Angela Falconetti President Polk State College
What impact has the Open Educational Resources initiative had on student tuition? This was an initiative that our faculty led along with our instructional technology area at the college to reduce textbook costs. The faculty worked together to be able to provide the resources that were needed for students without there being a strong requirement for textbooks, which are prohibitively expensive. We’re proud of the creativity of our faculty and staff. We also have a couple of other grants relating to rapid credentialing. We have an initiative in which we’re partnering with the Florida Department of Education, the Fast Forward program, which is emergency education relief. We were provided approximately $600,000 to implement rapid credentialing for areas including technology, bookkeeping, web production, logistics and machining.
has led to an exponential increase in teacher workload since March 2020, with almost three-quarters of teachers saying workloads have increased and more than half say they are going without regular breaks. So not only were children becoming more preoccupied with out-of-school responsibilities and distractions during school hours, but their teachers were facing burnout. Even with access to a laptop or internet connection, for some students it was also impossible to find a quiet space in the house to study. For others, parents’ inability to afford childcare meant that they were often babysitting siblings. Another trend of “learning pods” has emerged during the pandemic, where parents hire teachers for smallgroup in-home tutoring. It has become incredibly popular, according to a report in Tampa Bay Business Journal. However, the trend again risks marginalizing the worse-off students economically.
What makes your healthcare program stand out? First is the quality of the faculty. We have great content specialists who lead our healthcare program. At the end of the day, it comes back to leadership. The connections that the leader makes, the people they hire, seeing the student from start to finish and employment or to pursue another degree. The other piece that is critical to highlight are the great relationships with our healthcare professionals at the area’s healthcare entities. What is your outlook for Polk State College? We believe the outlook is positive regardless of the pandemic. We’re going to have some challenges ahead, which I believe in the end will translate into opportunities. But the challenges are going to be primarily, in our estimation, financial. The state shortfall from COVID in early March 2021 was close to $3 billion. We expect that we’re going to be impacted. A 6% holdback of funding was instituted for all state agencies beginning this new fiscal year. We’ve been operating with 6% less budget. We remain concerned about the preparation of our students, specifically just because of the remote environment. 158
| Invest: Tampa Bay 2021 | EDUCATION
41.1% of Tampa Bay residents have a Bachelor’s degree or higher.
