James Ammons said Thursday that FAMU has resolved almost all of the financial and management problems that have threatened the school's accreditation."We are making tremendous progress," Ammons told the board of trustees, meeting at FAMU's Orlando law-school campus last Thursday. "Our staff is working extremely hard."
Ammons said university employees have logged 10,000 hours and have corrected more than 90 percent of the problems.
In a report submitted last week to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, FAMU cited improvements to the university's bidding process with contractors, correcting fire-safety deficiencies and keeping better track of financial-aid transactions.
Belle Wheelan, president of the Commission on Colleges for the Southern Association, said, "I have great confidence they're going to clean it all up."
Accrediting officials will visit FAMU for three days beginning Oct. 3 to determine whether the school will remain on probation.
Also read: How we got in this SACS mess
Castell's Legacy of Shame
Dr. Belle Wheelan knows Dr. James Ammons and understands that he's a strong, capable leader.
ReplyDeleteSACS had no choice but to place FAMU on probation for the gross mismanagement that occurred on Castell's watch. However, the organization now has every reason to believe that things are getting better with Dr. Ammons in the big chair.
It really makes a difference when a university has competent, proven leadership at the helm. I'm betting that Dr. Ammons will restore FAMU to good standing at the end of the six months. There won't be any extension of the probation.
Does Vivian Hobbs think FAMUans are STUPID?
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From "The Ammons Report - Part Two"
The FAMUan
9/10/07
The institution's financial dealings were a big factor in SACS decision to place the university on probation said Vivian Hobbs, SACS liaison for FAMU. But Hobbs said there were other factors that played a role.
• The 35 findings the auditor general found in a report that the state of Florida conducts every two years.
• During the 2007 spring semester, hundreds of university employees complained to SACS that they weren't getting paid.
• During the time when the audit findings came out, FAMU did not have an acting chief executive officer. Castell Bryant, former interim president, took leave and the Board of Trustees appointed Larry Robinson to act as chief operating officer, which showed instability.
• The chairman of the Board of Trustees for the university resigned followed by several other trustees resigning.
"With all of this stuff compounded it looked like this thing is out of control," Hobbs said. "So they went to the farthest most severe punishment and that is probation."
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Hobbs has got to be joking! Her buddy Castell left because SACS started asking tough questions about the blistering qualified audit opinion she received from the Florida Auditor General. SACS didn't penalize FAMU because she jumped ship right before she knew the organization was about to announce its probation decision.
Additionally, Hobbs is completely wrong about SACS penalizing FAMU for the resignations from the Board of Trustees. SACS cited FAMU as being out-of-compliance with the requirement to have an "ACTIVE" governing board. SACS understood that there's no way an institution could go from having unqualified audits to qualified audits if its trustees were doing their jobs to hold the administration accountable.
It's clear that Hobbs still has no sense of responsibility and no clue about what's going on. Her comments in The FAMUan are just as untrue as her claim that faculty can only qualify to teach a subject area by having 18 graduate credit hours (of course, she was oblivious to alternative credentialing). She needs to stop defending her inept, conniving friends like Castell and Challis Lowe and start working to be part of the solution.
I sure hope that Dr. Ammons has reduced Hobbs' authority and gotten people who are actually capable of guiding FAMU through this reaffirmation of accreditation process. We don't need anymore public displays of incompetence from Castell-era hold-overs.