South Arkansas Community College President Dr. Bentley Wallace led a budget and finance committee meeting Friday, with two main agenda items discussed: proposed course fee changes and the non-renewal or renegotiation of the school’s El Dorado Conference Center lease.
“We don’t have a significant amount of change this year in terms of course fees,” Wallace started off the meeting by saying.
“One of the exciting things we have is a reduction of costs for students,” he added. “Instead of having students buy a book, we’re shifting that cost to what we’re calling ‘inclusive access.’ By shifting the cost away from students having to buy a book and including it into the course fee, we’re able to reduce the costs to students by 5%.”
“It will be built into their fee structure and they will have access to the content they need on day one instead of having to wait for the bookstore process and financial aid process to play out,” Wallace further explained.
Wallace said students and families will see new fees on paper, but this new process will eliminate excess expenditures on course materials, inevitably reducing the costs students would have normally paid.
“Students do have the option to opt-out of the inclusive access if they choose to,” Wallace said. “It is not a forced option, even though ultimately it is a better financial option; so they have some flexibility there. There are some new fees but the majority of what you see is clean up, corrections and bundled with the inclusive access option. There are very little new fee structures, especially compared to previous years.”
The second agenda item was on whether the finance committee should renew or renegotiate the terms of the college’s contract with the City of El Dorado in leasing the El Dorado Conference Center. The current 10-year contract is slated to expire in June.
“We want to position ourselves to renegotiate our lease with the city and to not allow this current agreement to renew automatically,” Wallace explained. “We would like to request that the finance committee advance a proposal to the full board advocating that I send a letter to the city notifying them that we are ready to renegotiate the lease for the conference center.”
After some discussion, the committee agreed to advance this proposition. Both the agenda items from Friday’s finance committee meeting will be further discussed at SouthArk’s full Board of Trustees meeting scheduled for Jan. 19.
Wallace concluded the meeting with an announcement about stimulus aid the school will be receiving from the COVID-19 stimulus package that was signed into law at the end of 2020. SouthArk previously received stimulus aid from the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Stimulus) Act and distributed $554,000 directly to students.
“We will be receiving another round of funding for institutional support and more importantly, for student support,” Wallace said. “We were able to distribute around $540,000 directly to students in cash payments last time. We are going to have the opportunity to do that again this year through that stimulus funding.”
Wallace said all the details about how the stimulus money will be used are not ironed out yet.