Martha Gilliland: Pima Community College is us

Join me in my New Year’s resolution. I promise to support my community college with my words, deeds and ideas.

Pima Community College is the key pathway for accelerating economic and social progress in this region. PCC can do the most to move the needle for my beloved Old Pueblo.

The Economic Outlook for our region says: “Better educated regions will win ... Tucson must focus on education.”

Of the students at PCC, 93 percent live here. PCC’s mission is student success. PCC educates students who need a refresher to enter college, students who are enrolled toward an associate’s degree or preparing for transfer to a bachelor’s degree and students in training for immediate jobs in the food industry, health professions, business, medical and aviation technologies to name a few.

The 7,100 students at PCC are in one or more of these tracks — all tracks lead to better jobs in Pima County, and the students stay here.

To be sure PCC is re-emerging from a rough patch.

In 2015, the state suddenly decided to withdraw all funding. Worse yet, an old 1980 state resolution is still in effect even though it is counter to good business practice. Known as the Expenditure Limitation, it allows spending money on buildings and land but not on personnel and new programs. Because it is tied to enrollment, it restricts investments in high-demand, high-wage, high-tech programs — the very programs we want.

The program aimed at students who need refresher work was eliminated in 2011. With the new administration of Chancellor Lee Lambert, it was re-established in 2013. The community college’s accrediting organization found PCC lacking in the consistency of course content, tracking student success and certain governance practices. PCC has the fixes underway. Time to support them.

We already know that educational attainment results in higher income levels that result in more tax revenue, better-educated children, less crime, less tax spending on welfare, Medicaid and other social services, more spending on retail goods and expansion of high tech jobs. That improvement produces further improvement in an ever-accelerating positive pattern.

Tucson lags the nation in educational attainment with only 75 percent of high school students graduating in four years.

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This is very old news. Yet we keep doing the same thing and nothing changes. The situation will be the same 10 years from now unless we act in a transformative manner.

We have a choice.

We can watch, wait, point to problems, be cynical and, thereby, assure the status quo.

Or we can engage, point to successes, be supportive, take some action and, thereby, change the outcome.

My resolution.

Every week I will share with friends a positive story about PCC. This is not trivial. Conversations are powerful forces for change. Each of us creates reality through our discourse. Discourse produces outcomes.

I will tell a member of the faculty, staff or administration that I value what he or she is doing and ask for a story about their work.

I will gently remind my friends, when they comment cynically about the past problems at PCC, that their negativity produces more negativity, and inhibits progress.

I will send a letter to my state legislators with the rationale to eliminate the Expenditure Limitation, and keep bugging them until they do.

Join me. PCC is us and it is up to us.