By Adela Garza
We are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Texas Southmost College this year.
Since back in 1926, this community, – once said to be the poorest in the United States – nurtured our community college district like a child. It gave local veterans and residents the opportunity to learn a skill, start a profession, or use it as a first rung to transfer to universities across the nation.
And its open enrollment gave non-traditional students like me a second chance to validate our self worth.
But just a scant 13 years ago, TSC almost ceased to exist. The plans were drawn, the proposals made, and – without local residents becoming aware – a bill was being considered in Austin to transfer all its real estate, buildings, bank deposits, and other financial assets to the oil-and-gas wealthy University of Texas System.
That almost happened when I was first elected to serve on the college board in 2008. A forceful college president working with a pliant board had already forwarded plans to do away with TSC, and its district would disappear only after local taxpayers finished paying its bond debt.
After that, the little college that had given so many of our young people, veterans, and residents the first rung to realize their dreams and uplift their families would be gone.
Our local students were already paying university-level tuition and fees, and only a dismal 16 percent graduated after six years. The rest fell through the cracks, their federal grants depleted with UTB-required "remedial" courses that didn't count toward graduation and they couldn't afford the high tuition and could not continue their schooling.
We said enough!
In the face of fierce opposition from an elitist stratum of our community, four of us –Rene Torres, Trey Mendez Kiko Rendon and me, a bare majority on the board – said we wouldn't stand by and give our educational birthright away and deprive future generations of the educational opportunities that only a community college can give us.
The combined forces of the UT System and local shakers and movers threatened us with personal and professional destruction, to ruin our businesses, and boycott our professional livelihoods. The college chaplain even picketed the professional offices of one of our majority and threatened him with eternal damnation.
If they had had their way, we wouldn't be celebrating the century mark of our college's anniversary today. Our college would have been a thing of the past and the fat cats in Austin would own our little school which had ben nurtured by the blood, sweat, and tears of our humble community.
They said we wouldn't be able to gain accreditation as an independent school, that our enrollment would disappear, and that our students would fail. We were wined and dined, begged, cajoled, and coerced to give up on TSC. We held on and stood our ground up to those forces seeking to destroy it.
I cannot tell you how often – in the darkest of those times – we felt like giving up in the face of this overwhelming adversity. But we thought then that it was worth it to save our TSC. It was worth it then, and it's worth it now.
The separation came and went and the opposition stood by, ready to watch us fail. But a Higher Power smiled upon us and our little college and drove us to work a little harder harder, and to persevere against the odds. Today, 13 years after we reestablished our independence as a stand-alone institution of higher education we have achieved this:
* We've reduced tuition and fees three (3) times to make TSC the most affordable college in the RGV
* We earned independent national accreditation despite the nay-sayers
* We've grown enrollment by over 130 percent
* We've built a state-of-the art workforce training program
* Today, TSC's graduation rate outpaces the state average
The best years – our next Century of Progress – is still ahead. With your continued support, we can keep building what we started.
EARLY VOTING:
April 20-28
ELECTION DAY
May 2
