 Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I'm your host Melinda Moulton and my guest today is Joyce Judy. How are you doing Joyce? I'm doing great Melinda. Thank you so much for inviting me to join you. Well thank you for being on my show. Let me tell my viewers a little bit about you. Joyce Judy began her career in 1983 as a coordinator of academic services at Community College of Vermont. In 2009 she was appointed unanimously by the board to be the president of the college. Her focus is now and always has been to expand access to higher education for all Vermonters. Welcome Joyce. Thank you for being here. It is a delight to join you and be able to talk a little bit about CCV and all that we do for the state of Vermont. Well I want folks to know too that you and I are good friends that we go back quite a while in our friendship. We get together quite often and cabits about the world and I've always wanted to interview you for my show and so this is an exciting moment for me. To begin with I would love it if you could share a bit about your childhood growing up on the Mac Maridary in Plainfield, New Hampshire. You know I'd be happy to Melinda and I actually credit my upbringing with being able to do the work that I do today. And when I say that I you know I grew up on a family farm and my I have I'm one of four five children and my dad was a quadriplegic and but always had this dream he was hurt in an accident and but my parents always had this dream that they wanted to farm and and so they bought this rundown farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire and just slowly started to build it and create something that you know if they were alive today they would never imagine that where they started buying a house with no electricity and no indoor plumbing and to have it being a thriving enterprise now that my that now has three generations that are that are farming we have a very large dairy farm but we also produce and distribute our own milk and glass bottles we started that long before it was a trend to do recycling and glass bottles we started it in the very early 90s we we circulate our milk under the Mac Maridary label also I have three nieces and nephews who have come back and they're all farming with my brothers and we have a very large maple store maple industry so it's been it's exciting to watch I try to stay involved a little bit I go down and bother them from time to time but it's a great perspective for me and why I say that growing up on a farm has prepared me for the work that I do today is that you know when we were growing up we had we didn't have much money but we never thought we were poor and I would say you know managing a community college is some ways is very similar we never have money but that doesn't get in our way and we have to be very good stewards of it because 80 percent of ccd's operating budget comes from student tuition so whatever we do we have to make sure that we are using that tuition money to make sure we are providing the best education that we can for for Vermonters and the same way when I was growing up we we did so much and we created so much but it wasn't because we had a lot of resources but I believe you do your best work when you are forced to be as creative as possible well my next question was going to be how do you think your experience working your family farm help prepare you for your job leading community college of vermont and you answered that so well you know and I will I will just expand on that a little bit as well one of the things you know I am I am incredibly proud of my my upbringing it's pretty it was pretty humble but at the same time another thing that my dad always taught us is that you do whatever it takes and so at ccd you know we have we serve 10 000 vermoners and we have a staff of 150 full-time people and we have 600 part-time faculty we don't have a lot of staff but and so it's do whatever it takes to get the job done and so you know if you're even though your job description my job description might be president but I might be called on to do something else or pick up a piece when someone else is not able to do it so in some ways I love this story we had us we had a regional director years ago he's since passed away from cancer one day he was walking in and he was picking up cigarette butts and a person walked by and said you know why are you why are you picking up cigarette butts you're the regional director and he looked at him he said whatever it takes and I just sort of feel like that is such an important part of my upbringing but also such an important part of the culture at ccd so I wanted to ask you who who who do you believe has had the greatest impact on your tremendous success as an education leader you know I I feel like I've had so many people that have influenced me Melinda you've influenced me I I cherish my friends I cherish the people that I work closely with I I feel like my parents you know had such an an influence on my upbringing my siblings so you know I don't I don't look at one person say oh that person has really has really been my mentor I have had many mentors and I have been so fortunate to have so many people sort of guide me make suggestions it's been I have had a wonderful ride when you talk about your dad a lot did he have a lot of big influence on your life both of my parents my parents are an incredible team and I often think of them as as a team because my dad was a quadriplegic and yet I grew up thinking that he didn't have that he didn't have a disability I mean my father couldn't walk he couldn't use his hands in a way that you know we can't I mean he wasn't completely paralyzed from the neck down but he essentially was paralyzed from the neck down for all practical purposes and yet he never was the center of he never wanted attention and my parents were a team they just did things together and you know they were together my dad died in 2004 and my mom lived till 2020 but they were they were just a pair they were a force my mother had to provide all the bodily functions for my dad and yet they they were so independent and so strong-willed and had their own sort of paths as well so I feel like both of my parents had had an influence on my mom was a nurse and she worked out but she also played a very big role in the farm and so that teamwork was pretty unique and pretty interesting and I often think about my mom because my dad was hurt in an accident and so their lives changed overnight and I often think you know what did my mom think about that because my dad was in the hospital for a very you know for many many months and you know at first they didn't think he would live and but they never looked back they always looked forward like what are the opportunities in it what are and never thought about what was me and that's been something that has really stayed with me for a long time. Well it explains who you are in a very big way tell us a little bit about the Community College of Vermont which I believe is the largest college in Vermont we are not the largest we are the second largest college in Vermont second only to the University of Vermont but we also we serve more Vermonters than any college in Vermont and you can imagine that because we have 12 locations throughout the state of Vermont we also have a very significant online and remote presence. We have we were formed in 1970 so we're 52 years old we celebrate our 50th anniversary during COVID and if someone had ever said to me oh you're going to celebrate your 50th year by having your centers essentially closed I would have said what planet are you on but it's the reality and it's what happened but you know CCD was created through the vision of Governor Dean Davis in the late 60s early 70s and his his vision was how do you take and provide Vermonters a college education the opportunity to achieve a college education and do it taking it to them in their local communities and he always believed that Vermont communities were incredibly rich with expertise and how do you take that expertise and marry it with people who are very motivated to learn and you know we have stuck to that core for years Vermont has incredibly gifted a gifted population and there are many people who are you know full-time accountants they're doctors they're people who work in a manufacturing that won't give up their quote-unquote day job but would love to teach and share their expertise and so we have some of the most our faculty are incredibly rich and incredibly strong our students always tell us that one of the best things about CCD is the practical knowledge that our faculty bring to the classroom because they're they live it we have you know doctors who teach anatomy and physiology we have computer people from from global foundries that are teaching our computer courses we could never afford to hire them full-time but they are so incredibly skilled and would love to share that expertise and then you put it with people who are highly motivated to learn um our average age is 26 and yet one of the things that has we've seen a shift in our population over the years for many years we served almost exclusively adults and when I say adults in that context I mean people like over 25 today we are seeing almost half of our population are more traditional age because people find that they can come to CCD they can save a lot of money they can do their essentially their first two years with us and then transfer wherever so we have developed articulation agreements and guided pathways with every school in Vermont and most outside of Vermont so that students can start with us if it's for whatever reasons and then transfer um we are the largest transfer cohort of students at UVM and UVM does a regular um transfer study and finds that CCD students are their most successful transfer cohort and they do incredibly well so people come to us for lots of different reasons um you know we serve a lot of veterans every year we have about every semester we probably have a couple hundred military or military connected students we serve many people with disabilities we serve many new Americans we but what's wonderful is when people get into a classroom it's the leveling it's they're all there to learn and so it makes an incredibly rich class because you might have a 16 year old and you might have a 70 year old but they're all there this past year at graduation our youngest was 17 our oldest was 71 so just that sort of well the school the college is also accessible and it's affordable we work hard to well first we do make it as accessible as we can as I mentioned we have 12 locations physical location but we also have a very robust online program we started our online program in 1996 long before you know but we believe we started an online program because of access a cornerstone of our mission is access and so how do we keep figuring out ways to make a college education accessible to all all all of our monitors and so online was one of those things that reduce travel it reduced time when you're in a really rural environment now you know broadband is a challenge for some it's getting better um but people can also find a way to a library many there are many hot spots in most local communities but so offering online when covid hit in 2020 40 percent of our classes were already online and so switching that other 60 percent it was a heavy lift don't don't get me wrong we you know moving those other 60 percent but we had a infrastructure in place to be able to do it which was such an advantage over so many schools who hadn't moved to to that as an option it's amazing can you share with us a few stories about people who have graduated from ccv and how the college impacted their lives you know linda if you ask that's such a wonderful question because you know sometimes when i'm talking with groups i will say to them you know ccv's work is about like it is life changing for so many students and for us i think that it is and if we weren't where we were and being able to offer the opportunities to students so many of them wouldn't have the opportunity to see the experience of power of education and see that education can open so many doors and you know it's hard to talk with people around the state and for more than a couple minutes and not find some connection to to ccv whether they took a course whether they are teaching a course whether their grandchild took a course or whatever i'll share a quick story that was um so we are offering an early college program which is wonderful um with we have we have tremendous philanthropic support and it's not from necessarily from our alumni it's from people who believe in our mission and believe in supporting it so we have a great relationship with the mcclore foundation and they have they have created this opportunity called the early college promise which is um if a student does an early college program meaning they take their their during their senior year they opt to take college courses at ccv they can still they stay they can still participate in high school sports and choir and band and drama and all that but they take their academic courses for whatever reasons at ccv the mcclore foundation will support them to to do their second year at ccv and get their associate degree and so we were having an early college orientation i was talking to this young woman and i said so uh why are you coming to why are you enrolled in the early college program and she was there with her mom and she said you know i just i i high school is just it's really hard for me the social scene is really hard you can imagine it's it's it's tough for some students and so she said i just wanted to have a clean break but our mom said we decided that ccv would this would be a great option if she wanted to do this because my husband um in 2000 came to ccv and got his degree and is now working full time for the state in it and she said and his mother had taken courses at ccv so it's just you know it's just a very interesting thing these are probably you know 10 20 years apart but how the progression and they you know they all had done well in their education we see you know there's a lot of high profile people i mean dylan g and patista who was a legislator who's just actually championing our our um life gap uh program dylan was a legislator he's someone that dropped out of high school um he uh came back to ccv finished his high school degree got his well got took courses towards that finished his college degree has gone on was a legislator um and you know and now has a very successful career but he attributes ccv as the place where you know he was he wasn't he was struggling he came back he got his education and now you know he's been incredibly successful so there are just stories after stories after stories of of people who have come to come to ccv have found their way um and then you know one of our goals is to make sure we prepare students for their next step whatever that next step is it might be um they've come here they want they're running their own business but they need a bookkeeping course they might come here and get a degree and um whatever in medical assisting or they might come here and take their first 60 credits and transfer to uvm go on and get their bachelor's do we get their master's degree whatever we have students in that whole spectrum and our role is to just prepare students for that individual student what is your next step amazing um you began your career at ccv in 1983 and you basically grew up with this college and you must have had your fingers in a lot of pies to help this college become what it is today um so i want to commend you on that and do you want to talk a little bit about that about being there for your entire career and watching this and helping to grow this college to be what it is today and ending up as the president of ccv well you know one of the things that's been very interesting about ccv yes i have grown up it's with ccv i have had the luxury of growing up with ccv and um and ccv has you know if you when we reflect back on we did during our 50th anniversary we did this reflection of you know each looking at each of the decades and um it's been very fun to see how we have evolved and so you know in the 70s and 80s you know people thought of ccv as a sort of fly by night institution and like a little sketchy and you know were they really what were they doing in these church basements and you know um we would we were running courses anywhere we could find a space and um and it was interesting because you know we went from the vision of dean davis and then peter smith came and really helped to create ccv but many of the public the higher ed institutions in vermont thought we would soon go away we were sort of the people's expressive that the higher ed industry and that you know we we weren't really for real and um and there were and we were a single line item in the state budget so that was hugely problematic because you know with the swipe of a pen we could be like gone and so that's when ccv joined the vermont state college system and that gave us some stability and i would say that you know in the 80s we were primarily a college that served women and oftentimes people who were very low income but we were providing an opportunity for for that group of people to really change their lives and then in the 90s as we started to see more and more students and what was interesting is we were seeing our students go on to other institutions or go to work and be really successful and people were like oh maybe they are doing good work and so over time you know we started to see more and more men we started developing um articulation areas with other colleges because so many of our students wanted to go on we got really serious about the academic quality and so a lot of things happened in the 1990s that were really foundational to the success of the college and one of the things that we we also um you know over time for a while we could fly under the radar and we just you know we did our own thing and then as time um evolved and our students would go on to other schools and other programs that we had to find the right balance between being a maverick and being able to play by traditional rules and we and our work I believe that we have always kept students at the center of our decision-making and by doing that I we've had to find a way of what serves students best and so there are times when we've had to adjust our our um policies and procedures and processes to be more traditional because that's what serves students best like for example we we were a pass no pass institution for the first 25 years of our existence so if you took a course you got a p or you get an n we didn't have grades but then as students started to transfer it was harder and harder for them to transfer because traditional schools were like now we want you to have letter grades and so students were saying no we want to have letter grades we made the transition from because you know we were a product of the 60s when we were created and so learning for learning sake and you know this is all great but you know as our students evolved they were like no we want grades so we we responded by doing letter grades and you know we and the rest is history around the number of students who are transferring but so we've had to you know that's just an example of how no that wasn't serving students well even though you know we we are we do believe that you know learning is really at the core of this but grades were important as students transferred so you've grown and you've evolved now I only have six minutes left of this interview and I gotta tell you I could talk to you for hours Joyce Judy president of ccv so often we hear about American children not meeting the international standards of education although Vermont rates higher than most states where do we fail our students and where do we succeed that's a really really important question something to ponder you know I'm not I don't know that we fail our students I think that one of the things that you know I believe there's a time and a place like for example I you know I'll sort of pivot from that in terms of you know how do we make sure that we are there for students when they're ready to learn and so we have a number of students who come to us that didn't do well in high school but when they're highly motivated they come to us with a real purpose it's amazing how fast they can make up that time and make up for that loss and so for us we offer a lot of a number of developmental skills courses which are not considered college level they don't get college credit for it but it's what they need I believe our role is to meet students where they're at and so I feel like you know with the public k-12 system one of the things that we have laid on that system is we are expecting them to be an educational institution we are expecting them to be a social service agency we are expecting so many things and you know it's tough to meet all those and yet I believe that I think a really good teacher figures out how to engage the student where they're at and help them create and develop their passion but it's hard when you have all these other expectations and you know how do we make sure we're taking care of you know the basic you know we are seeing one of the things that we've had to stretch and grow is that you know for a long time we didn't necessarily deal with a lot of the you know food insecurity housing insecurity and we have had to step up our game because you know if you look at the you know the needs of students in order for them to be a good student and be out of focus they've got to have their basic needs met and so how do we connect and partner with local agencies to make sure students are getting those needs met so I don't know that we fail it's just that we at at ccv we have to figure out we have to meet them where they're at when they come to us well I also think teachers aren't getting paid enough and and I think we need to pay our teachers more money for for the great work that they do and what you just said sort of segues into my final question for you Joyce what would you tell our youth today that would give them hope for the future in a world where economic inequality inequality human injustice and world peace and stability and climate change are their realities how do they maneuver life as they face the second quarter of the 21st century well I'm always a believer follow your passion if you are if you are passionate about something you just never know the opportunities that will open up and stay open to those opportunities you know it's always fun for me to see someone who is really passionate about something I don't care what they're passionate about be passionate about something and you can create so much from that and so I you know I am full of hope I'm an optimistic person yet we have a lot of challenges in front of us you know there are things I can get really down on but in the end we do have some we have control over our own sphere and so how do we take control of that and do the very best we can with what we can control well Joyce Judy you are one of the most passionate women I know and you're passionate about your running you're passionate about your your educational work and I and I just adore you for that and thank you so much for this time um to my viewers I you know I I hope that you'll go on to the website community college of Vermont and visit their website it's a great website and learn about their services and their and what they provide students in Vermont so so Joyce um thank you for being here today is anything you want to share with my viewers before we say goodbye no I would just say thank you and you know it's such a privilege to be able to spend some time with you and also to serve as president of ccv I work with incredibly amazing people both faculty and staff it's why I can do my work and so you know our success is really um about the work that our faculty and staff do as students and I think a lot of the success of Vermont is from the students who have come out of out of the ccv program too because they're serving our economy and they're out there doing the work and they're part of our economic growth and so for that um thank you for all you've done over the years the many many years that you've serviced this organization and to my viewers thank you for joining us and being here with Joyce Judy the president of community college of Vermont and I'm going to say goodbye but to you Joyce I'm going to ask you to stay on so I can talk to you and to all of you I want you to have a beautiful day and I'll see you soon