Cochise College Governing Board Chair Jane Strain has been elected to the Association of Community College Trustees Board of Directors as the Pacific Regional Director, announced this week.
The ACCT, founded in 1972, is the nonprofit educational organization of governing boards, representing more than 6,500 elected and appointed trustees of community, technical, and junior colleges in the United States and beyond. Strain is the first Cochise College governing board member to serve on the ACCT board.
“I’m excited,” Strain said. “This is a supreme opportunity for Cochise College and for Arizona. It’s going to be an amount of work; this is a hands-on board.”
Elections for Regional Director positions were held Oct. 3 during the 2013 ACCT Regional Caucuses and Meetings, which coincided with the 44th annual ACCT Leadership Congress in Seattle.
The Pacific Region covers all of the United States’ western-most states — Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Alaska and Hawaii — the Yukon Territory and British Columbia in Canada, as well as the Mariana Islands, Republic of Palau, Marshall Islands and American Samoa.
“The best part about being in Seattle was talking to the trustees from all of those places, and their stories are just incredible,” Strain said. “I had a great time talking to all of them, which is what we do on the ACCT board. We’re supposed to be this giant liaison, the person who pushes information down, gets information back, and makes sure trustees have current information about what’s going on.”
Strain was appointed to the Cochise College Governing Board in 1998 for Precinct 3 and was re-elected in 2000, 2006 and 2012. She was chosen as the chair of the Cochise College board this past January and has served as the college’s ACCT representative for the last eight years. Now, in addition to the two annual national events ACCT holds each year, Strain will now also attend the ACCT Board of Directors annual retreat in July.
In May, Strain participated in the Flinn-Brown Civic Leadership Academy, sponsored by the Flinn Foundation and the Thomas R. Brown Foundations, which helps prepare and support Arizona’s future state-level civic leaders. Completion of the program earned her the title of “fellow.”
Strain said in her time as a trustee for Cochise College, involvement in ACCT and through training seminars, she’s learned much about the importance of an educated college board.
“There’s research where they’ve linked the level of education of the board with how well the institution does in accreditation,” she said. “Those boards that aren’t educated in the business of the trustee world, a whole distance field of study, statistically do not do as well. The more trustees are educated in the business of being a trustee, overall, their board functions better with their CEO and the better the school does on these accreditations.”