Dr. Dennis Rittle at Cowley College community forum in Wellington Monday.

by Tracy McCue, Sumner Newscow — Using a combination of business opportunity for Cowley County Community College, and a need for higher learning opportunities within the confines of Sumner County, a proposal is on the table to open a Wellington campus.

Dr. Dennis Rittle, President of Cowley College, said he hopes to have a Cowley College – Wellington Campus by the spring of 2018.

Rittle was the featured speaker at two community forums Monday at the Wellington High School auditorium. The forum brought in about 115 people combined — 50 in the morning and 65 in the evening.

Cowley College is proposing to initially build a two or three building facility in Wellington, location unknown at this time, that would work seamlessly with its three other facilities in Mulvane, Winfield and its main campus in Arkansas City.

Some of the classes Cowley County hopes to offer range from teaching, nursing, fire fighting, law enforcement, CNC programmers, electrician and HVAC technicians, as well as general education classes for high school students.

Rittle would not specify the exact classes that would be offered in Wellington but the curriculum will be based specifically on the demands from the high school and business community.

The forums were hosted through the Sumner County Economic Development and Wellington Area Chamber of Commerce. Currently, there is an offer on the table to pay a half-cent sales tax to fund the construction of the facility.

The proposal is currently in the hands of the Sumner County Commissioners, who must decide whether to put it on the November ballot, make it a special mail in election perhaps in the winter or spring of 2017, or not allow an election all together.

Rittle expressed the desire of having a mail-in ballot away from the general election.

“We would prefer to stay away from the emotion of the general election,” Rittle told the crowd.

Rittle said Sumner County, especially to the south and west are underserved areas. One of the keys to community college education is convenience. Surveys have found that people like to take classes within a 10 to 12 mile radius due to time constraints especially with employment and child care issues.

Cowley has been looking into expanding into Wellington for some time, Rittle said. So over the past 12 months it has been conducting surveys that included 700-plus high school students from the seven county schools and 131 local professionals.

“The results were startling to us,” Rittle said. “Eighty-six percent of the students wanted to stay in the area. Usually, we see a higher percentage of students who just want to get out and move away. But we didn’t find that here.”

He also said up to 92 percent of the high school students, who took the survey, would consider taking a college course and a staggering 70 percent of the adult learners would take one as well if offered

“These are extraordinary figures and lead us to believe that such a campus in Wellington would work well,” Rittle said. “We learned there is tremendous overall community support for this special project, and that the breadth and depth of a high school partnership is strong.”

Of course, one of the on-going questions is Cowley’s appearance in Wellington before that ended in failure in the 1990s.

Rittle said there were several reasons for this. At the time, there was no local funding stream, no local administrative support from the college level, there was a minimal sense of community while students attended classes, the design was temporal in nature, partnerships were fragile and marketing was modest.

This proposal is at a different level, Rittle said.

For one thing, new buildings will most likely be built by Cowley which makes it an exclusively college facility. Also, sales tax funding will be for 10 years which means there is long-term finance involved. Eventually, depending whether the Wellington campus will be successful or not, there could be dormitories, although Rittle said that probably won’t happen for another five or 10 years.

He said the courses offered will be an evolutionary process depending what is demanded by the industry and high school students. Some classes will be more expensive than others.

Rittle answered several questions from the community at large, which all seemed positive to the idea. A representative from GKN even made an impassioned speech saying how much easier it is to hire Cowley County because they are a more trained workforce.

“A facility like this can only help Sumner County,” she said.

Rittle said community colleges are the greatest return on investments to the state of Kansas because it procures so much federal and state dollars.

Colleges are key to a skill workforce which attracts industry, economic development and community enrichment, Rittle said.

“Those communities with a community college will not let them die no matter what ,” Rittle said. “They know just how important they are to their well being.”

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