Center Associate Biographies
Karla Fisher
Karla Fisher serves as Vice President of Academics at Butler Community College (KS). In that role, she is responsible for seven academic divisions, a holistic student outcomes assessment program, curriculum development, industry-relevant career/technical education advancement, and faculty development.
Karla previously served as College Relations Coordinator for the Center for Community College Student Engagement, assisting community and technical colleges to become members, then helping faculty, staff, and administrators better understand and use data to improve student experiences and outcomes. She was also responsible for Center communications and publications. Prior to joining the Center, Karla served as Director of Institutional Marketing for Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she directed all aspects of the college’s marketing and communications, as well as several student services activities, the college’s external and internal/portal websites, and the Contact Center, a telephone and Internet student/community help service. In addition, Karla has developed and taught classes at the concurrent high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels since 1996, including eight years in online learning environments.
Karla holds a Ph.D. in Educational Administration from The University of Texas at Austin’s Community College Leadership Program, as well as an M.A. in Communication and a B.A. in English from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. She also holds a vocational certificate from UCMT in Salt Lake City and attended community college classes while working on her bachelor’s degree.
Suzanne Flannigan
Suzanne Flannigan currently serves as Vice President of Academic Affairs and Accreditation at Hartnell College in Monterey County, California. In that role, she is responsible for all faculty, programs, budgets, facilities and grants related to instruction. In addition, she serves as the Accreditation Liaison Officer for the institution, chairs the Accreditation Steering Committee and oversees all institutional involvement in the preparation of Hartnell College's next self-study. Most recently, under her leadership, all instructional activities at Hartnell College have been reconsolidated under the umbrella of academic affairs and a new organizational structure has been developed, vetted, and implemented.
Suzanne has extensive teaching and administrative experience. She was a tenured faculty member for nearly two decades, before moving into administration where she has overseen all aspects of a broad range of programs ranging from general education to vocational, workforce, and community development. In all of her roles, she actively engages the college community in dialogue about student success and seeks to instill both the love of and the necessity for data-driven evidence to continuously improve student success.
Suzanne holds a Bachelor of Arts in English, a Master of Education (with a special focus on post-secondary leadership), a Master of Business Administration and a doctorate from The University of Texas at Austin, with a specialization in community college leadership. During her studies in Austin, Suzanne worked as a Researcher for the National Association of Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) and the Achieving the Dream Project funded by the Lumina Foundation.
Suzanne is a recipient of the Edmund J. and Charlene Gleazer Endowed Scholarship, the John and Suanne Roueche Endowed Scholarship and the Houston Endowment Scholarship.
She has written and published many articles related to the community college, has co-authored a book on hiring practices, contributed to several other books, and is a regular presenter at national and international conferences.
Thomas Greene
Thomas Greene serves as Vice President of Academic Affairs and Student Services at Lake Tahoe Community College. Thomas began his tenure in higher education as a teacher and counselor in the mid to late 1990s. In 2003, Thomas returned to graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. in Educational Administration. While in Texas, Thomas worked for the Community College Survey of Student Engagement. Upon completion of his doctoral studies, and prior to his return to California, Thomas served as the Special Assistant to the President at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Florida. In 2008, he headed back to the west coast, serving as the Associate Vice President, Enrollment and Student Services at Sacramento City College (CA). In addition to his doctorate, Thomas holds an M.S. in Education (Counseling) and B.S. in Finance.
Thomas possesses both scholarly and institutional experience related to student engagement in community colleges. In 2006, he earned the National Dissertation of the Year Award from the Council for the Study of Community Colleges for his examination of the relationship between student engagement and educational outcomes. He regularly presents at conferences and consults nationally on student engagement and success, and has co-authored and published a number of journal articles on the subject. Thomas complements this scholarly background with significant experience assisting institutions with using student engagement and other empirical data to support improvement efforts.
Gail Hartzog
Gail Hartzog is Dean of Development and Planning at Chipola College (FL), where she oversees outcomes assessment, institutional effectiveness, and accreditation efforts and writes and manages grant projects. Her assessment work has been cited by the Governor’s Office of Program Planning and Governmental Accountability (OPPAGA), which named Chipola “one of five exemplary institutions among all state supported colleges and universities in Florida.” She is a graduate of the Specialist Training Program of the Council for Resource Development (CRD) and was the 2002 recipient of CRD’s Burton Talmadge Award. She has brought millions of dollars to Chipola College by writing successful grant projects, including TRIO, Title III, Department of Labor, and Department of Environmental Protection.
Hartzog has served on Off-Site and On-Site Review Committees with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and is the college’s SACS Liaison. She administers the CCSSE each year. In fact, the college’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) Learning to Persist includes the tracking of two CCSSE benchmarks and several individual items in monitoring student engagement and persistence. She has also administered the SENSE to determine the impact of faculty development and other efforts to increase student persistence and track levels of engagement among entering students. She and a team from Chipola College attended the Center’s Entering Student Success Institute (ESSI) in 2009 and continue to implement the resulting Action Plan, which has helped increase three-year graduation rates by 23 percent for all students and more than doubled the three-year graduation rates for developmental students.
Hartzog was a member of the Program Planning Committee for the 2003 SACS Annual Meeting and served four years on the Executive Board of the Southeastern Association for Community College Research (SACCR). Earlier in her career as an English professor, she was a finalist in the Florida Association of Community Colleges (FACC) “Teacher of the Year” competition. She has presented forum, concurrent, and round table sessions at the SACS Annual Meeting and at other state, regional, and national conferences on documenting institutional effectiveness, assessment of student learning, preparation of accreditation documents, and hosting visiting committees.
Stephanie Hawley
Stephanie is the Associate Vice President of College Access Programs. In that role, she provides leadership in collaboratively developing, executing, and evaluating plans to improve and increase success equity in Adult Education, Development Education, English for Speakers of Other Language and college level gate keeper courses.
Stephanie convenes the Student Success Initiative Steering Committee meetings across organizational reporting structures to ensure that instruction and student success support services are well-aligned to support the strategic plan for increasing the success of developmental and adult education students. She facilitates the College Transitions Committee (faculty, support staff, department chairs, and deans) to explore and address student access and success issues and to facilitate the use of data for strategic planning to reduce barriers to student success. Stephanie is the Core Team Leader for the Achieving the Dream four-year implementation plan.
Stephanie has served as a Vice President and an Associate Vice Chancellor in the Academic Affairs division at City Colleges of Chicago. She was responsible for collaboratively re-structuring the system’s developmental education programs on seven campuses. She served on the Academic Affairs Vision 2011 implementation team and led the system-wide retention initiative to improve student persistence. Stephanie served as both a consultant and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Morton College in Cicero, Illinois. Stephanie is the founding director of Oklahoma City University’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning where she currently serves as a consultant on diversity issues and faculty development.
As a professor of English and director of the faculty development center at Del Mar College (Corpus Christi, Texas), she received the 2002 Who's Who Who among America's Teachers award. Stephanie was a consultant and professor for the National Writing Project at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She has also taught graduate courses in English, higher education leadership, and teacher education. Her research interests and publications include topics associated with institutional factors affecting Black and Latino student persistence; developmental education; faculty and administrator professional development in the community college; and leadership and organizational development. Stephanie is a graduate of the Community College Leadership Program at The University of Texas at Austin. She earned a master’s degree from the University of Houston and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Texas. She is a peer evaluator for the Higher Learning Commission.
Tom Jaynes
Tom Jaynes serves as Executive Dean for Student Development and Support at Durham Technical Community College (NC). Tom is responsible for coordinated management and process improvement for multiple student services including orientation, advising, registration, counseling, admissions, financial aid, student activities, and student records.
Tom is deeply invested in the work of transforming support services using data. He chairs the college’s continued participation as a round one Leader College in the national Achieving the Dream initiative. Tom also provided key support to Durham Tech’s administrations of the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE). Tom has been an active participant in and workshop presenter at the Entering Student Success Institute (ESSI) in 2009 and 2011 and has provided numerous professional development workshops focused on the importance of using both quantitative and qualitative data to create specific action plans at American Association of Community College (AACC) conferences, Achieving the Dream (ATD) Strategy Institutes, Innovative Leadership conferences, and other national and state gatherings.
As a result of the rich culture of engagement and success data provided by both SENSE and ATD, Tom has helped Durham Tech move from a culture of “optional” to “required” by successfully designing, implementing and assessing four mandated, full-scale front-door experiences for at-risk students: an inescapable full-scale orientation for new college students; a required assessment for determining placement of underprepared students; a required and developmentally-appropriate advising experience; and a first semester college success course that helps new students create a full academic advising plan along with general orientation to critical college success skills. As a result of these coordinated front door experiences, Durham Tech has realized four years of gains in first-to-second semester student persistence and academic success.
Tom has worked at Durham Technical Community College for 19 years and began his career as a tutorial coordinator and a disability services counselor. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from Centenary College of Louisiana and an M.S.Ed. in Psychological Services from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kerry Mix
Kerry Mix serves as the Dean of Enrollment Services at San Jacinto College, South Campus, in Houston, Texas. In that role, he is responsible for four campus-based student services departments – financial aid, enrollment services, testing center, and veteran center. Additionally, he joined the ranks of part-time faculty for the college teaching a college preparatory (developmental education) student success course.
Kerry has served in a variety of capacities in higher education. At Coastal Bend College, he developed curricula, and taught and advised students as a faculty member. At the University of Houston Victoria, he was instrumental in the success of the Letting Education Achieve Dreams (LEAD) initiative, a comprehensive higher education awareness and participation campaign. Prior to joining San Jacinto College, he served as a research assistant for the Center for Community College Student Engagement. At the Center, his work included survey item and module development, and contributions to Center print and online communications including the systematic collection of data-informed college vignettes and video capture/editing. Kerry also cultivated relationships with college representatives through Center outreach efforts and national conferences.
Kerry started his educational journey at Coastal Bend College, where he attained an A.A.S. in Electronic Servicing. He went on to earn a B.A.A.S and M.Ed from the University of Houston Victoria. He earned a doctorate in Educational Administration from The University of Texas at Austin’s Community College Leadership Program.
Maureen Pettitt
Maureen has served as the Director of Institutional Research at Skagit Valley College in Washington State for the past 14 years. She develops and implements an ongoing, district-wide program to evaluate institutional effectiveness and student learning outcomes assessment program. She serves as the Accreditation Liaison Officer for the college and led the college to a successful ten-year comprehensive reaffirmation of accreditation in 2009. Maureen is the administrative member of the general education governance committee, responsible for guiding the implementation and assessment of the college’s general education program. She also works with faculty both inside and outside the classroom to create integrative assignments for students in learning communities that include data that students find interesting and relevant. In addition, Maureen serves on the college’s Achieving the Dream core team and leads Skagit’s ATD Data Team.
As Director of Institutional Research, Maureen assists the college community with the design, implementation, and evaluation of student success initiatives. She has served as a key individual in the development and implementation of the college’s Counseling-Enhanced Developmental Learning Communities initiative and on the college’s General Education Task Force; for both efforts, Maureen used CCSSE data to inform decision making. As part of Skagit’s institutional effectiveness efforts, Maureen and her colleagues have administered CCSSE in 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2010. The college also administered SENSE in 2010. She has used CCSSE data in a wide variety of presentations and articles and has conducted presentations using CCSSE data to examine learning and engagement of students in learning communities, students with risk factors, and differences between students in the US and Canada.
In addition to serving on a variety of statewide organizations and committees, Maureen has served as a lead and support for Skagit Valley College’s participation in the League for Innovation in the Community College’s 21st Century Learning Outcomes project and the MetLife Foundation Initiative on Student Success; team leader for a Department of Education project, Showcasing & Replicating Community College Programs on topics surrounding developmental education; an Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Research in the Community College for the past five years; Chief Scientific and Technical Advisor for Human Factors at the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, D.C.; research faculty at Western Michigan University; and tenured professor at California State University, Los Angeles.
Julie Phelps
Julie Phelps has served as a mathematics faculty member and the Project Director of Achieving the Dream at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, since 1997. She has studied ways to increase student engagement, learning, retention, self-efficacy, and success among developmental education students. She also has taught developmental mathematics as part of an intentional learning community by linking mathematics to a student success course. Through these research and teaching experiences, Phelps learned that required education and career planning, combined with a connection to other student support services, provide individuals the much-needed direction to become truly successful college students.
Julie continues her research in the area of developmental mathematics and is still using data to understand community college issues (i.e. supplemental instruction/supplemental learning, learning communities, closing the achievement gap, developmental mathematics curriculum redesign, and self-efficacy). Her experiences with these types of learning evidence are being utilized in such roles as consulting for the Achieving the Dream Initiative, the Developmental Education Initiative, as well as the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE). Additionally, Phelps was appointed as American Mathematics Association for Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC) Pathways (Quantway™/Statway™) Communication Liaison. Statway™ and Quantway™are yearlong alternative mathematics pathways for non-STEM students currently under development by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Charles A. Dana Center.
Julie earned a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction specializing in Community College in 2005 from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Her dissertation topic was “Supplemental Instruction in a Community College Developmental Mathematics Curriculum: A Phenomenological Study of Learning Experiences.” Julie has been the recipient of several teaching and leadership awards including the most recent the 2010 Virginia B. Smith Innovation in Higher Education Leadership Award.
Michael Poindexter
Michael Poindexter serves as Vice President of Student Services at Sacramento City College (CA) and Adjunct Professor at Drexel University. With more than 22 years of administrative experience, Michael has enjoyed an exceptional career, serving in both two-year and four-year institutions.
Previously Michael served as Vice President of Student Affairs at the Community Colleges of Rhode Island and as Vice President for Student Affairs at Kingsborough Community College (KBCC) (NY), where during his tenure the Student Affairs Division held the highest student satisfaction rate of all community colleges in the City University of New York and retention rates drastically improved over previous years. The students of KBCC presented him with a “Pursuit of Excellence Award” in recognition of his achievements. At the Community College of Denver, where he was Vice President of Student Services and Enrollment, Michael helped to lead an enrollment shift that through which high school graduate and minority student enrollment climbed to 50 percent of the total population. When he left CCD, minority student retention was on par with the retention of the student population overall. Previously, Michael served as Admissions Director at the University of Colorado and was an administrator at The University of Texas at Austin, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa.
In his field, Michael is internationally recognized and sought after as a valued consultant, keynote speaker, and conference presenter and convener. He served as a panelist/consultant for several PBS videoconferences on retention and has served as a Senior Consultant for Noel Levitz, one of the largest educational consulting companies in the world. Michael also is a member of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, the American Association of Community Colleges, the Outstanding Young Men of America, and the national advisory board of the Center for Community College Student Engagement. He received an Outstanding Service Award from the College Board, and the United Negro College Fund has acknowledged Michael for his service. Michael’s Motto is: “The Learner Comes First.”
Chantel Reynolds
Chantel Reynolds serves as a Senior Assessment Manager for the College Board’s ACCUPLACER & CLEP Program under the division of College Readiness. In this role, she works with colleges and universities seeking to establish and improve placement testing policies for incoming students (via ACCUPLACER) and to offer opportunities to improve student retention and graduation (via CLEP).
She leads the program’s work with institutions piloting a new diagnostics and intervention partnership recently announced by the College Board. A frequent traveler, she spends most of her time visiting campuses in AR, NM, OK, and TX, with the occasional side trip to work with institutions in California or North Carolina. When working with an institution, Chantel focuses on understanding campus culture and perspectives regarding student success and offering realistic, actionable solutions that work within that culture.
Prior to joining the College Board, Chantel served as Testing Center Director for Santa Fe Community College (NM). In that capacity, she oversaw the administration of the CCSSE and CCFSSE surveys, chaired the workgroup that reviewed and disseminated the results, and helped develop strategies and projects designed to bridge the gaps between student and faculty perceptions. Additionally, Chantel was a member of the Achieving the Dream steering and data committees at Santa Fe Community College and often found intersections between the data obtained through mandatory placement testing, CCSSE survey results, and Achieving the Dream analyses. She was also a member of a NM Higher Education Department task force focusing on redesigning high school assessments and closing the gaps between high school completion and college readiness. Her final weeks at SFCC were focused on developing dual enrollment partnerships with local charter and public school systems. Chantel has also served as adjunct faculty for Santa Fe Community College and Wayland Baptist University and taught in Santa Fe Public Schools.
Chantel is a frequent presenter at national and regional conferences, including NISOD, AACC, and NADE. During her time with SFCC, Chantel published articles in the Journal of Applied Research in the Community College and Assessment Update: Progress, Trends, and Practices in Higher Education. She holds both a BA and MA from Eastern New Mexico University.
Dana Sendziol
Dana currently serves as a consultant at the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE), having completed her doctoral degree in the Community College Leadership Program at The University of Texas at Austin.
A Chicago native, Dana earned an MBA from Loyola University Chicago, with dual concentrations in management and marketing. Her undergraduate degree is from Dominican University, where she majored in English and communications.
Dana has served in admissions, fundraising, executive education and recruitment and retention at DePaul University, Loyola University Chicago and Dominican University.
She was the national communications manager at the American Dental Association for the Tripartite Grassroots Membership Initiative, a grassroots membership campaign. Other past positions include directing the national public relations and advocacy efforts of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry as well as overseeing the four publications of that agency, inclusive of two scholarly journals.
She later served as Director of Community Relations and Public Engagement for Elgin Community College (IL) and in an executive capacity at Triton College (IL).