League Reaffirmation - Johnson County Community College

Johnson County
Education and
Research Triangle
JCCC also looks forward to supporting the
Johnson County Education and Research Triangle
offering bioscience research and education at
existing and planned educational facilities in the
county. The county partners include the University
of Kansas Edwards Campus, a proposed food
security research facility to be developed by
Kansas State University, and the Johnson County
locations of the University of Kansas Medical
Center. JCCC’s biotechnology program (see
chapter 4) prepares the technicians needed for
these programs and allows budding scientists
to earn an associate’s degree in biotechnology
as the first step toward further education.
Its biotechnology facilities support the research
and education taking place in the county.
“Bioscience research has an amazing potential for
new treatments and cures. We want those cures to
be discovered here in Kansas. That’s why we’ve
made the recruitment of bioscience companies a
top priority and why we’ve invested in bioscience
research and education at our universities. There
are also good jobs created by bioscience research,
so there’s an economic benefit as well. The triangle
will help bring cutting­edge research to this area,
which will then benefit the entire state.”
– Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas
Diversity
Johnson County has demographically been a
middle ­class Caucasian community, and the student,
faculty and staff populations at JCCC have reflected
this homogeneity. Over the last decade, as Johnson
County has increasingly become more diverse,
the college employee base has fallen behind.
Two initiatives have been implemented to address
this gap. The college has adopted diversification as
an institutional strategic initiative and has established
two strategic initiative teams to improve percentages
of students and faculty and staff. The current percentage
of minority students enrolled in JCCC credit classes
(14.6 percent) has already exceeded its annual
target (14.3 percent). However, the current percentage
of minority JCCC faculty/staff (10.4 percent) is still
below the annual target (11.1 percent). To facilitate
increasing both percentages, a new executive assistant
to the president, diversity initiatives, will work with
student recruitment and instructional and student
programming. The college is also piloting an intern
faculty program for minority candidates.
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