ULLIN (WSIL) -- Shawnee Community College announced its new president this week, with its Board of Trustees naming Dr. Tim Taylor as the school's 9th president. He spoke with News 3 Wednesday morning on the challenges ahead.
"One of the things I think is important for the college to do is to provide programs where students can get jobs regionally," explains Taylor on the positive impacts the college can have provide the community.
With his first day behind him, Dr. Taylor says the road ahead is looking busy, and exciting. He took time to visit with students and staff Wednesday morning, speaking with students on their areas of study and how they were getting along. Up until his appointment as president, making those meet-ups were all virtual.
"You could get a good sense, a strong sense the people here were just a great group of people to work with and a great team already," says Taylor, adding, "That makes your job as a president so much easier."
Taylor says aside from the current challenges of operating a school during a pandemic, the school's future is its enrollment. "If you look at the demographics for the five counties that Shawnee serves, we've lost about 10% of our populations since the 2010 census."
This translates into a decline in the number of high school students as well.
"It's a small community, a small community college, but we need to be connected to the community much stronger, much more strongly than we have been in the past," says Taylor. "That's going to be one of my area of focus, is to work on enrollment."
He says building stronger ties within the community, its people, employers, and politicians will also help improve job prospects in the region.
"That's one of the focuses that I think we'll be looking at in the future --what kind of opportunities are there, what can we do to connect with the economic development agencies so we have the programs that can support the new businesses that we're trying to attract," says Taylor. "Whether they're IT or bio-med or whatever they might be, we will do that."
Among his many appointments, Taylor previously served as the president of Frontier Community College in Fairfield, Illinois. He also served as president of Michigan's Oakland Community College, and as the dean of the Business and Technology programs at Richland Community College in Decatur, Illinois.
He takes the reigns from Dr. Kathleen Curphy, who served as interim president after the departure of Dr. Peggy Bradford.
