A team of peers visited Santa Barbara City College last week for the institution’s regular accreditation evaluation.
Initial findings showed plenty of commendations with some recommendations, according to a site team from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC).
The accrediting commission sends an evaluation team to public institutions like SBCC every six years to make sure academics, student services and all other aspects of campus life are up to government standards — more than 100 standards, to be exact.
Colleges without accreditation can’t award valid student transcripts or federal financial aid.
After hosting more than 80 meetings with members of the campus community, the site team on Thursday reported preliminary findings back to faculty, staff and administrators gathered inside the Garvin Theatre.
The group thanked SBCC for the warm welcome before rattling off a long list of commendations.
SBCC has a good culture of openness as a result of new leadership, happy staff, an exemplary program review structure, and a wide array of student support and learning services.
The college also has successfully integrated technology into the campus and provided fiscal transparency and aesthetically pleasing grounds despite the ongoing drought.
What SBCC can do better includes completing personnel evaluations in a timely manner, and modernizing and replacing aging buildings — something the college hoped to do with the Measure S ballot initiative that voters rejected last year.
The site team will submit a draft accreditation report to the ACCJC, which will review and act on the recommendations in January.
In anticipation of the visit, SBCC spent more than two years creating its own institutional self-evaluation report, recruiting 63 faculty and staff members for the task, said SBCC President Lori Gaskin.
“This is an unofficial sense,” Gaskin said of Thursday’s briefing. “We’re a great institution, but we don’t rest on our laurels. An organization is never perfect.”
She said SBCC’s self-evaluation — click here for the report — also found some areas in which the college can improve.
SBCC’s last interaction with the ACCJC was in 2014, when the accreditation commission removed the college from a “warning” status.
The college was placed on warning because of a 2011 complaint alleging the Board of Trustees was out of compliance with a number of accreditation standards, including not complying with its own rules of governance.
— Noozhawk staff writer Gina Potthoff can be reached at gpotthoff@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.