Maine system president goes on the rural road
By Matthew Dembicki, Published August 3, 2007

The head of the Maine Community College System this week begins an 18-stop tour around the state, meeting with local business and community leaders to discuss what public two-year colleges can do to revive sagging economies and address high poverty rates in rural parts of the state.

System President John Fitzsimmons said the idea to talk to local stake­holders developed when data revealed a significant gap between unemploy­ment and poverty rates and education levels between Maine’s rural and more urban areas.

Despite enrollment at the state’s seven community colleges increasing 47 percent over the last four years, the economic gap between rural and urban areas in Maine also increased, Fitz­simmons said in an interview before beginning his tour. About 12 percent of the more than 500,000 people who live in rural Maine live below the pov­erty line, he said.

“My intent is to visit rural areas of the state that are working hard to re­build their economies in the aftermath of steady—sometimes devastating—job losses in traditional manufactur­ing and natural resource-based indus­tries,” Fitzsimmons wrote in a article for the Bangor Daily News explaining his upcoming tour.

Jobs at paper and textile mills—which didn’t require more than a high school education—are disappearing, Fitzsimmons said, and most of these jobs were in rural areas. With those jobs gone, the poverty rates in rural areas have increased. Not surprisingly, the counties with the highest poverty rates are also those with the lowest percentage of adults with a college degree, he said.

Community colleges in the state are in a good position to help rural areas kick-start their economies through education and training for new indus­tries, Fitzsimmons said. Aside from being less expensive than four-year institutions, the state’s seven commu­nity colleges and their nine off-campus centers are located within 25 miles of 92 percent of Maine’s population.

“The economic and educational gaps between our urban and rural commu­nities are deeply troubling,” he said. “Without focused intervention, they are likely to continue to grow.”

Fitzsimmons said he expects new state efforts to emerge from his tour of all 16 Maine counties, as well as efforts to rethink some existing programs.

For example, the state’s 15-year-old Quality Centers program, which offers free training for new and ex­panding small businesses with eight or more employees, is considered a re­sounding success, he said. But it hasn’t been used much in rural parts of the state, where employing eight workers is significant. It might make sense to change it to three or so employees.

“We need to revisit what we’re do­ing,” Fitzsimmons said.

Fitzsimmons said his office will research what other states are doing to tackle similar problems, but the focus of the tour will be on listening to what local employers and leaders say. Community and business leaders have quickly started to sign up for the visits, he said. One of the more rural counties in northern Maine already has 40 participants signed up, and me­dia in the state have requested to trav­el with Fitzsimmons on his stops.

“It only reinforced that they see this as an issue,” Fitzsimmons said.

The tour will conclude in early fall. Fitzsimmons expects to issue an ini­tiative to cater to rural areas by early December.