College trying to meet par

OCC is making significant changes this fall in hopes of preserving its accreditation.

Since June, OCC has been operating under a warning from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, part of the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges — the group that makes sure local colleges are up to widely accepted standards.

After a routine audit in 2007 and a follow-up review in the spring, the commission gave a few recommendations that must be followed if the school is to remove the warning and avoid a process that could ultimately strip the college of its accreditation.

The school must do a better job of measuring how well students do in classes and programs and let the students know how that will be done in their syllabus for the class.

Also, OCC officials must do a more thorough analysis that relies on specific statistics and other approved data when improving courses, student retention and enrollment.

Finally, OCC should overhaul its planning and budgeting so “instructional stakeholders” like faculty are kept more in the loop.

The school is working on all of them, and is well on track for a required progress report in March and full correction by June, OCC President Bob Dees said. Those stringent “learning outcomes” — somewhat similar to what No Child Left Behind requires in primary and secondary schools — are on track to appear on every syllabus by the spring, he said.

“We’ve been on a real heavy effort to put student learning outcomes on all the course outlines. We’re over 90% complete at this point. There are over 1,000 courses being updated that way, and the faculty has done a lot of hard work. We will have all that in place.”

Accreditation has even been a political issue, as Coast Community College District candidate Lorraine Prinsky — as well as trustee Jerry Patterson — criticized her opponent, incumbent Armando Ruiz, for what she called an attempt to keep news of the accreditation under wraps. Ruiz denied those allegations. Prinsky won her election, though there were other issues in the race.

As for issues of transparency, Dees said the school had already been putting committees in place to have more groups looking at how to allocate resources, but the accreditation committee saw them before they could prove they worked. This fall, even with state budget cuts looming, they’re up to speed, he said.

“I think this fall, for the first time, we’ve seen the results,” he said. “It’s a many-layered process, but it does require everybody take part, everybody pay attention. They can take part and get their two cents in when they make decisions.”

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at michael.alexander@latimes. com.