BMCC board to act on ’employee retrenchments’

By Terry Murry on Thursday, April 29th, 2021 in Columbia Basin News More Top Stories

PENDLETON – The Blue Mountain Community College Board of Education meets at 4:30 p.m. Friday to take action on employee retrenchments. Those are basically layoffs that emphasize they come at no fault of the employee.

Interim President Connie Green says the college is working on re-imagining itself to better serve students and improve enrollment.

“The reductions are based on the model of how you right-size,” Green said. “We’re going to have a right-growth fund because some of the money we get from the federal government can be used to help you fix stuff.”

Green said the people being laid off can still play an important role at BMCC.

“As we lay them off, they will be able to come into this right-growth fund and continue working for us on a focused effort for four to six months to actually help us grow how we handle students,” Green said. “If we do that well, some may be able to stay on because we might grow enough. If we don’t do it well, we would have tried. They would have a job longer. We would have learned what we didn’t do right that we thought was right.”