What the hurricanes wrought

by Florence Kizza

Part 1 of a GreentreeGazette.Com e-Series

August 2006

Come Home to Delgado

Gwen Bouttè was going about the business of improving her job during the summer of 2005. Gwen is the Director of Admissions & Enrollment Services at Delgado Community College. Delgado Community College is in New Orleans.

Florence Kizza

Delgado prepares students for the local workforce or for transfer to one of the four-year colleges in the New Orleans area and has done so for 85 years. "The fall semester was going to be record enrollment with 17,500 on seven campuses," says Bouttè.

"I needed to track my communications with applicants and students better. Our current system was not allowing me to follow through from their initial contact through enrollment." She and her staff were calling prospective students and sending mail, but they had no way to determine how effective their efforts were. "We were kind of operating in the dark and reluctant to stop any of it," she continues.

Bouttè received a grant to purchase software from Education Systems called EMAS Recruitment Pro, and it came with a tele-counseling component. Bouttè was excited about the opportunities the software provided, particularly the personalized phone calls that her staff would be able to make to students.

A few days after a team from Education Systems traveled to Delgado to install the system, Hurricane Katrina hit. The campus was devastated, and the new Recruitment Pro system was useless.

"A week later our chancellor established an emergency command center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is 90 miles from New Orleans," Bouttè recalls. The IT staff, escorted by the Louisiana state police, retrieved their servers from the second floor of the IT building in otherwise-unreachable downtown New Orleans. They set them up in Baton Rouge.

Two weeks after Katrina, a core leadership team was established in Baton Rouge . A call center was established and advertised as a point of contact for students, faculty and staff, many of whom had lost their homes in New Orleans and were living in Baton Rouge hotels or with family members there.

The task force of key administrators met twice a week. Input from his recovery team was viewed as essential by a chancellor concerned with recovery and rebuilding. "We stayed in Baton Rouge until October," Bouttè recalls. Then we relocated to our campus on New Orleans' west side, which suffered wind damage but no flooding."

The "Come Home" campaign

The staff looked ahead to the spring semester. They set up tents on the main campus and powered up wireless laptops, since the buildings were inoperable. When residents returned to the area to inspect their homes, they were told that Delgado would be reopening in January 2006. This began the "Come Home to Delgado" campaign.

To get the word of the reopening out, Delgado's chancellor went on every talk radio station in Baton Rouge. Faculty and staff put up signs and set up information tables in malls and other stores as far as 90 miles away from New Orleans. They handed out fliers at Krispy Kreme at six in the morning and put signs on their own cars. "Half of my staff couldn't come back to New Orleans yet, so we asked faculty and staff who lived close to commute to assist," says Bouttè.

Delgado also relied on the internet. Faculty members could teach classes online even though they were not back in the city. In cooperation with the Sloan Foundation and the Southern Regional Education Board, during October Delgado offered 5,000 online courses to 2,000 students. Next semester, some 25 to 30 percent of students took their classes online.

And for the spring 2006 term, ten thousand students enrolled for classes. "Come Home Delgado worked. The reputation of our college helped us also," says Bouttè. "After 85 years, we are the community college flagship of Louisiana. People looked to us to help with normalcy following Hurricane Katrina. That's what we helped provide."

A gift of communication

Near the end of January, Education Systems contacted Ms. Bouttè with an offer of help.

"After Katrina hit there were no phones to call or mailboxes to deliver mail to," explains Lisa Pieterse of Education Systems. "Potential students had no customary way of communicating with Delgado."

"The whole scheme of things changed," Bouttè comments. "Now we couldn't do the mailings or use the tele-counseling for which we bought the Recruitment Pro solution." They needed to communicate online. We had an excellent website, but we had to be able to capture more information from displaced students," Boutte adds.

In March, Education Systems donated EMAS Online Pro software to Delgado. This $51,000 gift enabled Delgado to take their recruitment efforts online. "We now build a relationship electronically," says Bouttè.

People are coming back to town, and they want to continue their education at Delgado," says Bouttè. "We won't have large applicant numbers from right out of high school, because they're not in town. But our admission application is online, and we now offer so many classes online."

The school added more detail to their emergency response plan. In the process, they changed their emergency website suffix from .edu to .com and gave key administrators cell phones with an area code outside of New Orleans.

Though Delgado's campuses have all reopened, there is still a long way to recovery. Bouttè and her staff work in makeshift offices. "Our conference center is now a converted student services center," she says. "Everyone is sectioned off with curtains, and we don't have real walls. I don't even have a door anymore! We do the best we can with what we have."