New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently named the New York Forward Re-Opening Advisory Board to help guide the state's re-opening strategy. The advisory board includes more than 100 business, community and civic leaders from across the state. SUNY Orange President Dr. Kristine Young is serving on the board. She spoke with WAMC’s Hudson Valley Bureau Chief Allison Dunne.
She says summer classes will be online, and a decision about the fall will come around June 1. SUNY Orange will recognize its Class of 2020 with an online Virtual Celebration of Graduates event planned for 4 p.m., Thursday, May 21.
Westchester Community College President Dr. Belinda Miles and Vassar College President Elizabeth Bradley were also named to the Re-Opening Advisory Board.
I was very honored to be asked to this advisory board with seven other presidents of higher education institutions across the state, one of four community college presidents. So I think that indicates something about the role of community colleges in the state of New York. And the value that the governor places on the asset, that we will be in the reopening of New York and I have some ideas about what we can contribute to the reopening and the reimagining of New York.
What might be those ideas?
Well, I would argue that we have the infrastructure, both the physical infrastructure as well as the employee infrastructure. So we don't have to stand up an enterprise to help New York's recovery in a variety of ways.
Any other ideas?
You know, I've been thinking, you know, not going out into the community, like many other people, limited visits. And I think, you know, the one touch I have is moving into supermarkets and pharmacies and we see how they have had to respond very quickly from an infrastructure point of view and a procedure point of view of how they interact with customers. And every business in New York is going to have to think about doing that, their processes and their infrastructure. So can community colleges play a role in helping businesses train their employees to create that infrastructure, to learn the processes, to imagine the processes and then to share those, communicate those things to their customers, so everyone is operating safely in our new environment?
She says it would be a general short term noncredit behavior modification training program to offer throughout the SUNY system that may evolve into a field down the road. Meantime, young hopes that as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, more turn to SUNY Orange yet she knows there are others for whom college is out of reach financially.
We hope that it's a silver lining, opportunity for community colleges to capture the attention of students and families and capture their imaginations and say, hey, we've always been here. We've always been high quality. We've always been affordable. And maybe this is a semester or two, that we become a choice for you. I've seen articles in too many newspapers and media outlets that I really respect talking about students taking a gap year. There was one in the, I won't mention the outlets, but it really frustrated me that it talked about you know, maybe students, you know, take a year and hike the Appalachian Trail. And I want to come out of my seat and say like, why hike the Appalachian Trail when you can go to your community college and absolutely take accredited classes that will transfer up high quality. So it's too early to know if students will find us for that purpose, but we hope that some students will be able to give us a look. On the other hand, we worry that, you know, students who have been giving a look to us for many years, our you know, our first generation students, students who have been place bound, some older students who have commitments to family and work already, those may be students who have been disproportionately affected by the economic downturn that's associated with COVID-19. So we worry for them, that the community college that has always been there for them now may be out of their reach, financially.
There was a Facebook Live town hall with the Orange county executive and Congressman Patrick Maloney. And you know where I'm going and there were questions. And they both said they'd heard nothing about this. In fairness, someone had posed, saying SUNY Orange might be getting rid of their nursing program and their allied health program. And then someone piped in online saying she works there. And yes, that's absolutely true. What's happening?
Thank you for the opportunity. So just a few hours earlier, I had shared with the college community, you know, the college community, SUNY Orange, that values transparency and knowing what's going on. So I had shared with them earlier in the day that, you know, the state of New York was being transparent about not receiving, of course, all of the revenue it had projected for the new fiscal year and as a consequence, it might not be able to meet all of the expenditures that it had planned on, including what it had budgeted for it's higher education for SUNY system, including community colleges. So I had prepared an internal message for our college community about what the consequences could be for community colleges and specifically for SUNY Orange. And I was, you know, I was explicit, I was direct about the size of the possible impact for SUNY Orange and I was explicit about that, you know, the burden would be significant and shared. You know, I didn't want Academic Affairs thinking it was gonna be Student Affairs that might be carrying the burden. I didn't want Student Affairs thinking it was going to be Admin Services that was going to carry it. So I just named some programs by name as examples to try to hit home that this this was going to be this could be affecting everyone. And in just a couple of hours, I think some people misunderstood that I was calling out specific offices and programs for closure, and that is not what I was saying. I was trying to illustrate this is going to hit everyone because this is a very significant amount of money that would not be realized by SUNY Orange. So no, there have been no layoffs announced, there's been no program closures announced. I was trying to say for example, for example, and that is what I believe. I did watch the Facebook Live after I had heard about what had happened, and that is the explanation. So the first communications out of the state bar that we could anticipate up to up to the top line numbers up to 50% reduction in state allocation. So for our college, that means up to $6.9 million from our budget, which is about 10% of our budget, 11% of our budget.
