Parkland Updates

This update includes information on leadership changes, shrinking enrollment, and some local coverage highlighting the Parkland Staerkel Planetarium. First the updates on Parkland Board of Trustees and other leadership changes announced in December. In the first change there is some crossover news between the Parkland board and the UI Trustees, the News-Gazette explained a shift in leadership roles:

The board chairman for Parkland College is stepping down to take a job as secretary of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees...

As the ninth secretary of the university, Knott will be one of four officers of the Board of Trustees, reporting jointly to Board Chair Don Edwards and UI President Tim Killeen. He will coordinate agendas for meetings, maintain minutes and other board documents, respond to requests from the public, and provide assistance to trustees and other administrators...

[Parkland board] Vice Chairwoman Bianca Green will lead the process to fill the board vacancy.

Full article here with a lot of additional information on the people and positions. Parkland also had a press release here. In further changes at Parkland, the News-Gazette also covered a promotion of a dean to be in a position to succeed the retiring President of Parkland College:

A dean at Parkland College is being promoted as part of an executive transition plan for the retirement of President Tom Ramage in 2023.

Trustees promoted Nancy Sutton, dean of arts and sciences, to associate vice president for academic services effective Jan. 2, filling a position vacated when Pamela Lau was promoted to executive vice president in October. Trustees at that time named Lau as president-designee to succeed Ramage in 2023...

A search is underway to fill the dean’s post. Sutton will cover those duties in the interim and hopes to have someone in place by March.

More information at that full article here. Additional information from the latest Parkland Trustees meeting, including this promotion, at their press release here. More on the previous transition appointment of Lau in a press release from September of this year. The News-Gazette had coverage of the previous transition plan around the same time here, including some additional coverage by Tom Kacich here.

Tom Kacich also had some enrollment figures for Parkland in one of his Tom's Mailbag articles earlier this month:

Parkland’s enrollment decline is not out of the ordinary.

Illinois community college enrollment dropped from 347,277 in 2007 to 293,4517 in 2017, according to Illinois Board of Higher Education statistics.

Nationally, according to a recent report by the American Association of Community Colleges, since a peak enrollment in 2010, “total community college enrollment has dropped each fall, declining by more than 1 million students (14.4 percent) between 2010 and 2017.”

The most oft-cited reason for the falloff is the economy.

“Community college professionals frequently claim that the economy is an important driver of community college enrollments,” said the report. “Of particular note during the time period investigated is the Great Recession, which economists indicate began in December 2007. While the recession technically ended in the second quarter of 2009, solid job growth was not seen until 2011.”

Full Mailbag article here. This mailbag article also included some information on Parkland's time capsule at the Planetarium, to be opened the next time Halley's Comet comes around in 2061. This was in response to a question about another recent News-Gazette article highlighting the Staerkel Planetarium and its history on campus here.

Smile Politely had more on the Planetarium later that week, including a video segment and interview going behind the scenes:

In the 30+ years since opening, the planetarium has evolved alongside technology, replacing analog slides and practical effects with digital projectors and advanced imaging software. Nine computers work in-sync to produce images that can range from a drone view of the Parkland campus to a view of Jupiter’s southern pole. The centerpiece of the dome is a Zeiss M1015 star projector from Germany which is original to the planetarium and was the first of its type to be installed in the western hemisphere. Each of the stars projected on the dome has a dedicated light on the projector, for a total of 5,000 individual lights.

We spoke with planetarium director Erik Johnson to get a behind-the-scenes view of the planetarium’s operations and to experience the vivid imagery that takes you worlds away.

Full article and video segment here.