Because of the community’s insistence and persistence, Hawaii Community College — Palamanui will open on time, University of Hawaii administrators told a crowd in Kailua-Kona Thursday evening.
Because of the community’s insistence and persistence, Hawaii Community College — Palamanui will open on time, University of Hawaii administrators told a crowd in Kailua-Kona Thursday evening.
“Construction is nearing the end stages,” said John Morton, UH’s vice president for community colleges. “We have water and have turned the switch on the electricity. It is, in fact, going to happen.”
The university will take over the $25 million, 24,000-square-foot center in June, with staff moving in during the early part of August, Morton said.
“The semester starts in late August, and it will be at that campus,” Morton said at a forum sponsored by Community Enterprises.
Morton said that equipment for the culinary facility has been delivered. Following $800,000 that had to be diverted into construction change orders, administrators covered the shortfall by redirecting funds for equipment at other community colleges. Minor landscaping work at the center still remains.
Morton acknowledged that West Hawaii has a large percentage of students not going to college. The administration will continue to bring college courses into high schools, and will continue to emphasize distance learning to help serve students as far away as Hawi and Naalehu, Morton said.
“We want Palamanui to be out there aggressively identifying needs and delivering it to the community,” Morton said.
The four-year colleges in the system will also be doing their part to bring programs to the new campus, UH President David Lassner said. Tuition alone does not cover the cost of any program in the UH system, so collaborations are important, he said.
“We need an economy of scale to pull it off,” Lassner said. “It’s really important that we come together.”
The Shidler College of Business may offer its executive MBA program at Palamanui, Morton said. The nursing program — on hiatus for a year while administrators grapple with extremely low graduation rates — will be offered again in 2016 at the new center.
Palamanui’s director Kenneth Fletcher said the college has launched an aggressive publicity campaign.
“We’re going to be much more accessible, much more visible going forward,” he said.
The amount of federal grant money available to Hawaii’s community colleges increased recently from $8 million to more than $30 million through an aggressive campaign to get students to take advantage of the funding, Morton said.
However, because of tight fiscal constraints at the state level generally, no planning money for additional phases of Palamanui was gained this year.
“We’ll come back,” Morton said. “But for that to work, the first phase has to work. The classes have to be filled. They need to be bursting at the seams. There needs to be pressure that we need a new building.”
Morton explained that Palamanui will not be a stand-alone campus, due in large part to the expense of achieving and maintaining accreditation. Instead, the center will be a branch campus under Hawaii Community College’s accreditation.
“If you’re a stand-along accredited college, you’re obligated to have a whole layer of bureaucracy on top of what is going on in the classroom,” Morton said. “Where does it go from here? Let’s see what happens with the students. We will watch for what else we need to make this grow.”