CHANGES TO AVID PROGRAM

EQUITY & COMMUNITY RESOURCE CENTER BORN FROM AVID CUTS

Over Spring term, an email landed in the inboxes of Mt. Hood Community College’s AVID staff with news they were not expecting: the AVID Coordinator position would be cut at the end of the term due to the school’s budget cuts. What the email didn’t make clear was what would happen to everyone else.

“We went through a period of time where we were very uncertain about what it meant that AVID was being cut, and so we could only speculate that the whole department, meaning our coordinator and all of our jobs, were gone as well,” explained Kristin Klotter, who worked in the AVID department.

Along with student support that included course content assistance, time management, planning, organizing and comprehensive skills, AVID provided a community that couldn’t be found anywhere else on campus.

Klotter detailed that after receiving the email, “We were told not to tell the students, and we felt awful about that because we felt like the students should know so that they can start planning.” The decision to cut the AVID Coordinator position was followed by public outcry and protests from students, staff and community members at board meetings once the public was told about the cuts.

As the spring term progressed, the remaining AVID staff were told their future positions at MHCC would be a focus of the board, but unclear communication during an uncertain time of budget cuts still left the staff uneasy. With the summer term drawing nearer, the remaining AVID staff, including Klotter, worked with the board to get a written memorandum of understanding, which promised them that they would all have jobs, input in their new positions and if their hours were cut, then the college would approve unemployment. Klotter noted that the memorandum gave the learning specialists higher feelings of security regarding their jobs.

Klotter expressed her gratitude to Lance Lannigan, computer and writing lab coordinator, and Stephanie English, math and science lab coordinator, for proactively scheduling the AVID learning specialists into new positions in their respective centers, without overhead instruction, to ensure that the learning specialists would at least have jobs for the summer.

AVID learning specialists Klotter and Jonathan Straus began their new Success Coach role in the summer Term, and Luke Davis and Julia Nyman began at the start of the fall term. Their time is split between three departments: the Math and Science Lab, the Writing and Computer Lab, and Equity and Community Resource Center.

EQUITY & COMMUNITY RESOURCE CENTER AT MHCC Photo by Jasmin Navarro-Hernandez

The ECRC holds highly frequented areas like Barney’s Pantry, which is why Janine Shockley, the director of the Student Services Hub, thought it would be the perfect place to house the new ECRC. Its front and center location helps students who were not previously involved with the AVID program become aware of the services it offers. “Everything is about the mindset to make it approachable, friendly, in a place that’s accessible, and continue providing the same type of services, but hopefully expand the folks that are using them, so it’s not just the folks that knew to go upstairs,” Shockley explained.

Shockley is enthusiastic about becoming a part of the student success team, mentioning, “I’m really excited about it because I hope that we’ll continue serving students the way they were being served and that they won’t experience a disruption just because we had a bunch of cuts and we transitioned things, but that we’ll also increase usage with students who maybe never would’ve found themselves using these services.”

The student success team is taking this opportunity to improve upon the services they now provide. Both Klotter and Shockley are excited to use their new digital tool, Navigate, to better support students behind the scenes. The tool will allow professors, tutors, success coaches and advisors to communicate about requested and provided support for each student, so everyone in each student’s support system can be well-informed about the help the student needs and the help they have already received.

Despite such improvements, Klotter still sees some areas where the ECRC falls short.

The ECRC is intended to assist students with skills to improve their capabilities as a student rather than content tutoring, but AVID did provide content tutoring for courses that didn’t fit into the available writing, science, math, and computer spaces. In the 2025-2026 term alone, Klotter detailed, the AVID center tutored 54 different courses.

Klotter sees the biggest challenge being building back that community of AVID, especially now that the success coaches are spread across three different areas. Even though the same services are being provided, building a new community will take time.

“I just hope that when the college says that they’re interested in having students feel like they have a sense of belonging here at Mt. Hood Community College, that they understand that that sense of belonging comes from being a part of a community, and it doesn’t just come from being a welcoming spot,” Klotter explained.

With a new system to provide the similar services AVID did, there’s going to be some hiccups. Shockley views her role as “Process and continuous improvemen. We’re trialing stuff out, seeing what works and improving on it.”

Klotter shares Shockley’s sentiment, adding, “[Cutting] AVID was definitely a loss, but sometimes the losses in our lives that force us to pivot can lead to greater things, and that’s my hope with our new organization.”