Zelema Harris accepts three-year contract to lead community college system

Even St. Louisians who are most invested in Downtown St. Louis, conceptually and financially, tend to describe its revival as a work in progress. But, to listen to Zelema Harris, the new permanent chancellor of St. Louis Community College, Downtown has arrived.

“I love being able to walk to work,” said Harris, who lives and works in Downtown, with two different views of the new Busch Stadium from her apartment and office.

“I love being able to walk to so many different locations for dinner and lunch.”

By the time she started using words like “vibrant” and “amenities” to describe Downtown, she began to sound like an agent for Downtown Partnership or the RCGA. But, no – she just happens to be the right person in the right place at the right time for the right job.

It is, in some ways, a tough job, in that she replaces Henry Shannon. Harris is very new to St. Louis; Shannon is a native son with deep roots in the community and a substantial legacy at the community college, which earned him the St. Louis American Foundation’s 2007 Lifetime Achiever Award.

Shannon retired from SLCC this summer and now serves as president of the Chaffee Community College system in Southern California. Harris started at SLCC with an interim appointment on August 20. (She previously had served as president of community college systems in Champaign, Ill. and Kansas City.)

Harris overlapped one week with her predecessor at SLCC. As veteran administrators in the field, both she and Shannon knew the job at hand, so their time together was mostly “social in nature,” she said. “He introduced me to people in the college community.”

Those meetings and Harris’ first couple of months on the job must have been impressive, because last Thursday the system’s Board of Trustees announced she had accepted a three-year contract.

The biggest “cheerleaders” for her new job, she said, are her three grown children, Narissa Bond, Cynthia Bond and James Harris, who will visit with their mother in St. Louis over the Thanksgiving holiday.

“They felt I was ready for a new challenge,” said Harris, who briefly had retired and worked as a consultant in 2006.

As SLCC chancellor, her annual base salary will be $232,000, plus $18,000 annuity and $25,000 for housing.

Her housing allowance will go, not toward a mortgage in Ladue, but into rent for her luxury apartment in Pointe 400, the former Pet Milk Building at 400 S. 4th St., where she is neighbors with David Checketts, the new owner of the St. Louis Blues. (“My space is 1/8 his space, maybe 1/16th,” she said.)

Though she praised the “amenities” in her luxury apartment building and the “vibrant” life she finds Downtown, especially in the summer, Harris favors living and working Downtown, above all, because it gives her more time to work. “I don’t have to fight traffic or leave the office at a certain time,” she said. “I can get more work done.”

There is plenty of work to be done.

“We have tremendous resources that could be recognized more and utilized more,” Harris said of SLCC.

Most fundamentally, she pointed to a loss of enrollment in recent years, though the past fall saw a slight increase.

Also, the SLCC Foundation needs to raise $10 million to be able to expand the Harrison Center near the campus of Vashon High School, hopefully by next fall. This is crucial to what she sees as the core mission of the community college: “to work with people who are most in need of job opportunities, education and training.”

The new center’s proximity to a public high school also is crucial. Harris intends to strengthen the community college system’s partnerships both from below (the public schools) and above (the four-year universities) to help create “a seamless system where residents get started with us, then we move them on.”

With the expanded Harrison Center and on the system’s main campuses, Harris also intends to strengthen the college’s workforce development mission, which already is ongoing in partnerships with Danforth Plant Science Center, Better Family Life, Cortex, the Met Center, and other employers and institutions.

Harris was pleased to meet some SLCC graduates working as bench technicians during a recent visit to the Danforth center.

“They were pleased with the work. It’s a good career area with tremendous growth,” Harris said.

“We have the opportunity to supply more trained workers, which ties into the biotech belt movement of this area.”

This is why she could be the right person in the right job at the right place at the right time. Luxury apartments in a city center need thriving businesses around them, and those businesses – now, more than ever – need skilled and trained workers. Harris wants to help make that happen.

“We want to prepare people to enter jobs immediately,” she said.

“For people without jobs, the time it takes to complete an associate’s degree appears in the distant future. They want meaningful jobs now.”