NWACC President Leaves Legacy

Peers Praise Departing Paneitz’s Tenure

Becky Paneitz, president of NorthWest Arkansas Community College, is photographed in front of the student center June 12 at NWACC in Bentonville. Paneitz will retire at the end of the month. The student center was named after Paneitz in the June 10 Board of Trustees meeting.

Becky Paneitz, president of NorthWest Arkansas Community College, is photographed in front of the student center June 12 at NWACC in Bentonville. Paneitz will retire at the end of the month. The student center was named after Paneitz in the June 10 Board of Trustees meeting.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

BENTONVILLE — NorthWest Arkansas Community College is almost unrecognizable from what it was 10 years ago.

The main campus has added five new facilities, including a student center and a parking garage. The college also has opened satellite centers in Washington County and elsewhere in Benton County, and it’s in the process of building its first permanent facility in Washington County.

Enrollment has grown by several thousand students. Tuition and fees have increased, too.

At the center of this rampant change stands Becky Paneitz, the college’s president since August 2003. Paneitz, 61, is retiring after this week. Evelyn Jorgenson will take over July 1.

Paneitz leaves a long list of accomplishments along with some admitted mistakes. She has made both friends and enemies, but she appears satisfied with her overall performance and her legacy.

“My whole thing in this next phase of my life is to marry my passion with my talents,” Paneitz said. “My passion is caring about people like the students we have here, and people who are perhaps underserved. I know I can connect with them.”

The Next Level

The search for the college’s second president began after the first one, Bob Burns, announced in July 2002 his intention to retire. The board of trustees chose Paneitz in April 2003.

The Other 2003 Finalists

Where They’ve Gone

Sixty-six people applied for the president’s job at NorthWest Arkansas Community College when it became available in late 2002.

The college’s board interviewed four candidates: Ann Alexander, Steven Jones, William Roden and Becky Paneitz. On April 30, 2003, the board hired Becky Paneitz as the second president in the college’s history. Paneitz will retire at the end of this month. But whatever happened to those other three finalists?

Ann Alexander

• 2003 Job: President of Wytheville Community College in Wytheville, Va.

• After NWACC: Alexander left Wytheville in 2006 to join the faculty at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., where she led a master’s degree program in community college administration and a doctoral program in educational administration. She retired last year and moved back to her hometown of Okmulgee, Okla., about 40 miles south of Tulsa, Okla.

• NWACC Thoughts: “I thought the people there were really, really wonderful. Some of the faculty I got to talk to, you could tell they were really student-oriented. I knew (Paneitz) would do a great job.”

• Steven Jones

• 2003 Job: Chancellor of the Phillips Community College District in Helena.

After NWACC: Jones became the 12th president of Amarillo College, a community college in Amarillo, Texas, in October 2003. His legacy as president at Amarillo includes a $68 million bond issue he helped get passed in 2007, which paid for construction of two buildings and renovation of existing classroom space. Jones died of cancer in February 2009 at 56; he was survived by his wife and two daughters.

• William Roden

• 2003 Job: Chancellor of Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge, La.

• After NWACC: Roden went on to hold different administrative positions in education, including two stints in the United Arab Emirates — first as director of a military/government language training institute, then as principal at the Institute of Applied Technology. He’s also been an associate dean at the College of Business at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee and director of a statewide charter online high school in California. Since 2011 he has been a faculty member at the California Southern University School of Law.

• NWACC Thoughts: “I thought it was neat. I liked (Bentonville). I got the tour of Walmart; that was an interesting experience looking at the infrastructure there. I was very, very impressed. It would have been a really good job. It’s too bad it didn’t work out. There are a lot of good things going on there.”

A chance encounter between two men on the East Coast helped lead Paneitz to Bentonville.

Ed Franklin, director of the Arkansas Association of Two-Year Colleges, was in Philadelphia during the summer of 2002 for a national conference for community college trustees. There he met Tony Zeiss, president of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, N.C., where Paneitz was vice president for instruction.

“Part of the reason I was there was to spread the word that we had an opening at NWACC,” Franklin said. “And (Zeiss) said, ‘I have just the person for you, and she happens to be from Arkansas.’”

Paneitz, an Arkadelphia native, was the only one of four finalists without experience as the chief executive at a higher education institution. Howard Slinkard, board chairman at the time, said Paneitz came across as very energetic.

“She had a great resume in terms of working under some top-notch chief executives,” Slinkard said. “And she had Arkansas connections. We thought that was important to know some of the history of higher education and the players in the state.

“One of the things we told (the candidates) was, we thought the college was positioned to elevate its status and its endeavors and its offerings. The cliche was, ‘take it to the next level,’ and we thought (Paneitz) could do that.”

“I think she’s done an excellent job. Her ability to raise money has been outstanding. That will be one of her legacies,” he said.

Enrollment has grown from about 4,900 to about 8,300 since Paneitz became president. Tuition also has increased, from $46 to $75 per credit hour for in-district students and from $92 to $122.50 for out-of-district students.

Johnny Haney, who served on the board from 2003 through 2012, helped to hire both Paneitz and Jorgenson.

“When we hired Dr. Paneitz, it was our hope to see the college move to the next level and she has enabled us to do that,” Haney said.

Paneitz was hired at a salary of $125,000, the same amount she was earning at Central Piedmont. Her salary this fiscal year is $176,826.

“NWACC was a little jewel. It was in a community that did great things, but not a lot of people knew about it,” Paneitz said about the situation at her hiring. “We didn’t have a lot of community relationships or partnerships. We had quality instructors and a good board, but we just didn’t have any visibility.”

She was surprised to learn the college did not distribute a class schedule.

“I said, ‘Where’s your fall schedule?’ They had something they (photocopied), and the only place they had it was in a single rack in Burns Hall. And if they ran out, they photocopied some more. I said, ‘You don’t distribute your schedule?’ They said no, we want to be real careful in managing our enrollment.”

Along with raising the college’s profile, Paneitz was asked to raise money. In 2005, the college launched its first capital campaign with a goal of $16 million. Walmart kicked it off with a $4 million pledge. That campaign was completed in 2010. The money was used to build the Shewmaker Center for Global Business Development, to provide a scholarship endowment and to buy the building that is now being renovated into a training facility for the Southern Region National Child Protection Training Center.

Paneitz has helped raise about $70 million for the college.

Good and Bad

Bryan Aguiar, a faculty member for the past 12 years and the outgoing Faculty Senate president, said he didn’t agree with every Paneitz decision, but that she met the board’s mandate to manage the college effectively through a period of rapid growth.

“I think she did a great job on what she had to do,” Aguiar said. “That was a big task.”

Paneitz agrees she has made mistakes.

One of the biggest controversies of her tenure involved numerous raises handed out to employees in 2010 despite a pay freeze the state had implemented for all state employees. A state review eventually determined the college had given out a total of about $10,000 in improper raises to five employees.

The college also suffered some embarrassment in recent years for failing to pay taxes on time. Paneitz issued a public apology for that.

But Paneitz insists the college never intended to do anything wrong.

“It all goes back to, we’re not hiring as well as we should, and not training as well as we should,” she said.

“I did make some mistakes, but I did not do anything unethical, illegal or immoral.”

She added if the board had lost confidence in her, she would have left. The board not only renewed her contract in April 2012, but also gave her a $10,000 raise.

Building Boom

Paneitz has overseen four major construction projections from beginning to end since becoming college president in 2003.

At A Glance

College Facilities

Buildings constructed on NorthWest Arkansas Community College’s campus since Becky Paneitz became president and the year they opened:

• Center for Health Professions (2013)

• The Shewmaker Center for Global Business (2010)

• The Student Center (2007)

• The parking deck (2006)

Source: Staff Report

The first of those projects to open was the 821-space parking deck. Before the $9 million garage opened in August 2006, parking at the college could be a challenge.

“The parking garage has really been salvation for us,” said Jim Lay, director of facilities and construction management. “It would have taken nearly 30 acres to accomplish the same number of parking spaces the garage has. That’s why it exists.”

Next to the parking garage is the student center, which opened in early 2007. The 26,000-square-foot building put a number of different student services, such as financial aid and academic advising, under the same roof. Students also can grab something to eat, relax in the lounge and visit the bookstore.

The average age of students at the college was 29 when Paneitz arrived. Now the average age is 25, indicating more traditional college students are attending the school. Paneitz attributes that change in part to the student center.

“Students saw that student center and said, ‘wow,’” Paneitz said. “Everything we did was based on, how do we recruit students, how do we retain students. I think the student center was the biggest recruitment tool we had.”

The Board of Trustees agreed this month to rename the building the Becky Paneitz Student Center.

The $8 million, 42,000-square-foot Shewmaker Center opened in 2010, joining the adjacent Shewmaker Center for Work Force Technologies, which opened right after Paneitz started at the college. The Center for Global Business was the first of the college’s buildings to be paid for entirely through donations.

The Center for Health Professions, which opened in January, is a $14.2 million facility that gives the school much more room for students and classes. Mary Ross, the college’s dean of health professions, said the center has provided students more patient simulators to work with.

“It’s just been a wonderful thing for them, and the feedback from our clinical sites has been really positive. They’re saying our students are so much more prepared,” Ross said.

Paneitz has been great at meeting the program’s needs, she said.

“The students entering the different health professions, they’re going to be the caretakers of all of us who live in this county and region,” Ross said. “She always has kept in mind the question, how does this project serve the community?”

The center is expected to be the college’s first building certified by the U.S. Green Building Council as environmentally friendly. It takes about 10 months after occupying a building to receive that certification, Lay said.

Lay began working for the college in 1990. He said he never envisioned it becoming what it is now.

“In 1995, we opened Burns Hall to give students the sense of identity they were looking for,” he said. “I thought that would last us quite some time, but we’ve been under construction in some phase or another ever since then.”

Enduring Criticism

Some former college employees say it’s a good time for a change in the president’s office.

Marty Parsons was hired as the college’s vice president for finance in September 2010, then was named chief financial officer in July 2011. Paneitz fired him in August. A memorandum written by Paneitz and placed in Parsons’ personnel file a week before his firing states he was counseled on issues including insubordination, failure to complete the college budget in a timely manner, inappropriate language and low morale in his department.

Parsons, when contacted earlier this month, said there were “definite inaccuracies” in those accusations.

“I wish the college nothing but the best,” Parsons said. “The institution needs kind of a restart. I think the change at the top is long overdue.”

Paige Francis worked for five years at the college, where she was associate vice president for information technology. She left in January to become chief information officer at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

Francis wrote in an email that she left the college out of frustration.

“I tirelessly advocated for technology to provide improved service to our students, faculty, staff (and NWACC as a whole) in an environment where top leadership held little respect for technology, so most initiatives were exhausting,” Francis wrote.

Francis served on the presidential search committee that chose Paneitz’s replacement.

“I believe new leadership under Evelyn Jorgenson will likely change the overall feel of NWACC in a new and good way,” Francis wrote.

The Next Transition

Paneitz hasn’t always worked in education. She often jokes that earlier in her career, she was “in and out of prison” — referring to her stint as a human resources administrator for the Arkansas Department of Correction.

Paneitz earned a master’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock during that time. She got her first community college job in the 1980s as a part-time instructor in the criminal justice program at Pueblo Community College in Pueblo, Colo.

Another transition awaits her.

Paneitz plans to stay in the area, but likely will sell her house and perhaps move into a condo. She said she will do some traveling and consulting.

She also plans to help out in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease. Dave Danks, her husband of 15 years, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. He now lives in an assisted-living home. Danks, 63, still knows Paneitz and some other close family members, but doesn’t know what day it is, Paneitz said.

“It’s such an insidious disease. It starts back here,” she said, pointing to the back of her head. “That’s your memory. Then it starts moving to the front of your brain, which affects behavior.”

“He was my best friend,” she said of Danks. “The plan was, I was going to retire, and we were going to travel, and I would do some consulting. That’s going to happen, but it’s just going to be me.”

Her husband’s condition, along with the death of her mother in 2011, helped nudge Paneitz toward retirement. She has two daughters and four grandchildren.

“I started to think about what was most important,” she said.