College Executive Administrator Does Her South Florida Roots Proud

By Lou Hernández

Miami Dade College Hialeah Campus President Georgette Pérez never aspired to have a career in school administration. “I wanted to be a pediatrician,” she revealed. “But I found myself challenged with my early biology classes here at Miami Dade College. So, I began exploring the field of education as an alternative. I always liked helping people. I transferred from MDC to the University of Florida and began studying Psychology with a minor in Education. It was there that I was exposed to what a career in higher education administration could be like. From that time on, I fell in love with the profession.”

The South Florida resident received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Education degree in Student Personnel Administration from the University of Florida. “I’m from Hialeah,” said Pérez, the oldest of three children. “My parents are Cuban. I was born in Miami Beach and was raised and lived in Hialeah until I went away to school.”

“I was at UF for four years since I stayed for my Masters,” Pérez stated. “Then as I was about to graduate, I started looking for a job. I felt I was still young enough, and unattached as I was, to explore any new challenge.” That new venture involved an employment opportunity at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah as a student affairs professional. “My mother suffered when I left home to go to school in Gainesville. You can imagine her reaction when I told her I was going to Utah—where are you going?”

After three years, Pérez decided to return to her South Florida roots. It was a mutual decision, she recalled, made with her new significant other: “My husband Jesús, who is also from Hialeah, and I got together in Gainesville and started a relationship. We got engaged in Utah, where he had found work after graduation in the computer field, but we married in Hialeah.”

Back home, she began working for Miami Dade College in 2000, holding various administrative positions in the areas of Continuing Education, Testing, and Student Achievement. “I’m celebrating my 23rd anniversary with the college in July,” Pérez advised. “I started on the job helping Hispanic students create a college-going culture. It was a perfect fit for me because that was what my job in Utah entailed.”

The Hialeah-product later served the college’s North Campus as Dean of Students for nine years, during which she continued to expand her own educational trajectory by earning a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from Florida Atlantic University. “As Dean of Students, I oversaw the departments of counseling and exams and financing for students,” Pérez disclosed. “Miami Dade College has one president, Madeline Pumariega, with nearly 120,000 accredited and unaccredited students. Those unaccredited are people taking classes for work or other self-improvement related reasons. Each of the eight campuses that comprise Miami Dade College have their own presidents and deans.”

In August of 2022, Pérez, the mother of two grown boys and a teenage girl, was appointed president of the MDC Hialeah Campus. “This semester our campus has 7,000 accredited students enrolled for the first time in history,” she stated proudly. “

The majority of the students are from the local area and 98% are Hispanic. Our other campuses are a bit more diverse. One of the good things about MDC is our students can take classes at any of our campuses. We offer that flexibility.”

In 2003, MDC became a four-year institution offering bachelor’s degrees in different business fields. “That’s when we changed the name from community college,” the campus president said. “But we never deviated from our mission of admittance for all. We are an “open access school,” which means we accept everyone that has completed high school. And if you haven’t, you can get your GED here.”

The executive administrator is focused on meeting the educational needs of every person in the community with an expanding eye on the employment arenas currently most in demand. “With the recent influx of immigrants to our community,” Georgette said, “we wish to assure that everyone is aware of the services and resources available, from English courses to different career tracks. Miami is becoming a tech hub and our college is heavily invested in technologyrelated opportunities as well as the health field, for which there is a great need. We’ve committed to growing our health services field by 40 percent. We graduated nearly 400 nurses recently.”

“I love the fact that there is no typical day on the job,” she said gleefully, referring to the fact that, on average, she has to juggle meetings with academic boards and deans, with the underlying goals of how to make things better for her faculty and students. The day before our interview, the president had traveled to Boston on business, and later in the day she had appointments scheduled with a job-seeker and a student who desired a face-to-face get together. “I have an open-door policy. That’s non-negotiable for me. Student. Parent. Faculty member.”

Her position has not been without external challenges. Pérez harkened back to the initial shutdown days of the COVID pandemic: “We never close unless there is a hurricane. We still didn’t know the depth of what was coming. We needed to make sure everyone had a laptop and the ability to connect. Some of our students did not have a computer with a camera or internet. We gave out a lot of laptops to many students. We had laptop drives to make sure that anyone who needed a laptop was able to get one. We opened up the campuses for students who wanted to drive in and safely access the Wi-Fi from the parking lots. We worked remotely and then the staff came back after about five months for the start of the fall term. We continued working online with the precautions of masking and social distancing and temperature checks. We closed in mid-March for two weeks and started back up on March 30.

“From a class perspective, something that helped us very much compared to other colleges and universities was that we already offered a virtual campus; we had MDC online. So, we were well equipped with the learning management system, with many of our faculty who were able to deliver instruction that way. Having the curriculum already set up in an online platform helped us tremendously. We made it through.”

As far as recent curriculum oversight from Tallahassee, the school leader said that she has not had any issues. “We have to follow the law, and we have done so. Up to now, we have not had any problems. We strive to make all of our students feel welcome.”