By Dr. Ross Tomlin, TBCC President
We seem to have used the term “change is constant” a lot recently. TBCC has experienced a large amount of turnover in the past two years as many organizations have since the pandemic started. Our new employees are doing great work, and we continue to help our students be successful.
The theme of change continues for us. I have been President at TBCC for almost seven years. It has been the most satisfying and enjoyable part of my career. Tillamook County is a wonderful place to live and work and I have thoroughly enjoyed working together with the community to make Tillamook a better place to live. It is now time for me to look at retirement after spending 42 years working in community colleges. I have been a faculty member for over 20 years and a college administrator for almost 22 years. I have loved working with students and for students. Now it is time to pass the baton on to the next college leader.
The TBCC Board of Education has begun the search process for my replacement. The search committee will conduct first-round interviews over the coming month and then recommend finalists to the full board. The full board will then interview the finalists, with each one spending a full day on campus meeting with different groups of students, staff/faculty, and community members. The first round of interviews is confidential, but the finalists will be shared with the community. The board will then take feedback from these groups and decide on who to hire as the next president of TBCC. This will be done sometime over the winter, with the new president starting sometime after that. I will plan to provide some overlap with the new president to ensure a smooth transition.
In looking back over the past seven years, I am proud of the accomplishments we have made at the college, thanks to a lot of hard work by many people here, along with strong support throughout the community. We have increased enrollments even through the pandemic and are now no longer the smallest community college in the state. We have added over two dozen new academic programs with most of them being career-technical, which provide students with skills needed to obtain a living wage job right out of TBCC. The most recent is our Nursing program which starts this coming January. We have passed a bond and are getting ready to break ground this coming spring on a new Healthcare Education Building that will contain all our healthcare programs and a 360-seat community event center. We also had a very successful re-accreditation visit with no recommendations and four commendations. We developed a new seven-year strategic plan in 2022 that has five strategic priorities to continue good work for our students.
It has been a true honor to be the President of TBCC and I will continue to keep track of all the continued progress. I have no doubt that this little college on the north Oregon coast will continue to have a large positive impact in changing the lives of our students for the better. Thanks to all of you in Tillamook County who support TBCC.