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| S C T E CHN I CA L CO L L E G E S Y S T EM ’ S
F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
Montez recalls, “My first reaction was I’m not going to go be-
cause it’s true, and if you don’t know that, you haven’t been paying
attention. Then I decided, well, I’ll go. What’s he going to do?
What can he do? What can he say?”
Martin went, and he made it an event. “I took him a bag of
crumbs,” said Martin. “He realized when I walked in the door
that we had met before, and we had a very long and pleasant con-
versation.”
Courson and Martin got on well ... the Great Crumb Disaster
was averted.
“The good news piece of the crunch for me,” saidMartin, “was
what the colleges did. The colleges seemed to say, ‘Ok, it’s tough
time’s out there, but you know what? We’re going to get a bonus
out of this. We’re going to get a slug full of students, and we’re
going to do some things we couldn’t do before because we have
those students.’ One of the nice things for us is when the econo-
my turns down students go up. They start looking for places to
go. They start retooling and turning themselves around, which
means we’ve got a job to do.”
“The system and our colleges can change very quickly. We can
retool and change in a semester. The biggest obstacle we have
is ourselves. If we can meet our own regulations, we can retool.
When someone walks in and says, ‘I’ve got this new thing I’mdo-
ing, and I need to have people trained to do it,’ we can write that
course description and curriculum and get people in and trained
and out the door before most other educational institutions fig-
ure out what is needed and how it should be done. Very agile.
Very quick. A Navy officer serving with me on Trident’s board
used to say, ‘We’re not a battleship. We’re almost like PT-109.’”
“We can turn this system. The biggest obstacle we have is our-
selves.” Let’s add, “The biggest asset we have is ourselves.” How
2008
2008:
readySC
™
trained its 250,000th South Carolinian and ranked nationally among the top five state economic development
workforce training programs for the 25th consecutive year. The System launched the Statewide Enterprise Campus Model co-locating
business with educators and students as an essential component of creating and sustaining South Carolina’s workforce.
The 2000s
F L Y I N G H I G H
Executive Director Dr. Darrel Staat
(2010-2013)
SCTCS Plugged In: Reboot. Redefine. Reconnect.
The System’s 2012 Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference
