Pierce Looks to Rebound From Woes : Education: College president hopes accreditation troubles will spark solutions to fiscal, administrative problems.

Putting a good spin on bad news, the acting president of Pierce College said Monday that the campus’s accreditation problems will help spur solutions to longstanding money and management woes that have dogged the community college.

After an hourlong “town hall” meeting on campus, college President Mary Lee said she couldn’t disagree with a recent move by an oversight agency to postpone a decision on whether to reaffirm Pierce’s accreditation.

The stress will be good for the school in the end, she predicted.

“The college needed to have a fire lit under it. And they wouldn’t have said what they said if the college didn’t need to have a fire lit under it,” Lee said of the recent warning by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, which oversees schools in the western United States.

Pierce College remains accredited, meaning its students are still eligible for government financial aid and the credits they earn will be accepted by other colleges if they transfer or go on with their studies.

But the private oversight group’s recent warning to the college still roused fears among some students.

“When this arose, it scared me,” said 19-year-old Matt Cooper, a first-semester Pierce student who said he’s considering switching to another community college in the spring because of the warning. Cooper, who ultimately wants to attend UCLA, said he fears he may have a harder time winning admission to a four-year university if he continues at Pierce.

*

Pierce College officials insisted, however, that universities will not hold the college’s accreditation problems against its 14,200 students. No public college in California has ever had its accreditation withdrawn. And even if Pierce’s was revoked, past classwork by students would still be considered valid.

“Loss of accreditation is never retroactive,” so the worry is groundless, said instructor Barrie Logan, coordinator of the college’s internal accreditation review. “There is no way Pierce College is going to lose its accreditation status. We’re not even close.”

Instructor Richard Follett, president of the campus’s Academic Senate, said some people, apparently misunderstanding the meaning of accreditation, have even called faculty members wondering if the college is going to be closed. “Rumors of our demise are premature,” Follett assured about 75 students and faculty members who attended the meeting.

College administrators said the session was called to help dispel student fears and to help focus the college’s attention on solving problems identified by the oversight panel.

In deferring reaffirmation of Pierce’s accreditation, the commission criticized the college for failing to hire and retain top administrators, expressed alarm at declining enrollments and raised a variety of other questions about the college’s fiscal stability and academic programs.

Lee, acting president since the spring of 1994, conceded that many of the problems identified by the accrediting panel had been pointed out in accreditation reports in 1989 and 1984, but have not been resolved. But, she added, “Come and see us in two to five years, and you will not see the same response.”

Pierce administrators said the accrediting panel’s criticisms were no surprise to them. Virtually all of the issues that ended up in the panel’s study, first publicized last month, were raised by college officials in their report to the panel.

Follett called the accreditation problem “a turning point” for the troubled campus, saying, “This is no longer a whiny, self-complaining school. What you saw today was faculty, staff and students taking their seats at the table together” to begin jointly working to solve the school’s problems.

Lee said the college already has begun addressing the 24 recommendations made by the accrediting team that visited the campus last spring. And she said Pierce, fourth-largest campus in the nine-school Los Angeles Community College District, still has the ability “to be absolutely the premier college in the state of California.”

But Cooper said he remained unconvinced. “I think they’re doing this to really cover up all the stories and the accusations,” the student said of the meeting.