Lack of Investment in "Fragile" and "Stymied" College Campus Will Drag Down County Economy, President Says
Blue Ridge Community College President Laura Leatherwood has renewed her plea to the county for a new or rebuilt Transylvania County Campus at an estimated cost of $35 Million.
BREVARD — Kevin Spradlin’s machining classes at Blue Ridge Community College boast of highly engaged students — full-time undergraduates, dual-enrollment high schoolers and returning adults who, he said, “form a great collective group that’s like family.”
He touts relationships with nearby manufacturers in a field with a desperate demand for his graduates.
“Everybody is in a panic now . . . You walk into a shop and the average age is 55 to 60 if not more,” said Spradlin, a computer integrated machining instructor at the college’s Transylvania County Campus.
His program is also equipped with some essential tools, he said, including both manual and computer-controlled lathes and mills.
But what the program can’t provide is a grinding lab to train students in crafting super-precise metal products modern employers require. Nor does the college have space to add it, he said, nodding towards one corner of his classroom.
“We have a roundabout that’s coming about four feet from our door,” he said.
Actually, a sidewalk will separate the building and a revamped intersection planned for Osborne Road and Asheville Highway, said Glenda McCarson, the school’s associate vice president who oversees the campus in Brevard. But otherwise Spradlin is right on, she said, and what’s true for his classroom is true for the campus as a whole: It’s bursting at the seams.
The campus’ main building — a former elementary School built in 1951 — is nearing the end of its useful life. The college’s nine-acre property in Brevard is hemmed in by roads and development, said McCarson — as did, at the March 28 Transylvania County Commission meeting, college President Laura Leatherwood.
The cramped quarters limit the school’s ability to expand popular nursing and machining programs and recently forced the school to divert $300,000 in state funds earmarked for a new initiative to teach construction trades in Brevard.
This lack of growth, in turn, threatens the Transylvania location’s status as a “campus,” which allows it to grant associate’s degrees and attract about $600,000 in annual funding from the state.
And, big picture, limiting educational expansion means limiting the county’s economic vitality, Leatherwood said at the meeting.
“I will say our situation at this point is fragile and without appropriate facilities, our growth is stymied,” she said. “It will also impact our ability to attract and retain industry here in Transylvania County.”
With the county already funding a voter-approved, $68 million school-renovation project and facing the long-delayed need to build an expensive new courthouse, county commissioners declined to commit the estimated $35 million required to expand or replace the campus.
But they did express more concern than after a similar 2021 presentation from the college.
Commissioner Larry Chapman referred to its circumstances as a “crisis.”
Commission Chairman Jason Chappell, a Blue Ridge employee who directs the NC Works career centers at the Henderson and Transylvania county campuses, said the Commission will discuss forming a committee to explore the school’s needs “at one of our next meetings.”
And Commissioner David Guice, citing the time needed to formulate an expansion plan, said this work should start as soon as possible.
“It’s time for us to begin planning for the future,” he said. “We’ve got to begin that now.”
Accessible Education
North Carolina’s Community College System was created in 1957 to help the state’s economy transition from agriculture to industry, according to its website. Its goal is to give students, including high schoolers, a chance to work towards a four-year degree or teach them skills that can be immediately applied at nearby businesses — all without leaving home.
The word “accessible” is the first sentence of the system’s mission statement, and, financially at least, Blue Ridge has made big strides in this realm.
Tapping federal Covid-19 relief funds and other sources, the school was able to provide free tuition and books to nearly all students starting in 2021 and, thanks to an anonymous $2 million grant, will continue to do so at least through the spring of 2023, McCarson said.
But another form of accessibility — proximity to classes — has been dramatically threatened by a recent dip in enrollment at the Transylvania branch of the school, which has been located at the former Straus Elementary School since 1998 and achieved campus status in 2010.
While overall enrollment at Blue Ridge climbed from the equivalent of 2,128 full-time students (FTEs) in 2017 to 2,607 in 2021, the count at the Transylvania campus dropped to 285 during the last school year.
That number is crucial, Leatherwood told commissioners. For the Brevard branch of the school to remain a state-designated campus, it must maintain at least 300 FTEs.
Though last year’s decrease was blamed partly on Covid-19, which also prompted the state to grant a two-year exemption of campus requirements, failing to meet this enrollment threshold beyond that period would lead first to a warning, McCarson said. Next would come budget cuts and, the following year, a loss of funding for seven full-time positions at the Brevard campus as well as its ability to grant degrees.
“The ax is not hanging over us to chop our head off tomorrow,” McCarson said in an interview at the school this week. “But it’s there.”
The state requires community college classes to be available within 30 miles of all North Carolina residents, and if that ax does eventually fall, it would result in a diminished ability to meet that standard — offering fewer courses with fewer of them tailored to meet the needs of local businesses, and requiring more students to drive to more of their classes at the Henderson campus.
That’s a 22-mile drive from Brevard, McCarson said. But given the remote locations of communities such as Balsam Grove or Lake Toxaway, as well as the transportation challenges faced by many Transylvania residents, she said, “for a lot of our students, it may as well be 2,000 miles away.”
Old and Small
The deficiencies of the Brevard campus aren’t obvious when you walk through the doors of its main building. The white walls look freshly painted. The patterned gray carpet was replaced shortly before the 2020 onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The school is equipped with advanced computer technology, including large screens in one classroom that allow instructors in Henderson to broadcast lectures to Transylvania.
These improvements, as well as routine operating expenses, have all been funded by annual stipends from the county, which are expected to total $945,000 next fiscal year.
“We get a lot of support from the county commissioners,” McCarson said.
But that support is more extensive and expensive because of problems that might be expected in a 71-year-old structure, she also said. Workers routinely repair cracks that form in the walls. Discolored streaks in the basement have been left by chronic water infiltration that runs perilously close to electrical breaker boxes.
The ancient ventilation system has been known to pump super-heated air into the media center and relies on a refrigerant that is no longer manufactured.
“I’ve got 17 units that, if they go down, god help me if I can’t find this stuff,” she said.
More crucial is the limited size of the campus’ two buildings, which cover a total of about 30,000 square feet.
The school creates or expands programs in consultation with local businesses, ensuring the training satisfies their workforce needs and draws students with the prospect of good jobs after graduation.
For example, Leatherwood told commissioners, “We met with all three of our hospitals and they are just desperate for nurses.”
That has prompted a rapid expansion of its nursing program, including a recent addition of 20 new slots for students.
But though the nursing classrooms in Brevard are equipped with hospital beds and situated in the school’s Applied Technology Building — a 10,000 square-foot annex built in 2008 — they are capped at 24 students by the North Carolina Board of Nursing, Benjamin Rickert, the school’s director of communications, wrote in an email.
Because the classrooms are now at that capacity, he wrote, the “expansion was done at the Health Sciences Center in Hendersonville.”
The college missed another opportunity after state lawmakers secured $300,000 to start a training program for plumbers, electricians, carpenters and other trades that would provide sure employment and help the county address its dire housing shortage.
“The original plan was to place them in Brevard,” Leatherwood told the Commission. “We turned over every rock from a facilities standpoint and we could not find anywhere that we could start these programs, so now we’re going to have to start them in Henderson County.”
An Unclear Future
If and when the campus is expanded, where would it be and what would it look like? It’s too soon to tell.
Most of the commissioners declined requests to speak about the future of the campus and the prospect of funding an expansion. Burton Hodges, the executive director of the Transylvania Economic Alliance, also refrained from sharing a detailed vision.
“We look forward to working with our community partners to explore options to support their growth,” he wrote in an email.
With $20,000 previously allotted by the county, the college hired architectural firm Clark Nexsen, which presented preliminary plans to the Commission in March of 2021.
All the options envisioned new buildings that would add about 10,000 square feet of floor space to the current campus. Unfortunately, said Clark Nexsen’s Chad Roberson, the most desirable site — the current location of the old Straus school — would also be the most disruptive, forcing the demolition of the old building and displacement of students while the new one is under construction.
McCarson said she understands the challenges of building on a new location, including the limited availability of land in Transylvania, but given the prospects of such disruptions and the constraints on the property, that is her preferred option.
McCarson also said she understands that Henderson’s population and tax base is far larger than Transylvania’s.
“Two totally different counties,” she said.
Still, the disparity of their contributions is striking, Guice said at the March 28 meeting, pointing to the “funding that has come from the Henderson County commissioners and how they have stepped forward.”
Since 2016, that Commission has spent or pledged more than $67 million for new facilities, including the ongoing Patton Project, which will add a total of 80,000 square feet of new or renovated space at the Hendersonville campus.
Its $31-million Health Sciences Center, meanwhile, shows how local investment leads to matching investment from the state. The center was completed in 2016 and the range of programs offered there has nearly doubled since 2018. Its enrollment has climbed during that same time from 368 students (not including county emergency personnel, who also receive training at the center) to nearly 500 — each of whom brings in a state reimbursement of up to $6,400.
But there’s a much bigger benefit of expanding the school, Leatherwood said at the meeting: helping shape the county’s future.
US Census Bureau statistics show Transylvania’s population is aging and its pool of working-age residents is in decline, she said, and students who leave the county to attend college usually stay away to work.
Expanding the school and its educational opportunities is essential, she said, “if we want to keep people here, if we want them to fill jobs and not just any jobs, but those that pay a wage where they can support their families right here.”
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