A VIEW FROM METRO EAST

Now the state is overseeing the East St. Louis community college
by Patrick E. Gauen

James R. Thompson Boulevard is grander in name than fact, providing a narrow and bumpy approach to an even bumpier place for poor kids trying to learn their way out of the poverty of East St. Louis.

The road is no prize, but the former governor can take comfort that at least the local politicians only named the street for him — not the junior college at its end.

That school has a grand name too — Metropolitan Community College — and a great burden to provide 13th- and 14th-grade education to kids whose K-12 performance in East St. Louis is widely considered among the worst in the nation.

The community college is such a mess the state of Illinois recently assumed oversight, just as the state oversees the finances of the public school district and the city government.

The last straws were a nine-month-late audit and a misrepresentation of enrollment that improperly added $700,000 to MCC's state aid, bringing it to $2.4 million.

But there's more.
• Janet M. Finch, the college president, never moved to the area, preferring to commute from home in Nashville, Tenn., in a taxpayer-owned Lincoln, yakking on a taxpayer-paid cellular phone.

• College trustees suspended Finch and tried to fire her, but backtracked after learning her contract did not demand competent performance — just continued health. At last word, she remained on suspension.

This is bitterly disappointing to some community leaders who demand autonomy for the virtually all-black district. Others welcomed the cavalry.

• Audits were dismaying as well as late. At a time when the college should have owned $2,730,557 worth of computers, desks and other assorted things, MCC had lost track of $1,052,864 of it. The official explanation was that obsolete stuff was put out for sale, netting $11,738.

• A supplier repossessed nearly a quarter-million-dollars worth of heavy industrial education machinery because of nonpayment.

• The St. Clair County prosecutor asked state police to investigate whether the student inflation was deliberate or — as one acting administrator claimed — a case of a college unable to teach its own employees how to use its computers.

All of this is bitterly disappointing to some community leaders who demand autonomy for the virtually all-black district. Others, including the local NAACP leader, welcomed the state's cavalry.

From 1969 to 1994, the place was State Community College, aptly named because it was funded entirely through Springfield. But by 1994, voters faced a choice: create a junior college district like the state's other 48, or annex to nearby Belleville Area College.

The vote for independence was overwhelming. MCC was born, effective July 1996.

But that switch had not even occurred before the General Assembly — with the long-beleaguered institution obviously in mind — legislated stronger supervisory powers for the Community College Board.

That authority was invoked for the first time in May, when the board, under the leadership of former Belleville Area College President Joseph Cipfl, moved to temporarily take the reins at MCC. "It's just a political quagmire," Cipfl moaned at the time. "They've engaged in self-destruction."

Students who need all the help they can get (MCC communities Brooklyn and East St. Louis scored worst and third-worst respectively among Illinois public school districts in 1996) apparently are giving up on the place. Full-time equivalent enrollment is down to 431, from 770 last year.

While Cipfl and his state board await a committee recommendation on what to do next, state Sen. James Clayborne, a Belleville Democrat, is expected to revive a stalled bill that would require another referendum.

If passed, this one would keep a local commission to levy property taxes but permanently place the school's operations in the hands of Southern Illinois University, which already has a satellite campus blocks away.

It might be the only way to keep Thompson Boulevard from being figuratively — as well as literally — a dead-end street. 

Patrick E. Gauen covers Illinois politics for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Illinois Issues October 1998 ¦ 41