Barton Community College President Dr. Marcus Garstecki and Dr. Narren Brown, Director of Institutional Effectiveness, presented a tag-team report on the college’s strategic plan to the BCC Board of Trustees Tuesday afternoon. 

Dr. Garstecki noted that Dr. Brown was hired in April as development of the plan was in mid-stream.

“This report is going to look a little different than the ones you are used to seeing,” Dr. Garstecki said. “We brought the plan to you two months ago for your approval and it was approved, but we thought it was important this month to kind of put a bow on the planning process that has happened this past year.

“When it comes to strategic planning, our top priority is the mission. We make sure that everything we do is in alignment with the mission. Student success is very much in the forefront — many of the initiatives that we shared with you back in April drive so much of what we do in terms of decisions we make, as far as what priorities we’re going to have within the plan.

“Accreditation is up there at the top, with any of our program accreditors, to make sure we are in alignment with those expectations. Of course the Kansas Board of Regents have their own strategic plan and as we were developing our new plan, we were referencing to make sure we were in alignment; not that everything is going to be the same, but we want to make sure that we’re striving for outcomes that are going to mesh with the expectations the Board of Regents have that we get from Topeka.”

Moving forward

“We talk about the mission and how critical that is to what we do every day. So, we take pieces of that mission statement and make sure that they align with our strategic goals so we can demonstrate that we are working toward that. They align with our core priorities and have a KPI metric that shows our progress. HLC (Higher Learning Commission) criteria will also be changing this fall, so we will make some adjustment when you see this next year.

“By the time we get to this point next year, we will have more; there will be a couple changes that we’re making that maybe are no longer relevant to the work we are doing. We will have more metrics to share with you at that point.”

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Dr. Brown presented several of the college’s KPIs through a series of graphics that showed recent progress from cohort and non-cohort data collected over the past five years.

“When we think about measures, there are two types: non-cohort and cohort,” he said. “Non-cohort means that I’m taking a point in time, or a time window, such as an academic year. One of those measures is head count. That measures how many unique students that we have. Head count is important in measuring a strategic plan priority. A student might have one head count, but in enrollments, he’d be in here three times because he took three classes; that’s how enrollments work.

“If you look at the progress toward 2025, we’re going up. That replicates in credit hours.

“So this shows that as a student progresses, we start talking about success.”

Brown noted that through and immediately following the pandemic, the measures were below average, but recently are trending upward. 

The cohort measures include aspects of starts and finishes, retention, and completions (degrees awarded).

“So what this shows is that the more we can retain students, the more they can be successful, the more likely they are to graduate.”

Dr. Garstecki noted that looking forward, the college’s executive leadership team will be meeting in mid-July to examine initiatives, problems and goals.

They are in the process of forming a Strategic Enrollment Committee to take a deeper look at enrollment data to include location, programs, successes and challenges.

“We did have a period of time a couple years ago where our enrollment was dropping, but over the past three years, we’re heading in the right direction,” he said. “We are going to see fewer and fewer traditional high-school graduates across the state from about now until about 2040. So, for the next 15 years or so, we want to make sure we are doing our best with that group of students, as well as continue to have programs for non-traditional students.”