BY CLIFF SMELLEY
Telegraph Staff Writer
Santa Fe College can boast of several number-one rankings, but its president, Paul Broadie, said the school is continually striving to move forward and “tranSForm” the learning experience for its students and the communities in which it’s located.
Broadie, as part of his state-of-the-college address on Oct. 12 at the Gov. Charley E. Johns Conference Center in Starke, talked of the school’s $12 million tranSForm campaign, which was launched earlier this year. Its goal is to create additional scholarships, enhance programs across the college and further booster education in the areas of workforce development, STEM and liberal arts.
“Every donation to this campaign will give us the opportunity to further enhance opportunities for students in Bradford County and create the pathways to give Bradford County the workforce it needs as you continue to grow,” Broadie said. “In addition to this campaign, for this legislative session, one of our requests will be for additional funding to support our workforce-development and academic-enhancement efforts.”
Broadie spoke of Santa Fe’s number-one national ranking among junior colleges and said the school was recently named the number-one college in Florida for students who are veterans. He said he has challenged everyone at the college to continue moving the college forward as it focuses on being a leader in academic excellence, workforce development, student success, innovation, upward and social mobility, and community impact.
With that in mind, the school is exploring opportunities for increased degree, certificate and workforce-development programs to better meet the needs of Bradford County and its projected population growth.
“This year, we already implemented some law-enforcement training courses in Bradford County at the Andrews Center to keep law-enforcement professionals in Bradford County without them needing to travel to Alachua County, where our Institute for Public Safety is located,” Broadie said. “We are currently working on plans to add some Heath Science programs in Bradford County so that students will be able to take those classes in Bradford County. We are focusing on high-demand, higher-wage fields that open the doors for students to become phlebotomists, EMTs, dental hygienists and sterile processors.
“We continue to have a strong relationship with North Florida Technical College to provide enhanced training programs. We are in talks with Goodwill Industries and Career Source regarding partnership opportunities that will increase career and workforce training right here in Bradford and provide more opportunities to the residents, and our new director of Workforce Development, Trenton Hightower, is working to add additional SF workforce training programs that will benefit the community and respond to the needs of business and industry. Trenton is also reaching out to local businesses to offer customized training that enables employers to upskill or reskill their existing employees.”
Broadie said Santa Fe has helped students in rural communities by providing laptop computers and internet hot spots and expanding its internet connectivity.
“We also added innovative HyFlex classrooms to our centers, giving students the freedom to choose to attend class in person or virtually, while still giving both the student and the faculty member the same in-class, interactive experience,” Broadie said. “We have added new faculty lines to increase the number of full-time instructors teaching at our Andrews and Watson (centers), providing greater faculty support for students and increased course offerings.”
Santa Fe launched its SF Achieve program last year, which resulted in placing a specialist at Bradford High School to provide mentoring and academic coaching to help increase student success in college. Currently, 114 BHS students are affiliated with the program.
“Students who complete the program become SF Achieve Scholars, and that qualifies them for a tuition scholarship and provides each of them with $400 per semester to cover the cost of textbooks and materials,” Broadie said. “In addition, all SF Achieve Scholars are assigned a mentor to support their continued success as a Santa Fe College student.
“Since we launched SF Achieve, we have seen an increase of 12.8 percent in enrollment from Bradford County, and for Bradford High’s Class of 2022, we have seen an increase in enrollment of 16.7 percent from the year before.”
Santa Fe continues to serve BHS students with its Upward Bound and Educational Talent search programs, which fall under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Education’s TRIO program, which is designed to provide assistance to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
“In fact, all of our Educational Talent Search students in Bradford High School earned the SF Achieve Scholarship,” Broadie said. “Nationally, 22 percent of Upward Bound students enroll in college after high school graduation. At Santa Fe, 88 percent of our Upward Bound students in Bradford County enrolled in college for the fall term immediately after their high school graduation.”
Broadie said over the past two years, 100 percent of dual-enrolled students from Bradford who applied at the University of Florida were accepted. More than half of those dual-enrolled students are continuing their education at Santa Fe.
“We are committed to the success of every student who walks through our doors, providing them with the knowledge, mentorship and guidance to dream big, excel academically and achieve their life goal,” Broadie said.
In closing, Broadie said Santa Fe can achieve a lot on its own, but the possibilities are limitless when its communities are also involved.
“We will continue to work closely with you, our community partners, to enhance the opportunities here in Bradford County,” Broadie said.
Florida Chamber president talks of future, challenges
Mark Wilson, the president/CEO of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, also spoke at the state-of-the-college event, echoing Broadie’s remarks that future possibilities are limitless if everyone works together.
Once that was said, Wilson shared the 2030 goals for the state and what those goals meant for Bradford County.
First, Wilson said if Florida was a country, it would have the 16th-largest economy in the world. It’s bigger than Saudi Arabia, while the goal is to be bigger than South Korea and be 10th in the world by 2030, Wilson said.
To reach that goal, Florida will add 3.5 million to its population by 2030. It currently has a population of 22 million, which places it at third in the U.S. behind California and Texas.
“We need to add 1.62 million new jobs by 2030,” Wilson said, who added it would be a good idea if every legislative session or every meeting at the city and county levels began with that fact so that people are constantly aware of the need to make that happen.
Wilson said it’s projected that Bradford County’s population will increase by 3,500-3,700 people by 2030, so the county needs to create almost 1,000 new jobs.
To keep moving forward with the rest of the state, Bradford County has some issues it needs to address, Wilson said. For example, 45 percent of the county’s third-graders or reading at or above grade level, he said.
“I’m not blaming teachers. I’m not blaming parents. I’m certainly not blaming the kids. What I want to do is bring this to everybody’s attention,” Wilson said, adding, “The question is, ‘What are we doing about it?’”
Deficiencies in third-grade reading levels aren’t confined to Bradford. Wilson said when looking at the state as a whole, the percentage reading at or abo e grade level is 53 percent, but Florida still ranks in the top 10 in the U.S. in terms of third-grade reading.
“The United States is not top 20 in the world in this metric,” Wilson said, adding, “There’s not a third-grader in Bradford who’s going to grow up and compete against kids from China and from Brazil and from Mexico.”
In regard to the U.S. as a whole, Wilson said, “We can’t keep lowering standards in education and think we’re going to somehow compete around the world.”
The availability of high-speed internet is also another negative in Bradford.
“Only two-thirds of your residents in your county actually have access to high-speed connectivity,” Wilson said. “We’ve got to fix this.”
Wilson said one of the positives Bradford possesses is having a Santa Fe College center in its midst. He said people should want to support Santa Fe, noting that Florida’s network of colleges and universities is ranked number one in the U.S. by “U.S News and World Report.”
“We’re number one in the country,” Wilson said. “Wouldn’t you want to invest more in number one?”
Yet a poll revealed that 28 percent of the state’s voters don’t think Florida has the nation’s top colleges and universities, Wilson said.
“The best way that we can help (Broadie) is to talk to our employees and talk to our neighbors and have our chambers and our county commissions and city councils share this information,” Wilson said, adding, “That’s a strength that’s going to bring jobs to Florida. We need to invest more in what’s working.”
If Bradford residents were willing to think beyond the borders of the county, it could have another strength in its proximity to the Port of Jacksonville, Wilson said. He explained that Charleston, South Carolina, considers the Port of Charleston and its facilities part of Charleston, though the distance between the city and the port are approximately the same distance between Bradford County and the Port of Jacksonville.
“I just want us to be thinking about that from an economic-development standpoint,” Wilson said.
Increasing job opportunities is a way of helping Florida reach its goals, but it’ll also hopefully help with childhood poverty. Wilson said more than 30 percent of the children in Bradford are living in poverty, while the state has a total of 773,000 children living in poverty.
Wilson said what’s baffling is that these numbers exist despite the fact that Florida creates one out of every 13 new jobs in the country.
“How is this possible,” he asked. “What are we, as a business community, going to do about it?”
Wilson encouraged those in attendance to visit thefloridascorecard.org, which posts metrics for the state overall and broken down by county.
