The N.C. Community College System and UNC System officially entered into a teacher prep uniform articulation agreement on Monday that has been years in the making Anna Pogarcic reports.

The agreement, system leaders say, will make education more accessible and affordable. It will allow students who have earned an Associate in Arts Teacher Preparation or an Associate in Science Teacher Preparation to smoothly transition to a UNC System school and earn their teacher’s license.

This is an effort to address the critical teacher shortage in the state, both system leaders said.

“We believe community colleges can be a part of the solution to the teacher shortage and assist in training teachers that not only come from our counties, but will remain in their communities once they graduate and become a certified teacher,” NCCCS President Thomas Stith said.

As of the agreement’s signing, 52 community colleges were participating alongside 15 UNC System schools.

This is one of the ways the two systems are collaborating to improve the transfer process, Stith said.

UNC System President Peter Hans highlighted the particular benefit this agreement could have for teachers from rural areas of the state.

“(Teachers are) making do the best they can, but that’s not enough for the young people of our state,” he said.

The two systems have agreements like this for other areas, like nursing, and Hans said he hopes to see more in the future.

“We’re serving the people of North Carolina,” Hans said. “That’s what the community college system exists to do — that’s what the university system exists to do.”

The teacher prep uniform articulation agreement goes into effect this fall.

The State Board met last week and took up several items of business, including an articulation agreement with the UNC system around early childhood education, Career and College Ready Graduates, and two recent audit reports.

The audit reports for Roanoke-Chowan Community College and Rowan-Cabarrus Community College received a fair amount of discussion from the Board, including a series of questions from Board members around the role of Trustees for the colleges, staffing, and more.

Here is a portion of the conversation around Roanoke-Chowan:

The auditor’s report for Roanoke-Chowan found that from August 2019 to August 2020, the college issued over 2,600 checks totaling $10.3 million with invalid signatures. These checks had digital signatures from the former president and controller, even though they were no longer employees.

“According to the former interim President,” the report reads. “She became aware of the invalid signatures in January 2020 after she filled the Controller position. However, the signatures were not updated until August 2020.”

Updating the signatures is the job of the CFO, a position that was vacant at the time.

Also last week, the House approved two appointments to the State Board. Anna reports:

Vice Chair Bill McBrayer has been reappointed, alongside M. Lee Barnes Jr. of Durham County. This will be McBrayer’s second six-year term. He is the human resources manager of Lexington Home Managers. Barnes has previously served on the Appalachian State University Board of Trustees and is the president and director of M.M. Fowler Inc., a corporation that owns and manages gas station convenience stores.

The two will serve until June 30, 2027. …

The Senate is expected to vote on two additional appointments this week.

My colleague Emily Thomas visited Haywood County in the immediate aftermath of Tropical Depression Fred. When her story published last Friday, around 20 people remained missing, more than 500 families were displaced, and tens of thousands were without power. As of Monday morning, five people were confirmed dead and one remained missing.

Emily captured the following quote from Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers that spoke to the spirit she saw on the ground, “As a paper town and a mill town, we know what it is to be down. We know how it is to fight back when the odds are against us. We have been here before. We will get through this. We will do it together.”

Emily also caught up with Haywood Community College leadership and staff:

“Because we’ve been in this ongoing crisis response mode … we were able to shift quickly,” said HCC president Shelley White.

The college got to work, reigniting their HCC Cares campaign to connect students with emergency financial assistance. Their COVID-19 response page now includes information for students and employees seeking additional resources.

With growing concern about the immediate personal and safety needs of students, HCC plans to survey students early next week and ask them to identify their current needs.

But the focus isn’t just on current needs. HCC is already thinking about getting students reengaged, knowing they will require ongoing support during this time.

“This has been a devastating event to parts of our county,” White said. “Some students may have an extra hardship right now … not being able to connect or even have power or access to technology.”

White told faculty to extend extra time on assignments to students if they need it…. In addition to supporting students and employees, HCC is also offering resources to the county.

For the full story on Haywood, click here. We will be documenting the recovery and rebuilding in the weeks and months ahead. If you have ideas or stories to share, please email us directly.

I am proud of our reporting all of the time. Our team relentlessly hits the road each week to document your stories, conduct research, and cover the meetings that matter to our education system — but I am really, really proud of my colleague Rupen Fofaria’s reporting on literacy and the science of reading over the last year.

We published two articles from Rupen last week that I wanted to particularly spotlight for you all.

The first piece, “Relationships and partnerships: How DPI and N.C.’s three higher ed systems are teaming up for literacy,” takes a look at how the UNC system, North Carolina’s private universities and colleges, and the community college system are each approaching literacy. As Rupen reports:

The UNC System is coalescing around a Literacy Framework for each of its 15 educator preparation programs, the NCICU is forming a task force to focus implementation at its 31 colleges of education, and the community college system is working as one unit to design a literacy class that will be required for its new teacher preparation degrees.

“It’s rare in education policy for all the ships to be rowing in the same direction,” UNC System President Peter Hans said. “But it feels as though that is the case. And I can’t think of a more important issue for everyone to be aligned.”

For more on the partnerships on this issue, check out Rupen’s piece.

Fifty-two of the state’s 58 community colleges will offer an associate degree in teacher preparation this fall — and the science of reading will be baked in to the courses:

“It has been fully developed by colleagues across the state who do have the knowledge and the expertise in the brain development and all of the great research around the science of reading,” said Cathy Collie-Robinson, director of the early childhood education program at Durham Tech. “In fact, the course is built around that. The very first module that they put out there was the science behind reading, and so I’m really excited for that.”

For more on the development of the teacher preparation programs, check out Rupen’s full article.

For all of Rupen’s reporting on this issue, click here.

The Belk Center at NC State provided an update on their work that we encourage you to read. As a reminder, their annual Dallas Herring Lecture is coming up this November. You may register here.

Gaston College and Johnson C. Smith University have reached an agreement to launch a new direct entry program called JCSU 2+2 Connect.

Nash Community College’s economic impact report from ESMI was written up in the local press — and the report “found that in fiscal year 2020, there was $86 million total added income in Nash County resulting from Nash Community College’s operational, student and alumni input.”

Pitt Community College will offer their first dental assisting program this year.

Rockingham Community College and UNC-Wilmington have also reached a deal providing students with “guaranteed admission to The University of North Carolina at Wilmington to those students who complete an associate in arts or associate in science degree with a cumulative grade-point average of 2.5 (on a 4.0 scale) in transferable, college-level coursework.”

Andrew Beal, one of our loyal Awake58 readers, reached out to share this piece on the role Vance-Granville Community College played in the career of a newly named elementary school principal.

Wake Tech announced a six-acre land donation to Wake County to provide room for more affordable housing: “Wake County and Wake Tech leadership announced today that the property, located at 0 Chapanoke Road in Raleigh, will be developed into multi-family affordable housing. Units will be one, two and three bedrooms, with 30% of units set aside for Wake Tech students who meet specified criteria. The property is located directly across from Wake Tech’s Public Safety Education Campus.”

Wayne Community College’s presidential search — and request for public input and transparency —remain in the news.

CCDaily.com takes a look at the state of campus child care during COVID-19. I know from my own travels that a number of community colleges have wrestled with the role of child care centers in recent years — and in some cases colleges have closed them outright. This piece explores some colleges across the country who have seen an increase in enrollment in child care centers during the pandemic — and colleges who are using federal funds to meet the demand.

This entire piece from CCDaily.com on early colleges and dual enrollment is worth your time, but I wanted to spotlight this piece in particular:

Education leaders are thinking about dual enrollment as the first step in a three-institution pathway, leading from high school, through a community college and then into a four-year institution, without skipping a semester or losing a single credit. Laura Douglas, president of Bristol Community College in Massachusetts, has been a pioneer in this area, particularly in connecting work done in career technical education and on to four-year engineering institutions, saving students thousands of dollars in tuition or student debt.

More specifically, community college leaders are using dual enrollment as a tool to break down the stigma about community college among high-, middle- and low-income students. Matt Reed, provost at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey, told us that the range of high schools that his institution works with for dual-enrollment programming enables the college to reach the full range of students who are potential attendees as well as their families.

For the full read, click here.