St. Clair College and Patti France Invested In Our Community
By Edward Olsen, photos by Tina Huynh
When Patricia (Patti) France retires from the Presidency of St. Clair College this June, she will leave the school in one of the most solid and enviable financial positions of any enterprise, public or private, in southwestern Ontario.
The oldest elements of its physical infrastructure have also been updated and repaired, and many new facilities have been constructed on its campuses. As well the College’s “brand” and reputation have never been more conspicuous and highly regarded.
Despite the two-year-long pandemic — which virtually shuttered a number of postsecondary institutions — St. Clair didn’t just survive COVID’s worst days, it thrived through them.
Those two years are included in a remarkable run of literal good fortune, marked by substantial annual budgetary surpluses throughout almost the entirety of France’s nine-year-long presidency.
At the end of March (the College operates on the same budgetary calendar as all provincial agencies), St. Clair projects that it will conclude its 2023-24 fiscal year with the highest surplus in the school’s 57-year history.
When the year’s budget was set in March of 2023, a year-end surplus of $37.9 million had been predicted. That was bumped up by 37 percent during the mid-year review, when Finance Vice-President/Chief Financial Officer Marc Jones informed the school’s Board of Governors that record-setting enrolment had boosted revenues beyond all previous forecasts.
As for how this latest windfall fits in with France’s financial track record, it’s a “cherry on the top” achievement to cap her tenure as President. The 2023-24 surplus will be the seventh consecutive annual surplus of eight-figures.
And because the College has set aside much of that cash in long-term reserves — christened “the sustainability fund” by France and the Board of Governors — much of it is still nestled away, earning yet more money in interest-bearing investments.
During the past two fiscal years, the Board of Governors agreed with France’s proposal to inject some of the surplus money into the College’s bursaries and scholarship funds, administered by the school’s
Fundraising Foundation.
Also at France’s recommendation, the Board has allowed some of the accumulated surplus funds to be used to tackle the College’s long-standing “wish list” of deferred maintenance projects.
“You have to remember that St. Clair — and the entire provincial system of two dozen public colleges — was founded in 1967, sort of as a celebratory project during Canada’s Centennial,” France mentions. “And that means that many of our main buildings have been in use for almost 60 years. Anyone who has ever lived in a 60-year-old house knows the headaches associated with upkeep and repairs. Multiply the dimensions of that house by a factor of a couple of hundred to represent the huge size of our original buildings, and you’ll appreciate the scope of some of the challenges that we’ve had to deal with.”
Several years ago, St. Clair’s Facilities Management Department estimated the school’s cost for such deferred maintenance projects at $42 million.
The provincial government had a grant program that allocated upkeep funding of several hundred thousand dollars annually.
That was something of a “drop in the bucket” really, because by the time such cash was spent on one job, another much-delayed maintenance item may have worsened by the same amount (or more).
“The surpluses during the past few years have allowed us to inject a couple of million dollars per year (even as much as $5 million on occasion) to tackle some of our most significant and long-overdue deferred maintenance projects,” France notes. “It’s not very glamorous — in fact, many of them aren’t the sort of projects that are even noticed by staff or students — but they are essential.”
Aside from those injections into current-year budgets, the sustainability fund exists as an “emergency-use-only” reserve. Its rationale: the money would allow the College to survive for a year or two during any sort of dire crisis, which severely disrupted enrolment or funding.
Amazingly, a world-wide COVID pandemic did not meet that criterion, so the sustainability fund reserve remained untouched while the viral outbreak raged in 2020 and 2021.
Neither the domestic or international enrolment of the College declined markedly during the pandemic, because both its staff and students adapted so rapidly and successfully to a switch to online course delivery.
France still marvels at how the College responded to the outbreak in the spring of 2020: “We received the shutdown order in mid-March, just as students and staff were about to clear out for March Break (Reading Week). In terms of a major crisis, I suppose it couldn’t have been better timed. During that span of a week when students weren’t scheduled to be here anyway, we converted the entire curriculum of all our 100-plus programs into an online delivery format. Our Information Technology Department installed, enhanced and distributed all the software and hardware needed for online lectures and the posting of lecture notes; faculty were trained to use all of that remote methodology; and students were informed that, when March Break was over, they’d be completing the final six weeks of the semester with online instruction and exam-writing. Students simply made the change from face-to-face to face-to-computer-screen, and they finished the semester successfully. What we were particularly proud of was what that meant for students in their final year of their programs — that their educations had not been derailed. In June of 2020, we had an online convocation ceremony for what was, at the time, the largest graduating class in the College’s history.”
Then, partially in 2020-21 and fully in 2021-22, St. Clair became one of the first (and few) postsecondary schools in Canada to re-launch face-to-face course delivery.
Based purely upon France’s adamant philosophy that education is most effectively delivered in-person — especially a college education, which concentrates on hands-on and “real world” skills training — St. Clair developed rigid protective health procedures in partnership with applicable ministries and the regional Health Unit to allow it to re-open for “business (or education) as usual” . . . or as usual as anything was in the days of mandatory masking and social distancing.
All of which meant that the pandemic era, in terms of both enrolment and revenue, seemed to be — on paper at least — just another normal couple of years for the College.
A headline in the student-government-published e-magazine during that period read: “Pandemic? What pandemic?”
France was quoted in the associated story as observing: “Remarkably, the pandemic has not adversely affected the pursuit of postsecondary education — at least in the case of our students. In fact, our students seem to have recognized that many new employment opportunities may arise as we emerge from the pandemic and set about rebuilding our economy; and so, they have chosen this unusual time of crisis to prepare themselves for those better days ahead.”
So, even in the midst of the darkest days of the viral outbreak, the surplus-generated sustainability reserve remained largely untouched, because current revenues were still flowing in at a record rate.
That allowed the College to not only whittle away its deferred maintenance list by renovating its oldest infrastructure during the past several years, but also to create many new facilities for the benefit of students.
During France’s tenures as both St. Clair’s Senior Vice-President and President, the architectural development of the College has been both rapid and extensive.
