The chairman of the Harford Community College Board of Trustees says they will hire an outside executive search firm to help them find the replacement for HCC President Dennis Golladay, who plans to retire when his contract expires in July 2016.
A member of the board when Golladay was hired in 2010, Valdes is about to begin his second search for a new college president.
"We have plenty of time," Valdes said following Tuesday's trustees meeting.
As they did last time, the trustees will hire an outside executive search agency to help find a new president, he said.
In the next few months, Valdes said, he will meet with various search firms that specialize in academia to get cost estimates. Once a firm is hired, it will advertise the position and assemble a group of candidates based on parameters set by the college trustees.
That group will be screened by a search committee made up of trustees, students, faculty and administrators. The committee will pare the list down a smaller group of 10 or so people who will be recommended to the board, Valdes said.
The board will screen the finalists and narrow them down to two or three, who will spend a few days on campus, meeting with students, faculty, touring the campus and getting immersed in the campus.
Based on those visits, the board will decide on who it will hire.
While no timeline has been established, Valdes said it would be ideal to have someone hired by early spring 2016.
"Ideally they could close their affairs and hit the ground running, because we have a lot of challenges," he said, citing many of the topics discussed at Tuesday's meeting, including enrollment, the budget and the new trades building.
Nursing accreditation
The Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing was recently on the HCC campus for a site visit, Golladay told the trustees.
It has not issued a final report yet, but Golladay said HCC "had met all standards and we were in good shape."
"I think the board would like to know our programs are in pretty good shape. When outside programs come in to take a look at us, this is what they say," Golladay said. "At a lot of colleges they're not meeting standards."
The HCC president also reported the student loan default rate at the college is 8 percent, lower than the national average, which Golladay said is in the teens.
Enrollment is down at HCC 3 percent from spring 2014 to this spring semester, Golladay said, adding the decline was "not unexpected."
Full-time equivalents in spring 2014 were 3,618.7 students, which fell to 3,505 for the spring 2015 semester. The actual figure, Golladay said, was better than projected and HCC is 1.1 percent ahead of its projection.