Highline Colleagues,

Last week the college received notification from the Department of Education of the non-continuation of our Title III Strengthening Institutions (SIP) grant. This action ends the grant early as we were about to enter our fifth and final year of the project.  We were also given the opportunity to submit a request for reconsideration of this decision, which we sent Monday.

While not completely unexpected, this decision is very disappointing. Highline College has successfully operated its Title III SIP grant program for four years to the benefit of 17,539 students, over 12,000 of whom are low income or first generation college students. The work to serve these students epitomizes the Department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education. Some activities and departments that receive support from Title III are Entry Advising, Institutional Research, embedded tutoring, and faculty and staff professional development.

While we await the response to our request for reconsideration, we are actively determining which activities supported by the grant we can continue to support and how they might be funded. We are aware that this impacts some of our employees more directly than others. As we stated over the summer, if grant funded programs face loss of funding, the college will continue to cover salaries and benefits for grant-funded positions for up to 60 days while we figure out future options. We will update campus as we have more information to share on this issue.

In Community,

John, Danielle, Rolita, Jamilyn, Maribel, Michael, Josh, Melanie, Tim

Highline College Executive Cabinet