By JOHN J. SYGIELSKI

The General Assembly determines the next biennium of funding for Virginia’s community colleges as legislators develop the 2004-2006 budget in the weeks ahead. Community colleges need your help to educate legislators about the funding required to provide and grow educational programs and services to meet the changing needs of our communities.

Community colleges are the fastest growing segment of Virginia’s public higher education system with more than 85 percent of post-secondary students over the last two years coming to one of the 23 colleges in the state system. An excellent community college education costs about one-third the average of attending Virginia’s four-year institutions.

Over the next several years, thousands of additional students will seek enrollment in Virginia’s community colleges, including Lord Fairfax Community College. These include your workers, your high school students (through dual enrollment) and graduates, your neighbors, and even many of your family members and friends.

LFCC and the other 22 community colleges have open enrollment. With no restrictive entrance requirements, a student simply registers and participates in outstanding traditional and/or virtual learning experiences. In fact, because of open enrollment, LFCC enrollment has grown by double digits over the past several years. These students use LFCC and the other community colleges to transfer to advanced degree programs and for new job skills training, career certification, and continuing education.

Do you know that a degree from LFCC assures admission to many of our well-respected four-year institutions of higher education? Because of the faculty and staff commitment to “raising the bar” for our students (whose average age is approaching 30), students who start at LFCC (or any of the other Virginia community colleges) do as well at four-year institutions as those who entered four-year institutions directly from high school.

In 2003, our Virginia Community College System (VCCS) established the Dateline 2009 mandate requiring all community colleges grow to meet the needs of the Commonwealth. By 2009, we must be prepared to provide educational opportunities to 16,000 new students; increase non-credit workforce training by 80 percent for 225,000 citizens; and continue to serve our regions in new and expanding ways.

In this economy of unprecedented slow job growth, LFCC helps those whose plants closed and who have lost their jobs as companies “streamlined” to be more efficient. LFCC, through a couple hundred dedicated and underpaid full and part-time faculty and staff members, assists local employers, employees, and displaced workers as well as students securing their future careers in Page, Shenandoah, Warren, Frederick, Clarke, and Fauquier counties and the City of Winchester.

LFCC identifies and trains skilled workers so our local economies can continue to flourish again. Community colleges are there for employees to keep their skills current.

Let me tell you of just one from more than 7,000 people in our LFCC community. Laid off when her plant closed, she is retraining to work in the medical field, balancing full-time classes and hospital experience with managing her household of school-age children and her mother in poor health. Striving for an A average, she makes her children particularly proud, but needs financial aid to keep going for the two-year program. She represents so many in our college.

The General Assembly has to provide resource and student financial aid for LFCC (and the VCCS) to remain the high quality educational bargain we are for our citizens. Tell them.

LFCC and the community colleges throughout the state are all about access, opportunity, and excellence. We increase the availability of any time, any place programs and services for students of all ages. A recent study reports that LFCC returns $2.70 to our communities for every dollar received by the state. LFCC is one of the best returns you will ever get on your investment of tax dollars-bar none!

However, we need to be doing more and not less. To meet needs, we must build our programs and our off-site course offering to address our students/workforce needs. We must not ignore significant portions of our community and their traditional and non-traditional educational and training needs. But without additional funding, we may have to.

Assist us by asking our political leaders to support community colleges, the most cost-effective higher education programs and services in the state, to achieve the state mandate. Take a minute now and write, call, or e-mail.

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Reprinted from an editorial in the OPEN FORUM, Winchester Star, Monday, February 2, 2004. Open Forum is a column available to Star readers to address a subject of their choice. John J. Sygielski is president of Lord Fairfax Community College.