SCC Board differs over process for filling governing vacancies

BEATRICE – The Southeast Community College Board has approved a policy for dealing with how vacancies are filled on the college board, but not without some differences over the process.

Board member Dale Kruse questioned why policies on filling vacancies and election oversight didn’t come before a human resources and equity team, prior to coming to the full board. One board member said the reason is it doesn’t involve hiring or employment decisions, but rather administrative actions.

But Kruse says it has been past practice.

"In the past few years, any policies that came through, whether they were hiring, academic or whatever, were ran through the HR/Equity team, just for the purpose of a small group of people looking at it from a new set of eyes to see if any suggestions they would have....before it came to the full board for discussion and review."

SCC Board Chairman Neal Stenberg said he wasn’t aware there was such a policy, and questioned whether the human resources and equity team was the proper place for review.

"What this policy does is it spells out in detail what we're going to do. So, there aren't going to be surprises...nobody is going to say the policy got modified or structured to give somebody an advantage...because everybody knows what's going on. Everybody has every application...everybody has an equal vote. To me, that's important. Because, I'm not a big fan of certain people assuming a lot of control. We're all equal."

In recent years, the college board has been through the process of filling board vacancies on two occasions, where a member of the board passed away.
In one of those instances, there were over 30 applicants for the vacant board seat, while in the other….there were about five.

An offer made by board member Kathy Boellstorff to postpone approval of the policies until further review, failed on a 4-7 vote of the board.  After defeat of the postponement motion, the policies then were approved on a 10-1 vote. The college board met at the Beatrice Campus Academic Excellence Center, on Tuesday.