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EGCC’s Laura Meeks retires
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Laura Meeks plans to spend her first weekday as a retiree modestly.
“I’m going to do some spring house cleaning before I have any fun,” Meeks, who retired Friday after 16 years as president of Eastern Gateway Community College. “I’m Swedish, and that’s a Swedish tradition.”
Before coming to EGCC, Meeks served as a community college president in Kansas.
Jimmie Bruce is EGCC’s new president.
“I feel really, really good,” Meeks said. “I’ve had my arms around the college, and now I’m letting go. The new president, Jimmie Bruce, is here, and I really like him. He’s a community college leader. I have 100 percent confidence that he’s going to take the college to even greater places and help students.”
Once the house is clean, Meeks said she plans a trip to Boston and a return to Kansas to see her sons and three grandchildren, age 1, 4 and 5.
She’ll continue to live in the Steubenville area, though, and be involved in education in the Mahoning Valley.
“I want to support Youngstown City Schools,” Meeks said. “I want to take what I know and see if I can help.”
She said she wants to raise scholarship money for city school students.
Meeks was appointed recently to the school district’s academic distress commission, but that panel will be disbanded in October when a new commission is appointed.
That commission will appoint a chief executive officer to operate and manage the city schools. Since passage of the legislation, called the Youngstown Plan, rumors have circulated that Meeks will be the schools CEO.
When asked, Meeks says that’s not true.
“I will not be the CEO,” she said.
The career educator wants to work as a sort of career matchmaker.
“What I do plan to do, I want to help students,” Meeks said. “I want to play a role helping students find jobs, almost like a matchmaker. I want to help them identify their strengths and identify opportunities. That’s what community colleges do anyway. I’d like to keep working on that. I’d also like to help community colleges find great presidents.”
She said she will miss what she termed the “student-centered faculty and staff” at Eastern Gateway. She’ll also miss the students and their stories.
Meeks lists the 2009 expansion of the college, based in Jefferson County, into Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties, and EGCC’s role in the trend toward emphasizing the importance of course and degree completion, as accomplishments of which she’s especially proud.
She wishes she could have seen a manufacturing center in the Valley begin during her tenure. Grant money was awarded last week for a feasibility study for such a center.
Meeks wishes Bruce and the college well, but she won’t be involved.
“I’m not going to be a backseat president,” she said. “I won’t even be in the car. I’ll be standing on the side of the road cheering on the parade. I’ll be a cheerleader.”