REPRINT FROM COMMUNITY EDUCATION JOURNAL

Volume XI

Number 2

January 1984

A Community College
Examines Its Community

By Fern June Khan

© DETERMINE the direction of

college expansion, the Division of
Continuing Education at LaGuardia
Community College, New York City,
undertook a community needs as-
sessment in collaboration with the
American Association of Community
and Junior Colleges (AACJC). LaGuar-
dia was one of six urban community
colleges designated to participate with
AACJC in a project to demonstrate the
ability of the urban community col-
lege to become more responsive to the
varied needs of its community.

The experience of project staff dur-
ing the assessment process were simi-
lar to procedures reported elsewhere,*
but the LaGuardia experience had
unique qualities, too, involving the
variables of staff, college location, het-
erogeneity of the community, and mis-
sion of the college.

Located in Long Island City, Western
Queens, LaGuardia Community Col-
lege is in the heart of an area once re-
puted to have the broadest concentra-
tion of diversified light industry in
America. The area also has a rich diver-
sity of ethnic and racial groups, who
live in predominantly ethnic enclaves
within neighborhoods. The selection
of the college’s physical location was
the result of demographic surveys by
the Board of Higher Education, which
revealed that area residents were
among those with the lowest average
family income and educational attain-
ment in the entire city and were not
being served by any colleges within
the City University of New York.
Hence, the very reason for the college’s
existence was to meet the educational
needs of an economically disadvan-
taged, ethnically diverse, and indus-
trially commited community.

“Refer to New York State Continuing Education
Needs Assessment, January 1977, or to Patricia
Cross, The State of the Art in Needs Assessment,
April 1979.

The Assessment Process

The project goal was defined as en-
hancement of LaGuardia’s ability to
develop an effective working relation-
ship with its community, and through
combined effort and resources to
jointly meet identifiable needs and
interests within the community. This
goal seemed both reasonable and man-
ageable to project staff and to the col-
lege’s policymaking body. The project
objectives were:

1. To initiate a study of the commu-
nity—its needs, strengths, and
resources.

2. To develop a community profile.

3. To establish communication sys-
tems with the community that
would facilitate dialogue, net-
working, and sharing of re-
sources.

4. To develop processes for in-
volvement of the college commu-
nity in identifying college needs
and resources relative to the
community.

5. To establish an advisory board
with college and community rep-
resentation.

6. To determine priority issues in
light of identified needs and re-
sources of the college and the
community.

7. To plan and implement programs
addressing priority issues.

8. To develop instruments and sys-
tems for continual evaluation of

Fern Khan, a native of Jamaica, West In-
dies, received her B.A. and M.S.W. from
New York University. She is currently a
professor and director of Community Ser-
vice Programs at LaGuardia Community
College, where she plans and implements
a variety of Continuing Education pro-
grams, many of which serve as feeder
programs to the college's degree pro-
grams. Classes for deaf adults and the
“College for Children” are among her re-
sponsibilities.

12 COMMUNITY EDUCATION JOURNAL

programs and ongoing assess-
ment of needs.

The initial phase of the project was a
community needs assessment; the
dual aim of the assessment was to pro-
duce a report on the continuing educa-
tion needs of residents and to com-
pile a community profile of Western
Queens. Questions were designed to
elicit attitudes toward employment,
neighborhoods, and continuing edu-
cation, as well as information on age,
sex, race, education, marital status,
and income. The goal was to reach
1,000 residents through telephone in-
terviews.

Letters were mailed to 48 community
organizations requesting specific in-
formation about the community
served and the potential for college-
community collaboration in meeting
community needs. Simultaneously,
project staff visited 14 community or-
ganizations; the visits included each of
the five community districts in the
survey sample. District managers were
helpful in providing an overall de-
scription of the residents and their
needs as well as suggesting organiza-
tions that should be contacted.

The college also formed an advisory
committee representative of the college
and the community to review the sur-
vey findings and make recommenda-
tions for increasing community-based
activities and linkages.

The community definition was lim-
ited to relatively local neighborhoods.
This was not intended to deny the
LaGuardia commitment to New York
City as a whole; rather, it represented
an effort to focus that commitment,
particularly in relation to community
education, on those populations most
closely associated with the college geo-
graphically or through current partici-
pation in college programs. A survey of
students registered in Division of
Continuing Education programs dur-
ing the fall of 1979 indicated that 75
percent of the Division’s population


“The very reason for the college’s existence was to meet the educational needs
of an economically disadvantaged, ethnically diverse community”

came from neighborhoods represented
by Queens Community Districts One
through Five and neighboring Brook-
lyn Community Districts One and
Four. Collegewide statistics indicated
that more than 50 percent of the stu-
dent body came from the Borough of
Queens and 21 percent from Brooklyn.

The college provided monies to hire
part-time staff for the telephone survey
and to engage the services of a public
opinion research firm, Kane, Parsons,
and Associates. The latter assisted
project staff in the development of a
questionnaire to find out how resi-
dents perceive neighborhood prob-
lems, their personal and educational
needs, their interests, and basic demo-
graphic information. The firm also as-
sisted in drawing the sample and in
coding, analyzing, and reporting on
the findings. Some monies for consul-
tation, as well as for a project assistant
for a six-month period, were provided
through the Center for Community
Education, AACJC. Sister Edith Kane,
S.N.D., was hired as project assistant.

The Telephone Survey

Using a nine-page, 36-question in-
strument with translations in Spanish
and Greek, and with six weeks during
which to complete the calls, the survey
began. Calls were made Monday
through Friday from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.
and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. To
facilitate supervision of the interview-
ers, who had received orientation and
training, calls were made from ad-
joining offices.

The Survey Results

The telephone calls yielded 1,800 eligi-
ble respondents and 840 completed
interviews, providing a success rate of
84 percent (the project goal was 1,000
interviews). Respondents had to be
aged 18 and over and not currently
registered as full-time students; 67
percent of the respondents were white,
14 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic,
and 4 percent other. The median age
was 36.6; 13 percent were in the 18-24
age group, 17 percent over 65, and 43
percent were 25-44. In general, re-

spondents were better educated than
the population of Queens as a whole;
15 percent were college graduates,
while 27 percent had not completed
high school.

Survey data showed that community
residents were most concerned about
the lack of neighborhood recreational
facilities and adequate health care in-
formation. Younger adults and adults
in the labor force placed greater stress
on inadequate adult education facil-
ities. Approximately one-third of the
sample was interested in changing
jobs, a desire strongest among blacks,
younger workers, persons who had
attended college, and white-collar
workers. A sizeable number of adults
seemed ready to avail themselves of
continuing education for personal and
career growth. About one-third of the
sample had previously participated in
continuing education programs.

With this information, the college
staff increased its publicity efforts to
focus on Career Change for Adults and
supplemented its quarterly brochure
with attractive posters, shopping bags,
and more recently, radio spot an-
nouncements. The survey results and
recommendations spurred increased
effort to reach community residents
who were ready for more education
but who had not thought of LaGuardia
Community College as a resource.

Other outcomes have included in-
creased outreach to community or-
ganizations to acquaint them with the
college’s wide variety of programs and
program possibilities, such as off-
campus courses, and collegewide par-
ticipation in community health fairs,
street and borough fairs, and presen-
tations to neighborhood groups. A
divisional publicity committee de-
veloped as a natural offshoot of the
survey; this committee now makes
recommendations on divisionwide
publicity activities.

The Advisory Committee

The Advisory Committee’s tasks were
to review the findings of the survey,
assign priority to the areas of need, and

establish subcommittees to work on
those areas. The long-range goal was to
encourage active involvement of com-
mittee members in articulating the
needs of their communities that the
college could realistically address. The
Advisory Committee members repre-
sented a variety of social, governmen-
tal, political, and religious agencies
within the community as well as being
community residents themselves.

In spite of the problems inherent in
organizing individuals with diverse
interests and needs into a cohesive
group, the college representatives on
the Advisory Committee developed a
sensitivity and awareness of the spe-
cial organizational needs and interests
of agencies that serve community resi-
dents.

Summary

To undertake a community survey of
this magnitude, a college must expend
roughly $12,000 in salaries and assign
the supervisory staff necessary to over-
see the project. Tangible results can
lead to more effective recruitment and
amore positive image for the college as
well as to incidental learning and
deepened community understanding
for the staff.

The survey process has continued to
provide useful insights, ongoing re-
lationships, and, of course, program
ideas for LaGuardia Community Col-
lege. The process involved the coop-
eration and support of almost all areas
and levels of the college, academic as
well as administrative. The result was a
renewal of interdisciplinary relation-
ships and, hence, programs that reflect
a holistic orientation. Programs de-
signed to enhance the growth of com-
munity residents also, in the long run,
aid the growth of the community itself.
One example was the combined in-
volvement of the Social Science Divi-
sion faculty and Continuing Education
staff with the Astoria Reformed
Church to plan a fitting celebration for
Martin Luther King’s birthday in Feb-
ruary 1981; LaGuardia Community
College President Joseph Shenker was
one of two guest speakers at this event.

JANUARY 1984 13


Two community basketball clinics
have been held in cooperation with
LaGuardia’s recreational program.
One featured New York Knicks’ Mike
Glenn and attracted more than 250 deaf
youngsters from New York City.

Most of the project objectives have
been accomplished. The college has re-
cent data on neighborhood demo-
graphics and needs, and clearer indi-
cations of promising areas for commu-
nity and college collaboration. With a
heightened awareness of community
diversity, the college staff are now in-
volved in an ongoing process of de-
veloping programs to meet immediate
and long-term community needs. One
example is a deliberate reaching out to
community women through a series of
Saturday workshops to identify areas
of interest and to provide academic
and career counseling. One outcome of
the workshops is an Office Automa-
tion Training Program for women
funded by the New York State Educa-
tion Department; more than 250
women applied for 40 available spaces.
In addition, the Community Service
Program sponsored, in cooperation
with the Women’s Program, three
major conferences during 1982-83:

© “Midlife Crisis Conference,”

which attracted many women and a
few men of all age groups, mainly from
the Western Queens community.

° “Employment Opportunities for
Visually Impaired Women,” which
drew 250 participants from various
parts of the U.S.

© “Third-World Women’s Confer-
ence,”” which brought together women
of diverse backgrounds, experiences,
and cultures; this very successful con-
ference will be repeated in 1984.

These conferences attracted more
than 600 persons from throughout the
metropolitan New York community.

Another program developed in re-
sponse to community needs identified
in the needs assessment is the College
for Children, a combination of aca-
demic and leisure courses offered to
community residents on Saturdays.
More than 450 children have partici-
pated in this program since it started in
1982. Classes are designed to provide
pleasurable learning experiences
through a variety of activities, includ-
ing gym fun, reading, math, and com-
puters for children. All Children’s
College classes are held on Saturday
mornings; parents who wish to take
credit and noncredit courses fre-
quently enroll for classes at the same

14 COMMUNITY EDUCATION JOURNAL

time. New classes to be added this year
include Developing Critical Thinking
Skills in Children, Myth and Fantasy,
and Theatre Arts Workshop for Chil-
dren. LaGuardia has been asked to
replicate the College for Children ina
nearby school district where similar
programs for children are sorely lack-
ing. Grants are being sought to permit
expansion of the program and inclu-
sion of handicapped children.

In the process of responding to the
community needs assessment, the
college has renewed old commitments
and effected new linkages to commu-
nity groups, individuals, and agen-

cies. Oo

REFERENCES

Cross, Patricia. The State of the Art in Needs As-
sessment. Washington, D.C.: ERIC Reports,
April 1979.

Warden, John. Quoted in Philip Deaver,
“Exploring ‘Process,’ A Review of Process
Perspectives by John Warden,” Community
Education Journal, April 1980.

An Assessment of the Needs of the Western Queens
Community. New York City: LaGuardia
Community College, Division of Continuing
Education, 1980.

New York State Continuing Education Needs Assess-
ment, Report No. 1. Albany, NY: State De-
partment of Education, Division of Con-
tinuing Education, January 1977.

Kussnow, Paul. “Food for Thought,” Community
Services Catalyst, XII, 2, 1982.