By Gillian Crist
Page Editor
The Amarillo College board of regents named Dr. Frank Sobey and Dr. Jamelle J. Connor as the presidential search finalists at the Oct. 22nd meeting after rounds of video interviews from an initial 12 candidates.
Sobey currently serves as the interim vice president of student affairs at Amarillo College, where he started in 2005 as an English instructor.
Connor is the vice president of student affairs at St. Petersburg College, located in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she has been since 2008.
The presidential selection committee consisted of AC faculty and staff, board of regent members, and community members. It took advice from Gold Hill Associates, a firm based in Mississippi that guides community colleges in their search for executive hires.
This comes after the previous search yielded no satisfactory results.
Connor and Sobey will now conduct in-person interviews with the board of regents and give presentations to the community.
“We evaluate both candidates by their resumes and videos, [where] they answered several questions for us. From that group, we took four that we interviewed further, and after those interviews, the committee advanced two names to the board of regents,” Dr. Paul Proffer explained.
The board of regents hopes to have a final decision for the president by the end of the year.
In the meantime, Denese Skinner will continue to serve in her role as interim president.
The regents also approved a motion to allocate an additional $500,000 for network infrastructure upgrades, increasing Wi-Fi service from two gigabytes to ten, affecting all campuses.
“We can’t push any more data through the hole we’ve got. We’ve got to increase the size of the hole, and so that’s what this does for us,” Skinner said.
The regents also discussed purchasing two 24-passenger buses for the athletics program at $150,000 each. Currently, $108,000 is being budgeted for transportation to rent buses. AC currently has a fund for automobile purchases, but it was depleted to $150,000 after two diesel trucks for the truck driving program.
Regents voted to approve the commission of Mike Haynes, a journalist and former AC instructor, to write a book for AC’s 100th anniversary, similar to the 50th-anniversary book written by Joe Taylor.
“He’s got a tremendous amount of knowledge about Amarillo College,” said regent member Mark White.
The book is expected to take four years to complete, or about 2,000 hours of research and writing. Regents also hope to enlist the help of the Texas Historical Commission for the research of the book.
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