The 30-year-old portable classrooms known as the U-Village on the Santiago Canyon College campus are no longer meeting the needs of faculty and students who use them for a variety of classes. In addition to being old, the portable classrooms were damaged by the past winter’s rains and recent earthquakes, making them unsafe, said Jeannie G. Kim, president of SCC.
A plan is in place to decommission the U-Village, which means the campus community must re-evaluate its spaces and building needs now and for the future. The first step is relocating the programs that currently use the aging portable classrooms to other rooms on campus — no small task.
“We have quite a few classes and operations that are functioning from that location,” Kim said. “So we’re developing a plan. We have an entire campus task force that is working to figure out where some of these operations and classes will go onto the main campus.
“It will create a little bit of a crunch on the campus, but we are trying to explore every opportunity to be able to maximize and do some additional space utilization planning around all of that.”
The disruption may have positive consequences. “We now have the opportunity to revisit how the campus spaces are being used and plan for better uses for some,” said Denise Foley, acting Dean of Business and Career Education.
Fortunately, the shift will not happen overnight.
“The move will occur in stages,” Foley said, “and we do not anticipate a negative impact on the academics. In fact, for some programs, the move to new and better spaces will be an improvement of the facilities, so the academics should be positively impacted.
“Overall, we are looking forward to the move and are hopeful that it can be accomplished in a short time frame with as little disruption to all the programs and offices in the U-Village and entire campus as possible.”
Santiago Canyon College needs campus improvement and growth, according to Kim — specifically for the SCC Career Technical Education programs as well as the Veterans and Student Life Center — if the funding can be put in place.
“The RSCC District has been considering a bond,” she said. “The board of trustees, I hope, will be able to move forward on that decision in June. I’m hopeful we will be able to build a Career Technical Education center and a middle college high school, which would handle all of our medical occupations programs.”
Middle college high schools are schools that are located on college campuses with a traditional high school program as well as access to college classes in a specialized field.
Kim hopes to include a middle college high school near SCC’s Career Technical Education program that would emphasize workforce development related to medical occupations.
“We would have those high school students who are interested in these medical occupations,” Kim explained. As a part of their high school degree, the students could become certified as a nurse assistant or lab technician.
“They could also earn an associate’s degree and also get all of the college credits for their Cal-GETC requirements, a transfer ability to UCs or to the CSU,” she said. “They would graduate high school as rising juniors in college. We already have a program like that called the Early College Academy that we operate in partnership with Orange Unified School District out of Orange High School. So, we want to model it along those lines.”
Students who want to work upon graduating high school would be certified for jobs in hospitals, such as medical billing or medical coding, filling the need for workers in the medical field in Orange County.
“What we see is the proliferation of a lot of hospitals and a lot of medical centers — we’re becoming a real hub,” the president said. “All of them require a workforce, and we need to get students involved and excited about it from the time that they’re in high school. A lot of our students may not necessarily even be thinking about four-year institutions. But coming to a community college, going to a high school, that opens them up to occupations within the medical arena — not just doctors and nurses — that would benefit this community.”
That said, the immediate task is decommissioning the portable classrooms, which should begin in 2025, coinciding with the college’s 25th anniversary.
While envisioning hopes for the college’s immediate and distant future, Kim’s focus is on students. “What we’re looking at is to figure out all of our educational needs and ensure we’re supporting our students.”
