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 Around the State
Gov. Roy Barnes, |
 this is a time of reflection, even in the midst of all the activity that our assistant commissioner for external affairs, Norm Moye, and I are involved in around the state as we prepare for our work with business and industry in the new year and the legislative session that begins in January. While spending time considering the past is a normal part of fall and the beginning of winter for most people, for me this fall is especially such a time because of all that happened for our system during this past year or so.
My daily activities on behalf of this agency are often aimed at the structure, in a sense, working, for instance, on policy with the state board and legislators, on local and specific technical-college issues with community leaders, technical college board members and presidents. I can do this because of the quality of the faculty, staff, and administrators throughout our technical colleges. It has lately occurred to me that while I see you when I’m in the technical colleges — we may speak briefly, I hear great and small good things about you, I see the quantifiable results of your work as I review the numbers for all the schools — our actual connection is minimal, as circumstances require. But because I understand that you are the heart of this system, I have decided to try a quarterly publication where I can strengthen that connection, where I can perhaps connect you more firmly to the broad vision of this system and perhaps show you the effects — beyond what is readily visible to you on the job — of your efforts. I thought it would be appropriate to begin this attempt by focusing on this year’s Lighthouse Institute because it features issues that are important to those of you who teach in our system. In the next issue, I’ll focus on our structure by giving you my perspective as it played out for me at a system-wide meeting of many of the elements of our external framework. So welcome to Volume One, Number One of “From the Commissioner.” Please feel free to send me suggestions concerning what you’d like to see covered here. Keep up the good work.
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Looking back from this vantage point, events from 1988 move swiftly from milestone to milestone — the first five schools, the next few, the last one to come under this agency in 1998, the nearly $1 billion in capital investment, Governor Barnes’ A+ Education Reform Act (House Bill 1187), the first eighteen name-change ceremonies, the final name-change, the leap in our already remarkable enrollment increases. But I know that effect of pieces falling into place is characteristic of remembered time; I know, that on a day-to-day, meeting-to-meeting, decision-to-decision basis, the construction of this system was the result of extraordinary effort, of thought, action, patience,and faith on the part of believers all over the State of Georgia, people who championed Georgia's technical education system when it was, truly, only an idea.
n reviewing our history as a system and thinking about its future, I am extremely aware of both its framework and its essence, its structure and its substance.
