After approving its new 25-year master plan at last week's monthly board meeting, National Park College is now focusing on how to further enhance educational needs of students on campus, while building long-term partnership opportunities locally to better meet community needs throughout the evolving process.
According to NPC's website, about 55% of the students receive financial aid and scholarships. Last year, NPC students received over $8 million in grants and scholarships. While continuing to offer a variety of two-year degrees and certifications, the college hopes to expand upon its four-year bachelor's degree opportunities on campus, as it recently did through Southern Arkansas University.
NPC Board Chair Forrest Spicher noted his appreciation to the board and others during last week's meeting.
"I appreciate the work and leadership of this campus to grow our pipeline of future students, provide quality learning opportunities, and ensure NPC's financial stability in the years to come," he said.
A common theme during the school's six public forums held in the weeks prior to the plan approval was one of broad overview. Though certain sentiments such as the community's desire to see new on-campus housing and expansions to the athletic and trade facilities, many revolved around the significance of overall campus facility improvement, to help better attract students to campus.
NPC Vice President for Administration Kelly Embry said they wanted that same attraction aspect equally for the high school program offerings.
NPC President John Hogan explained the integrated nature of the master plan last week, noting it is a result of years of strategic planning and tracking high-priority objectives, all of which ties to the college's budget investments.
"We continue to listen to the needs and desires of our students and our community," he said. 'What we heard is that investments in facilities that support student success should be our priority including investments in housing, nursing, athletics, welding and other skilled trades. We are grateful for the positive and encouraging feedback that confirmed we are headed in the right direction."
Going through the different portions of the plan, architect John McMorran, of Lewis Architects Engineers, said much of the focus would revolve around student campus life.
"Then all around this whole thing is kind of a hub right here of student life," he said.
"That could really be a host of different possibilities with dining and showing off the technology side and just some other things like that ... just whatever student life, as you begin to have more students on campus living here on campus, some of those needs are going to develop in the years to come.
"And again, as you kind of step back and look at it from this perspective, one of the things you're going to see is you're going to see trying to get parking and vehicle traffic kind of moved out of the central areas and there's just a lot of safety factors in that but it'll really kind of help maintain that campus life and student life feel," McMorran said.
"And then with all this, a potential location for maintenance facility, really kind of a new hub for campus maintenance. So, like I said, this really looks similar to what you've seen before. There's a few little practical things that were adjusted," he said.
Hogan said what the college saw as a missing piece initially was the thought process with strategic plan and need to be a representation of that, such as what the future of the college would look like as opposed to, "Which building goes where and how much is it going to cost in the bricks and mortars?'
"Some of what happened is we were formulating the strategic plan and we were trying to respond to the housing -- we had a conversation that came out of board communication in that we need to look at the bigger picture," he said. "We need to see where we're headed as a college. That collided with the strategic planning process and that launched the master plan being a comprehensive set of circumstances, and I think we designed the process at that point, where you enumerated a number of forums, we had it online all the time, got a lot of feedback from that."