Recently, I spent four hours in meetings where I not only didn’t get a vote, but I didn’t get to comment, and was not even given copies of the documents everyone else was reading. And I had a great time, because the two groups I was covering were so competent that it made me cry that our city, county and school board meetings couldn’t fly at this high level.
The Florida Keys Educational Foundation is a private non-profit with over $4 million in cash assets supporting the mission of the Florida Keys Community College, primarily by providing student scholarships. They had two meetings this week, first of their finance committee and then of the whole board. Their major decision was to triple the amount of money they would spend on the Foundation’s executive director’s duties.
The former director had resigned after only a year, citing in her exit interview excessive amounts of time devoted to bureaucratic duties as opposed to her main mission, fund raising. An additional issue was the technical expertise needed to use the complex and extensive software the Foundation purchased last year to track student outcomes.
After extensive discussion, the board decided to split the position between a more experienced director to do fund raising and use the software, and an assistant to handle the operational duties that had been so time consuming for the previous director. The total amount allocated for these two positions is $180,000, of which $115,000 would come from the Foundation and the rest from the College. This is a large amount of money, so we can expect highly skilled people to be hired.
The president of the FKCC Board of Trustees, Bobby Stokely, attended and persuaded the Foundation’s board that this additional money for the director’s duties was both necessary and financially sustainable. He outlined a program of fund raising that the new director would be responsible for that would greatly increase the amount of donations the Foundation would receive.
In particular, he proposed that five $50,000 donations be solicited from major donors, and led the way by making the first pledge himself.
Two major issues discussed at length by the Foundation’s board in the two-hour meeting were how to increase Full Time Enrollments (FTEs) at the college, and how involved the Foundation’s board should be in overseeing how their private money was used by FKCC’s administration on their behalf.
The two main ways to increase FTEs, as explained by college president Dr. Jon Guevara and Trustee president Stokely, were to have another 100-bed dorm and to increase student enrollments, especially from out of state and internationally, in FKCC’s pre-eminent programs like Marine Propulsion. Students need housing, and the dorms provide FTE’s with a substantial commitment to getting their certificates here. And the marginal cost of adding students to existing programs, especially without having to hire additional faculty, keeps the college in the black.
The Foundation’s board decided to reconsider in the coming year how much of their volunteer time would be spent on monitoring how the FKCC administration used their money, as opposed to raising funds in the community. In general, the board did not want to be involved in, for example, choosing scholarship recipients.
However, the board’s new treasurer, Ed Russo, expressed well-received concerns about tightening up the specificity of how some funds in particular were spent. Examples were $4,500 spent on an appreciation dinner from unspecified line-items in the budget. (This amount was immediately covered by extra private donations of board members once the issue was raised.) Another example was the Chorale’s former musical director’s $15,000 salary coming from the “Programs” line-item, an expense previously undisclosed to the board. Russo was supported in his need for understanding exactly what the checks he was signing were for, and that they had been properly approved, primarily by Guevara.
Treasurer Russo also led the support for raising the salary for the board’s part-time accountant, who is also a full-time employee of the college, from $6,000 to $11,800, reflecting, as he said, “That I’m going to need a lot more work out of the position.” This was approved by a split vote on the board’s three-person Finance Committee, with its chairman, John Padget, wanting to see if the excessively particular duties of the accountant could be consolidated.
Padget succeeded in making both the accountant’s increase and the large increase in the director’s salaries apply for only a single year, subject to review of the accountant’s time and of the new director’s success in raising enough funds to justify the salary increase.
While everyone in the room was smart and paying attention, I particularly enjoyed watching Jon Guevara, John Padget, Ed Russo, and Bobby Stokely interact. Strong opinions, courteous confrontation, close listening, responsive answers, decisions made. Reminded me of tenure track decisions at business school faculty meetings, which were multi-million-dollar choices with consequences. I think these people know what they are doing, and I expect great things of our college.
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