Gina Whitmore—with a group of faculty and staff eager to attend a
Bridges Out of Poverty workshop to our campus in June. The materials were extremely well-received by
those who attended—so much so that our college’s president caught wind of it
and mentioned it to the entire faculty at our fall in-service gathering. Now the college will offer the training to a
larger number of faculty and staff in the next month or two, and also in the
works is a semester-long reading group in which faculty members can delve more
deeply into the process of understanding and better equipping our student
population. Another outcome from the
workshop that Compassion Coalition provided is this: A few
weeks after the training, Jessica Bocangel told me about Faith Gilley, a Compassion Coalition
volunteer who has co-facilitated three Getting Ahead classes in the Knoxville
community. Faith—a wife and mother—had
decided to return to college as a non-traditional student, and she is now
co-facilitating the college version of the Getting Ahead materials. The college has plans to offer additional
sections of this same course in the spring semester.
The very fact that Pellissippi State—a public community college—is open to such a partnership is,
at the least remarkable, and from my perspective far more spiritually
significant.
By coming alongside
Pellissippi’s students, faculty, and staff in meaningful, redemptive ways, ,
Compassion Coalition looks an awful lot like Christ — the word that became flesh
and blood and moved into the neighborhood that is Pellissippi State. I think I speak for many of us when I say how
encouraged and excited we are by Compassion Coalition’s presence in our
community. I hope you are as well.
