By Giovanni Roverso
Peninsula College’s new Vice President of Instruction Sharon Buck is on campus and has “hit the ground running.” Buck was selected in December after a prolonged selection process that began early last year after VPI Mary O’Neil Garrett retired in 2014.
Interim VPI Brinton Sprague, who worked with Buck previously, has been showing her the ropes since her arrival at the beginning of January and has made for a good handoff, she said.
Buck was formerly Dean of Instruction, Transportation and Applied Technologies at Lake Washington Institute of Technology in Kirkland.
Since then she’s partially moved to the Peninsula and lives in Agnew. She plans to move to Port Angeles, or Sequim, after the spring when her husband retires and puts their home in Redmond up for sale.
Buck said she’s enjoying the Peninsula very much, doesn’t miss the traffic jams and that the scale here is just more relaxed and reasonable.
“People have time for each other. The pace of life, you can breathe and you have time and it affects everything you do,” she said.
Buck said she admired the willingness and dedication in faculty and staff at PC, and said she notices “an overt, genuine passion here a lot, to connect students to initiatives that are meaningful to grow and that is contagious. It just sparkles out!”
She said everybody has been very willing to help out and have rolled out the carpet for her.
“Dr. Buck has very much of an open-door policy, which makes communication and information sharing a positive experience,” said Brian Betts, Buck’s and the former VPI’s assistant, has been helping her manage her workload and scheduling.
Since it’s still early on, Buck said, she’s still making sure she gets the details and the workflow down, while getting to know everyone on main campus as well as its satellites in Port Townsend and Forks.
Her main priorities now are planning the spring quarter class schedule and to prepare the yearly academic unit plan in tandem with the college budget for the next year.
Buck also mentioned she’s working with the Strategic Enrollment Management committee on ensuring students get the classes they need to graduate and move forward in their academic plans in a timely manner so as to optimize financial aid expenditures and to “get them in and out how they need it and easily.”
Buck said it’s too early to talk about introducing new classes and that she will be able to make more informed decisons later on in the year after the budget process.
“It’s too early to see at this point what the new rising star might be, or making sense of what students want, what the college wants and what the community needs,” she said.
Buck said the college works actively with businesses, such as the Peninsula Chamber of Commerce and others to plan and develop programs and opportunities in response to demand, while also trying to predict what the jobs landscape will look like five years down the road. She said she was interested in understanding which new careers to promote on the Peninsula that could be resilient over time.
Buck emphasized that she valued both the expansion of opportunities and preservation of cultural and natural resources in the Peninsula’s best interests.
“How do we support industry while not losing the identity of the community? What makes sense for here?” said Buck.
She’s also looking forward to bolstering programs useful for college transfers, and being mindful of what kind of people the industry needs both right after Peninsula College and after a university pathway.
Buck said it is important to involve students and the community with first-hand experience and research, real stories, people and data, through a variety of multicultural events, Studiums Generales to make learning more engaging than just reading out of a book at home.
She wants students to get motivated and start contributing meaningfully right away.
One-on-one bridges for understanding are important, Buck said, and that she hopes to partner and work with various groups Peninsula College is surrounded by including tribal communities, by listening and responding to their needs.