News

There’s no Sygielski like John Sygielski

By Stephen Floyd

John Sygielski, Mt. Hood Community College’s next president, may hail from Virginia, but the scholastic and political issues at MHCC are not as foreign to him as hackysack and bio-diesel may be.

Believing that the community should be the source of direction for any college leader, Sygielski said he has continuously looked to the students and community members at Lord Fairfax Community College in Virginia for how to answer the questions surrounding higher enrollment.

“Attraction and retention is critical to institutions such as ours,” said Sygielski, who will remian president of LFCC until he begins his tenure at MHCC on July 1. “Once we get them in, how is it we work to keep them here and get them into the classrooms?”

Starting with facilities maintenance, he said the physical look and feel of an institution can make or break a student’s first college experience.

“When you walk onto campus for the first time, your eyes are either attracted or repulsed,” said Sygielski. “I will say that maintenance on this campus has been critical. We, too, have roofing issues, many capital issues.”
He said even though building and maintenance professionals don’t have a “sexy” job, he thinks of them as fellow teachers at LFCC, saying that the lessons they offer students and the community in general can be as valuable as a math or English lesson.

“They are key to my vision of how an institution can be successful,” he said.

As well as the first impression of the campus, Sygielski said programs offered at a college bring students to campus in the first place. As an advocate of student programs at LFCC, he helped forge the college’s first athletics program after many students expressed reservations about joining a school where they could not play sports.

“They told me, ‘If you had a sports program, we would think about going to college and think about going to LFCC,’” said Sygielski, adding that soccer is very popular in his part of Virginia.

He also said he recognizes co-curricular programs (clubs, forensics, student publications, et cetera) as strong tools for retention, as well as avenues for future excellence in universities and professional fields.

“I believe students who are actively engaged in co-curricular activities during their community college experience will be highly experienced and valued leaders at the four-year institutions they transfer to,” he said, citing his active relationship with Phi Theta Kappa, attending frequent meetings and being an honorary member. “When people are involved in a group, they feel more connected to the people in the group and the college as a whole.”

Though his style of leadership revolves around public input and petitions, he said people were unsure of accepting his openness at first when he became president of LFCC.

“It took a good year to talk about some very basic issues,” said Sygielski. The thickness of toilet paper and location of ashtrays displayed the depth of the community’s concerns at first, he said. But then larger issues began to surface, and one of the first he had to address was a proposed $14 million arts center.

“A lot of steam in the college community seemed to have stalled,” he said, describing the frustrations of the administrators at the time. The project had bred hope but also “bad blood” within the community,he said, because it had been interrupted so many times.

“I went around the community and, hearing a lot about this arts center, we came to understand that this building was never wanted by the community,” said Sygielski. He said the feedback from the LFCC community favored a community center for sports, theater and general usage, not the $14 million arts center.

Using half of the money from the previous project, Sygielksi said it took him six months to raise the remaining funds, with only one six-figure donor opting out.

“He was not happy with the re-direction and did not want to proceed,” said Sygielski.

But he said fundraising has been a strength throughout his career as a college president, and many four-year institutions came to LFCC for advice and explanations of how Sygielski’s efforts could be so successful.

“We raise more money at LFCC than many colleges in Virginia,” he said. “I spent probably 40 or 50 percent of my time fundraising.”

He added that developing open relationships with alumni and community members has helped fundraising greatly, and that taking loans and writing bonds have also been open options for him, citing that every bond measure he wrote for LFCC has passed.

“(Bonds) have been very successful,” he said. “We thoroughly engaged the community in those bond referendums.”

But there is one issue MHCC fortunately has not endured and which Sygielski is personally invested in: campus gunmen. He is a graduate of Northern Illinois University and his current college shares scholastic programs with Virginia Tech — two campuses scarred by armed violence in the past year. This has propelled the issue to the forefront of his public safety policies.

“It is important that college leaders take appropriate actions to minimize the potential for violent attacks and to respond quickly and appropriately if they should occur,” he said, adding that such attacks are “seemingly senseless.”

Though he has experience dealing with issues such as aging campuses, increases in violence and decreases in enrollment, Sygielski said keeping an open mind and listening ear for the MHCC community will most help him ease into his second presidential position over a community college.

“It is critical that a new leader spend a great deal of time actively listening to and understanding the successes, hopes, dreams, and concerns of those who are associated with the college,” he said.