If you want to know what authentic oversight looks like, it goes something like this. The Bucks County (PA) Commissioners voted to appoint five new trustees to the Bucks County Community College Board after determining that the sitting trustees failed to live up to their responsibility for monitoring the school’s financial status.
One trustee, whose term was ending, was appointed to fill the remainder of the term of another trustee whom the Commissioners dismissed. The Commissioners subsequently appointed four new Trustees to join the Board.
The concern stems from the fact that the school had a number of “material deficiencies” in its most recent audit and the BCCC Trustees didn’t take any action. While the commissioners did not cite specific examples of the school’s financial problems, the Commissioners were required to bring in financial consultants to help bring the school’s finances under control.
Two audits, conducted in 2022 and 2023, found “material deficiencies” in the school’s financial and accounting procedures. According to the audit report, the school’s business office routinely failed to reconcile the institution’s bank statements or prepare basic financial statements, and the institution suffered from a lack of communication and financial accountability. To correct the impact of the deficiencies, the auditor said the College would need to make large financial adjustments.
Bucks County Board of Commissioners’ Vice Chair Diane Ellis-Marseglia hinted at another potential issue that the Commissioners hoped to correct with new trustee appointments. According to Ellis-Marseglia, the familiarity of the Board members with the school’s administration played a role in the Board’s lack of oversight following the audits.
“I’m not sure why they weren’t dealing with it, but I think sometimes that happens when you have people who are on boards for six, seven, eight terms. They just don’t look at things new.”
Institutions can’t wait for their trustees to act
The County Commissioners, who appoint the community college trustees, took matters into their own hands. In a meeting last week, the Bucks County Board of Commissioners declined to re-appoint five of the Board’s 15 current trustees. One of the commissioners who voted against replacing the five said that it would be difficult to replace the institutional knowledge that the outgoing trustees had developed. The outgoing trustees had served on the board for between ten and twenty-five years each. In 2019, the Commissioners replaced one BCCC Trustee who was first appointed in 1996 and died while in office.
The takeaway here should be that board inaction is costly, in terms of both money and time. Higher education institutions cannot wait years for change. Trustees must act when the administration’s inaction causes financial, functional, or reputational damage. When that inertia also takes root in the Board, authentic oversight does not occur, and the institution suffers as a result.
Photo Credit: Brett Jordan, via Flickr
