Greene County Education Center to close in May
WAYNESBURG – The impending closure of Westmoreland County Community College’s Greene County Education Center has left some students in a lurch, although the Greene County commissioners are hopeful they’ll be able to find other higher education options for county residents.
Commissioner Blair Zimmerman said the community college has been an “opportunity for a lot of kids in Greene County who might even be a first generation attending college.” That’s why the decision to close the school’s education center in EverGreene Technology Park at the end of the semester has been so impactful to so many, he said.
“The cost of a community college is a fraction of the cost of a four-year school and it’s giving you an opportunity to stay local and maybe keep a job during the day,” he said.
The center opened in 1999 with classes at the former East Franklin school and eventually moved into its current location at EverGreene in 2006.
The WCCC Board of Directors voted Jan. 25 to close the satellite school in May, school spokeswoman Anna Marie Palatela said. The school announced the decision Jan. 30 and students were notified by email Feb. 1, two days after the 14-day deadline to receive a full refund for the spring semester.
Some students said they felt blindsided by the news of the closure. For some, it was their only college option.
Michelle Carney, 39, of Waynesburg, started at the school about three years ago and had three semesters left in the nursing program.
“It means I can’t continue because I can’t drive to Youngwood every day,” she said of the nearly 60-mile trip. “That’s the reason I started school, because it was local.”
Carney said she doesn’t want to consider Waynesburg University because it’s a four-year school and she was working towards an associate’s degree. She said she can’t take the nursing classes online and driving far to another campus isn’t an option for her.
“I’m stuck, and I just wasted so much money,” she said. “It’s showing around $19,000 on my credit score, for absolutely nothing. I don’t know how they can sleep at night taking people’s money and then not making sure they can finish.”
Jessica Vukmanic, 38, of Waynesburg, also said she feels “stuck.” She had started at the education center a year ago and was working on prerequisite courses in order to get into the nursing program.
“All of a sudden they said, ‘Oh, we’re closing,'” Vukmanic said. “We would have just appreciated a warning that it was even a possibility that the school was closing, because we wouldn’t be a year behind.”
She said by the time she found out she wouldn’t be able to continue in the nursing program at the school, she had missed the deadlines to get into nursing programs at other colleges.
“My plan now is to apply to Fairmont State University, but that’s going to be a 40-minute drive for me,” she said. “I would have preferred to stay in Greene County where my kids go to school.”
Abigail Perl, 17, moved here from New Jersey last year to attend the college. She’s a freshman who chose the school because she has family in the area.
“I go to community college because I’m not sure what I want to do or what I’m going to do next,” she said. “It’s too late to transfer anywhere else.”
Perl said now she doesn’t want to finish the semester at this school. Had she known the school was closing, Perl said she would have tried to find a new school for this spring semester.
“I don’t feel like they treat us right because they let us know at the last minute,” she said. “I feel like I’m being taken advantage of. If they cared about our education and not just our money, I feel like they would’ve given us another semester to prepare.”
Palatela said the school is “working with students one-on-one” to help them either transition to an online class or other institutions.
“This was a yearlong process in terms of evaluation,” Palatela said.
Palatela said the nursing director Sue Snyder contacted the students that were on the prerequisite track for nursing and is working with them on other schooling options. Palatela said the school did not begin a first-year nursing class in the fall because they did not want students to be in the middle of the two-year program if the board decided to close the campus.
Last year, WCCC also closed its Mon Valley branch campus in Rostraver Township. WCCC President Tuesday Stanley called the decision to close the Greene County campus “extremely difficult.”
“We didn’t take it lightly,” she said. “We couldn’t find our way out of subsidizing the center. We wanted to stay there, but we just couldn’t find a way to continue.”
Stanley said the Greene education center recently has been losing $250,000 per year because of declining enrollment. She said only 43 students enrolled in classes this spring semester, down from 113 in 2015.
“If you look at the statistics in Greene County, the high school graduation rate is continuing to decline and the population overall is continuing to decline,” she said. “We didn’t feel we could pull in enough adult learners and high school graduates to make up the $250,000.”
However, there could be other options coming.
Zimmerman said the college had been getting $100,000 per year from the county, $50,000 from the commissioners and $10,000 from each of the five school districts, but the school districts stopped contributing a few years ago. Now, county officials are hoping they can attract another school to eventually take WCCC’s place, Zimmerman said.
“The commissioners are pursuing other avenues for higher education in Greene County,” he said.