Lexington Herald-Leader opinion page
Kentucky’s Community and Technical College System is providing Kentuckians with more opportunities than ever before.
Though the community colleges have traditionally focused on academic transfer programs, and the technical colleges have historically been geared toward technical and industrial training, those missions are being blended into a common focus: to serve students, business, industry, and the community in the most efficient and productive ways possible.
The AP article piqued my interest.
The writer profiles a student in Pittsburgh who had difficulty in transferring credits from a technical institute to a baccalaureate degree granting institution. In Kentucky, as opposed to Pennsylvania where the story focused, there is great success in transferring community and technical college credits to baccalaureate degree granting institutions.
Ashland Technical College, for example, has an articulation agreement for six programs, which offer complete transfer credit to Morehead State University toward degrees in Industrial Technology and Human Sciences. Similar articulations have been established across the commonwealth.
When planning a college education, the student and his or her family should ask questions of both the community and technical college, and the transfer college or university. They should compare checklists and seek guidance from academic advisors to ensure that the student is taking the correct course work at each, in order to graduate with an associate and then a baccalaureate degree in a reasonable amount of time.
In KCTCS, doing what we have always done isn’t good enough any more, providing better educational opportunities for our students, our local businesses, and our communities. We know education pays, and we work hard to help students become successful graduates, with as many opportunities as possible.
Greg Adkins is president of Ashland Community College and chief executive officer of the KCTCS Ashland District.
Bowling Green Daily News
More than 80 students gathered in a standing-room-only conference room Wednesday to learn the ropes for starting school at Bowling Green Technical College.
Wednesday’s orientation was one of six the staff at the college puts on before school starts.
Irene Meisel, dean of student affairs, said she uses the orientations to acquaint new students with the polices and procedures of the college in a way that won’t bore them to sleep.
“I try to make it light for them and enjoyable,” Meisel said.
The students filled out paperwork and received student handbooks.
Meisel said she likes to keep the groups fairly small.
“My intent is to give them a personal welcome,” she said.
The orientation introduces students to the college atmosphere so that when classes start, the new environment isn’t as overwhelming, Meisel said. These students may feel a little more comfortable approaching Meisel and others on campus if the student has a problem.
“I try to break down those barriers of intimidation,” Meisel said.
Morgantown resident Linda Coleman sat through orientation Wednesday. She’ll be taking 17 hours this semester, working toward a new career. Coleman lost her job when Sumitomo closed recently.
The orientation helped her get ready for classes.
“It showed me what I need to keep up with,” Coleman said.
Scott Bruce of Beechmont came to the college once to get a better job at Logan Aluminum. He decided to come back again to get an even better job.
“They’re helping me come back to school,” Bruce said. He said the company has adjusted his schedule so that he can attend classes.
Bruce has one semester to go.
“I’m ready to get it over with,” he said.
The orientation also is good for students who have been out of school for a while, Meisel said.
“I believe in them,” she said. “I just want them to believe in them.”
Orientations continue today and Friday.
The Snitch crime magazine
By Michael Jackman
SNITCH Contributing Writer
Michael Foley is building a barbecue pit in the late-morning heat.
The lean, muscular blond is stripped to his T-shirt and khaki pants. Though
sweating, Foley seems genuinely content as he deftly scoops up mortar with a
trowel and butters a brick.
Cattle wander in the fields nearby. The air is thick with humidity and the smells
of burnt grass, cattle manure, ozone from the high-tension wires and sun-baking
bricks.
Larry Johnson admires Foley’s work.
“Think you can move it to my house?” he says.
“Think you can get me out to put it in?” replies Foley, who, though just a stone’s
throw from a rolling Kentucky field, is kept away from it by a 14-foot high
fence, complete with electronic sensors and topped by razor wire. Foley is inmate
number 119451/156278 at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Ky.,
and he’ll be here for a while. He’s serving a 15-year sentence for rape.
Johnson may not be able to get Foley out, but if his work goes well, he may
be able to keep Foley from coming back in.
“I’m attempting to put the prisons out of business,” he says.
Johnson, 48, tall, bearded and upbeat, is the principal of this joint’s education
program.
He absorbs Foley’s rejoinder and continues the tour, which has already moved
through the hangar-like electrical, carpentry and automotive classes, to this
masonry class.
Inmates move about freely, relaxed, working independently or in teams, or listening
to their teachers. In the carpentry class, one works on a bathroom cabinet.
Another sweeps up wood shavings, while a third perfects a sleigh-bed to die
for.
Officers are scarce in the classrooms, and despite the guard towers, the fencing
and the state-mandated khaki uniforms, the surroundings aren’t Alcatraz-oppressive.
“I have tried to make this feel and look like a school and not a prison,” Johnson
says.
Coincidentally, like many schools, this institution is bulging at the seams.
Built in 1981 and designed to hold 486 inmates, Luther Luckett now has a population
of 1,040.
That prisons are overcrowded is no surprise. But the hard figures are shocking.
According to Bureau of Justice statistics, 1.3 million adults were doing time
in state and federal prisons in 2000. Then add in the number in jail, on parole
or probation and the figure soars to 6.5 million — half a million more people
than live in the entire state of Indiana.
Luckett, a medium-security prison, houses sex offenders, murderers and every
other type of felon except those on Death Row in Eddyville. Most of Luckett’s
offenders, like those at every other prison, have something in common that people
tend to forget — eventually they will be coming home.
Warden Larry Chandler, 60, a straight talker from Trimble County, puts it this
way: “They’re all coming soon to a Wal-Mart near you.”
This being the case, cautions the white-haired, bespectacled
warden, “You have to prepare them to go back and do something or they’re just
a drain on society in a different way.”
That’s the major argument in favor of education programs, to provide criminals
with the skills and the smarts to stay out of the revolving door.
“In here,” Chandler quips, “we deal with the four R’s — reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic
and recidivism.’”
Experts agree that education lowers the recidivism rate, that is, the percentage
of criminals who, after their release from prison, wind up behind bars again.
“Education is the only thing that there is substantial evidence showing it reduces
recidivism,” says California professor David Werner, director of the University
of La Verne’s Educational Programs in Corrections (EPIC) and author of Correctional
Education: Theory and Practice. “The more education an inmate gets, the less
his chance of his returning to prison.”
The latest research continues to support this view.
Last year’s “Three-State Recidivism Study,” conducted by the Correctional Educational
Association and funded by a grant from the Department of Education, compared
re-arrest rates of inmates released from Maryland, Minnesota and Ohio prisons
between 1997 and 1998. The study found that “correctional education significantly
reduced long-term recidivism” 29 percent for the prisoners studied.
But evidence notwithstanding, the national outlook for prison education is bleak.
Says Werner, “I have come to the absolute stunning conclusion that almost everything
that has happened to prison education since 1990 has been depressing because
it has been a movement almost continually downhill.”
Most prisons have kept literacy and GED programs, Werner notes, but that’s small
consolation.
What he finds especially troubling is the lack of post-secondary programs that
flourished between the passage of the Higher Education Act in 1965, and 1994.
The HEA created Pell grants, and prisons took advantage of them. But the Violent
Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by President Clinton in 1994,
took Pell grants away from felons.
“My personal opinion is that was a mistake,” says Chandler. “We have to ask,
‘What are we accomplishing? Is mandatory sentencing working? What do we need
to do?’ Education has to be high on everyone’s agenda.”
Without Pell grants, both the bottom and the bottom line dropped out of prison
education. All but eight of the 350 programs shut their doors, teachers were
laid off, and inmates left prison not much more educated than when they arrived.
Kentucky’s correctional institutions are among the few in the country that still
offer college programs.
All the post-secondary associate-degree and technical-diploma and certificate
programs in Kentucky prisons, as well as its GED and adult basic education programs,
are administered by the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS).
Bryan Armstrong, KCTCS director of public relations, says the college system
spends $6.3 million of its $410 million annual budget on its 12 prison programs,
covering salaries for 80 full-time faculty and about 20 staff, as well as equipment
and classroom costs. The facilities themselves are the responsibility of the
Department of Corrections, as is financial aid.
In 2001, KCTCS enrolled 1,359 inmates in technical programs and about 3,500
in adult education programs. Another 450 were taking courses leading to associate
degrees. That’s about 10 percent of the KCTCS students enrolled in credit courses.
“All that is at no cost to the taxpayer,” Chandler says.
Well, not exactly, explains Keith Bird, KCTCS chancellor. “Funding is a combination
of state and federal funding. You can’t say that there’s no taxpayer dollars,
because it ain’t true.”
More to the point, he says, is that no taxpayer money is used to provide financial
aid for inmates.
“That’s the hot issue,” Bird says. “So what you get is people being sensitive
and saying, ‘No, we’re not spending taxpayers’ dollars per se on people who
have committed a crime.’”
It may be just a matter of semantics, but it keeps emotions at bay, apparently,
at a time when the country is in a mood to punish and not to rehabilitate.
“We focus on making the bars better,” says Chandler, who is designing a prison
that will open in 2004 in Elliott County. His new prison, the warden insists,
will have “a hell of an education program.”
What the public doesn’t realize, Chandler says, is that educating prisoners
to get on with their lives saves the taxpayers big bucks. Incarceration costs
Americans $47 per day, he points out.
Werner estimates that his EPIC program, which operates in a California juvenile
facility, costs about $100,000 a year but saves taxpayers $500,000 a year.
“However, if people out on the streets who don’t know anything about the program
start hearing that people in prison are getting a college education, they get
unhappy,” he says.
As long as the public rejects the idea of giving prisoners financial aid to
go to school, the inmates have to pay their own tuition, which in Kentucky runs
$175 per three hours, plus $20 good-faith money. Inmates can pony up out of
their taxpayer-funded salaries — almost all inmates are assigned prison jobs
that pay, on average, a whopping 75 cents per day — or prisons can find some
other way to fund their tuition.
“We have found some creative ways of getting funds and getting these guys some
education,” says Johnson, the education boss at Luther Luckett.
One of those “creative ways” is staffer Gaye Holeman, the Jefferson Community
College liaison. “She beats the bushes to try to find money to get scholarships
for the guys,” Johnson confides.
There’s also a modest scholarship fund, taken from canteen money. A canteen
is a small store where the prisoners can buy snack foods, sodas, cigarettes
and other items. In fact, the day of the tour, the canteen computer crashed
while a line of prisoners waited outside in the heat, causing a small crisis
for the warden.
Chandler says the prison has raised $17,000 so far to help pay the costs of
education.
Back at the masonry wall, Stephen Foster — he’s heard all the jokes before,
thank you — a graduate of the GED program, helps Foley level bricks while relaying
two of the program’s important benefits from the inmate’s perspective: staying
occupied and staying out of trouble.
“You’re tired and wore out when you get out (of class),” he says. That means
he’s too weary to get himself in a mess. “It’s easy to get in trouble around
here,” he admits.
The chief forms trouble takes are fights and write-ups resulting from infractions.
Infractions can be minor, such as failing to wear the required ID badge, or
major, such as refusing to obey an order. Consequences range from warnings,
or, for big trouble, to being placed in “segregation” (solitary confinement),
or even having time added to your sentence.
Foley pipes in, “Jobs like cleaning the bathroom don’t keep you busy all day
long.” But after the class, he says, “I take a shower and I’m ready for bed.”
Chandler echoes this ancillary benefit of the education efforts. “Inmates behave
when they’re involved in some kind of program.”
In the GED preparation class taught by Roy Holladay, an infectiously chipper
man dressed in a crisp white shirt and tie, Adam Alli, originally from the Sudan
in Africa, tells what the program means to him.
“Through Mr. Holladay, I find more life in me. I don’t feel like I’m in prison,”
said Alli, who, when not studying, pursues a prison hobby: crafting picture
frames from cardboard and glue.
Holladay, like most teachers at Luckett, whose salaries start at a modest $31,700,
likes his job.
“This is the best I’ve ever had it in my life,” he confesses. “I love my students.
They’re hard workers. Ready to learn, quiet, respectful.”
Construction and carpentry teacher John Shelbourne, 45, looks like a guy you’d
have in a voc-ed class, with his ruddy, sunburnt face, blond mustache, loafers,
jeans and checked shirt. But he wouldn’t trade his time at Luckett for a public
school job.
“We don’t have lunchroom duty, parents, open houses,” he says, ticking off the
pluses of prison.
Nor does he have any behavior problems. The threat of write-ups or losing the
privilege of taking classes is a major deterrent. Also effective for dealing
with disruptions is a surprising threat for these hardened cons, Shelbourne
reveals:
“If you don’t straighten up I’m gonna call your mother.”
Education proceeds stepwise, based on inmate testing, from elementary literacy
courses, to the GED, and then either to technical or associate degree programs.
As incentive, with each educational milestone earned, Kentucky statutes allow
the inmate to reduce his sentence by 60 days, what’s called educational “good
time.”
Before being allowed into the two-year, six-hour-a-day technical program, students
must test to at least a 10th grade, fifth-month reading and math level and must
have already earned a high school diploma or GED.
In addition, they must be getting out within three to five years. That rule
is simply practical.
“Technology changes,” Shelbourne says. “Plus, there’s a learning curve.”
But any inmate doing any kind of time — even life — can earn an associate degree
if he qualifies. Because the degrees are accredited, and granted by the KCTCS,
they can be applied to any state college or university program.
Though Luther Luckett’s academic and technical programs may look like school,
this is, after all, a prison. That means there are lots of rules and restrictions.
For instance, although the automotive course has computers, you won’t find any
with e-mail or access to the Internet.
Several times a day, the prison does a head count. If the count is off, classes
will be late, says Johnson. And of course, if there are lockdowns — periods
when prisoners are confined to their cells — there are no classes.
“Security is numero uno,” he notes, adding that, at Luckett, “We have fog days
instead of snow days.” Which is to say that there’s no school when it’s foggy
outside, lest the students be tempted to become fugitives.
Tools are strictly accounted for. If not all tools checked out are checked back
in, no one leaves. Nor will you find any chemistry classes on the curriculum.
“We’re talking about people who can make hooch out of nothing,” explains Cindy
Hall, the prison’s public information officer.
Johnson adds that if two inmates had a beef, one might throw acid in the other’s
face, or maybe an inmate would steal acid to try to dissolve a lock.
“We think security, he thinks school,” Hall says with affection of the principal
and his efforts to improve education. “We have to try to find a balance.”
Since coming to Luckett in November 1999, Johnson, with Chandler’s help, has
more than doubled enrollment, from 175 to 380 students.
“I use all the incentives at my discretion to get inmates to go to school,”
says the warden, who himself is working toward a master’s degree in Justice
Administration from the University of Louisville.
Whatever the studies conclude about education in prison, for the teachers in
the trenches, the best evidence is their success stories.
Automotive technology instructor Dennis Lawrey says that several of his graduates
have gotten jobs.
“And none of them have come back to prison yet,” he adds.
He won’t reveal names, but Lawrey notes that one former student-inmate is a
mechanic supervisor at a large corporation, and another, who had been in and
out of jail for 20 years, now runs maintenance for a hotel chain.
As for the national attitude toward prison education, the pendulum may be starting
to swing away from bars and back toward books.
“One thing I think may fuel a bright future for prison education, and that is
money,” says Werner of the University of La Verne.
“The states are spending more and more money incarcerating people. If people
start realizing all this money that people are spending on prisons, they’ll
want to make them more effective so that people won’t go back.”