Dr. Oliver Young, President of Southwest Mississippi Community College, spoke at a recent meeting of the Southwest Mississippi Home Builders Association. He told of how well SMCC students do compared to others, and he informed the group of recent and upcoming projects of the college.
Young began his comments by saying: "The people in this area support that community college really well. But that community college not only is a very valuable asset to this area, it's a very important industry in this area, and it's going to be even more viable in the future, as to what the community college offers and how it's involved with what's going on in this area."
SMCC offers excellent academic transfer courses. "That has always been kind of the heart and soul of a community college, Young said. "Our students, whenever they transfer to the universities, do as well as, or better than, the students who start at the universities. A lot of people don't realize that. A lot of people spend a lot more money to send their children to the universities." SMCC has many students for whom it costs very little or nothing to attend school there, depending on their ACT scores and scholarships.
Young read from a Mississippi State University report issued April 23, 2008, in which SMCC transfer students there had an overall GPA of 3.02. MSU native students had an overall GPA of 2.90. Young then read from a community college state board report that compared community college students across the state. Speaking of SMCC students who transferred to universities in Mississippi, Young said "our percentage of students graduating from the universities was the third highest, out of fifteen community colleges in the state." In addition, the percentages of the top two community colleges were not much higher than that of SMCC.
Several major foundations and research industries have rated the Mississippi community college system. "We are always rated in the top three in the nation in the quality of education that's provided, especially with the limited resources we have," Young said.
SMCC offer day and evening classes, even virtual classes. "We have somewhere around 70,000 students enrolled in virtual classes in the state of Mississippi," Young said. SMCC offers their own virtual classes, and SMMC students can also enroll in virtual classes offered by other community colleges. Japanese is one virtual class taught at SMCC. So someone working at the Toyota plant, for example, who needs to know Japanese for their job, can enroll in the virtual Japanese class at SMCC.
"We also offer twenty-eight or twenty-nine career and technical programs," Young said. "These students can go directly to work when they finish the program. They can either earn a certificate or an A.S. degree. We are working with the universities to get them to accept more and more of the technical courses to be applied toward a B.S. degree."
SMCC also provides extensive workforce training. "We trained over 15,000 citizens in Southwest MS last year in various aspects of their profession, anything from computer training to special skill training that their industry requires," Young said. "Workforce training is basically paid for by the state of MS. We just have to develop a project, and the state will pay for the instructor and the material. Many times the company itself has to find the instructor, but the state will pay for the instructor."
The school also has an Institute for Learning in Retirement. "We have about 225 or 250 or more retired citizens in the program," Young said. "Some of them may come out and take a short course, or computer training, or art. They come and have lunch with us the first Wednesday of every month during the school year, and they'll have a banquet, and plan trips to go to New Orleans or Mobile or different areas."
SMCC has many extracurricular activities, including a really good stage band and marching band, student government organizations, Phi Theta Kappa, and BSU (Baptist Student Union), which recently had one of the highest numbers of students agreeing to serve as summer missionaries. "They were like in the top three in the country," Young said. "They had twelve students who went on summer mission work in 2007. This past year we had nineteen students involved in summer missions."
Within the last three years that Dr. Young has been president of the college, they have accomplished several physical improvements. "We have finished the renovation of the science building," Young said. "If you haven't been in the science building, we'd love for you to come and go through it, because it is a very fine science building for a community college. We have some outstanding instructors there, and we are just very pleased with our science department. We used to house our math instructors in the science building also, but when we had to move in the Brumfield Building when our science department was being renovated, we decided to just leave our math department in the Brumfield Building."
"We've also renovated our fine arts building, and we're still in the process of doing some renovating. We've put in a new lighting system, new sound, new carpet, and we're in the process of completing the classrooms and hallway on the north side of the building."
"We've also renovated the humanities building. This summer we went through the entire building, painting and replacing the carpet with tile, and just really improved the appearance of the building. We've completed some renovation to the old cafeteria/student union building. We renovated the old bookstore area and made it into a massage therapy area. We renovated part of the building for our occupational safety and health program. They also converted a storage room into the campus security headquarters. We're in the process of renovating the rest of that building to house all of our health occupation programs, so that we can move our process technology program into the H.T. Huddleston Career and Technical Building."
The college also did some renovation of the baseball field. They removed the wire fencing from around the backstop, poured a really nice concrete area around the outside, and put up netting, instead of fencing. "Our baseball program," Young said, "is going to do really well."
The school also built a new women's softball field. "That was badly needed," Young said. "We were playing at the Summit Little League sometimes, and sometimes down at McComb and different places. That's been a nice addition to our athletic program. We also built a soccer field. This is the second year of the school's soccer program. We also built a new track. Last year was our first year to have a track program. For the first year, we had a very successful year. The women's team went to the national junior college championship and placed sixth, I believe. And we had one young lady that won first in the 100-meter dash and the 200-meter dash, and ran a winning relay, and she was voted the most outstanding female athlete at the NJCAA national championships, so we were very pleased with that. And our men's team, they ended up placing, I think, eleventh or twelfth, but we didn't have as many male athletes that qualified."
"The young lady that won the NJCCA title also participated in the Olympics this year. Her name is Sheniqua Ferguson, and she's actually from the Bahamas. This young lady has a lot of promise."
The school is in the process of building a nice new entranceway. "We will have a security post there," Young said. "We need to control entrance to that campus. There's too much going on in the world, and the students are pretty vulnerable. It's all about protecting those students and keeping undesirable people off the campus."
The other project the college has in the planning stage is a new men's dormitory. "Our men's dormitories are at least thirty years old," Young said, "and we looked at renovating those dormitories, and the cost was going to run somewhere around six million dollars. The board felt that would be putting good money into an old structure that really would not serve the purpose for our students. We would like to have more control over our dormitories. Our men's dormitories are motel-style, and the students pretty much have freedom to go and come, and it's hard to keep up with what's going on, if someone is into some kind of meanness or devilment. The projected cost of a new 150-bed dormitory, just for the building itself, is like nine million dollars. The legislature is not allocating a lot of bond money, so it may be a while before we can get enough funds, unless we can get some local support and get our supervisors to commit funding to help us and pay for it over, say, a twenty-year period. That's what most of the community colleges are doing. It's more difficult for our counties to provide us that local support because we do not have the tax base some other areas have."
One of the new programs SMCC has started in the last couple of years is clinical massage therapy. Carl Ray told Young about an excellent massage therapy program in Florida, and Young sent some people to Pensacola to look at it. At a trustees' meeting on the Mississippi Coast this summer, Young also noticed a full-page article in the Sun-Herald about the benefits of massage therapy after chest surgery. "When therapists massage those muscles, instead of contracting and pulling against each other, they relax, and the healing process is speeded up tremendously," Young said. "The massage therapy process is becoming more and more clinical." Students could take what they learn at SMCC in massage therapy and continue in equine therapy making a great income massaging racehorses. In the Olympics, Young said, "just about every one of those premier athletes had their own massage therapist" for their horse. "SMCC is the only public community college in Mississippi that offers massage therapy. The for-profit schools offer massage therapy at a cost of somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars. Our tuition cost is around two thousand. So we've had a number of students from Jackson and even north of Jackson to come down and enroll in our massage therapy program."
The school also began an occupational safety and health program, "because no one else in the state is offering that program, and we knew there is a larger and larger demand for it," Young said. They also added a medical billing and coding program, which is needed in this area. They have also doubled their LPN program. They had one LPN program to start in August, and another in January. "We always have a waiting list," Young said. "In fact, that waiting list is like a year to a year and a half." They have also increased their ADN program from 110 to 130. They do not have available clinical staff to increase the ADN program further at this time, unless they offer ADN courses on the weekend and at night.
The latest program the school has begun is process technology, an offering for the oilfield industry. With the expansion taking placing in the oilfield industry, Young says they expect that program to really grow. "We were very fortunate to locate four individuals that together have about 150 years of oilfield experience." When SMCC aligned with a company in Louisiana that provides all the training for the oilfield industry, the SMCC instructors went to Louisiana and trained with them.
SMCC is also working on a proposal for a regional emergency training facility. They have been to a couple of facilities to explore the opportunity. Young said, "Texas A&M has a premier emergency training center, including 50-something acres that they call ‘Disaster City.' Almost any kind of disaster you can think of, they have specialized training for it. We're going to pursue every potential resource we can to try to acquire the funding necessary to develop a regional training facility. That would bring in a lot of people, and they would have to stay in the motels, and buy their food, etc., and they have to receive their training usually on an annual basis." These would be people like firemen, police, National Guard--any number of different professions. "It may take us a year or two," Young said, "but we feel like it is well worth the time and investment."
