Seward County Community College Signs Statewide Agreement with Kansas Department of Education.

Seward County Community College and the Kansas Department of Education have signed statewide articulation agreements allowing all Kansas high school students to receive college credit at SCCC for certain courses.

The agreements will allow the college to deal with all Kansas high schools with a streamlined approach rather than on an individual school-by-school basis.

“With the state-wide agreements, the format is very specific for pathways for all high schools across the state,” said Todd Carter, vice president of academic affairs at SCCC. “If a high school anywhere in the state has that particular (career technical education) pathway, then their students are eligible to utilize our agreement. Without a statewide agreement, we would have to have individual articulation agreements with every of our partner high schools. The (agreements) offer that opportunity for any school across the state.”

While Carter believes that there is opportunity for statewide recruiting, the major benefit is easier management. Currently, SCCC has 11 different articulation agreements with the 11 different high schools in its service area. Those schools are Liberal, Sublette, Satanta, Hugoton, Moscow, Ulysses, Stanton County, Southwestern Heights, Meade, Rolla and Elkhart. 

“We submit one agreement to the state and it covers all 11 schools so we’re not having to do individual agreements for each one of the pathways for each of the 11 schools,” Carter said. “It’s more efficient. The format that they use for the statewide agreements is very specified, very clean so every school is going to be able to follow that and we’re not trying to negotiate agreements with multiple schools.

Seward is only one of a handful of community colleges which has a statewide articulation agreement. According to Carter, the Kansas Department of Education would like all community colleges to follow suit.

“They sent someone out here to help us with the process,” Carter noted.

Articulation agreements allow students to transfer credits from certain courses at one school to another.

“(The agreements) allow students to transfer credits to us that they’ve taken in high school,” said Travis Combs, dean of industrial technology and continuing education at SCCC. “The main purpose in creating them is to help the transfer student knock down barriers. It acknowledges classes that they’ve already taken and enables them to seamlessly transfer into post-secondary education.”

The four agreements cover Industrial Technology Program Pathways, Health Science Career and Technical Pathways, Agriculture, Business, or Personal Services Program Pathways and Education & Training, Engineering, Biomedical, or Biochemistry Career Cluster Program Pathway.