The Student Success Center received $600,000 in funding from revenues amassed from Vintage Cerritos.

Vintage Cerritos, an establishment for senior housing and assisted living at the southwest corner of campus, produces a baseline annual rent payment of $380,267 for the college, according to Vice President of Business Services and Assistant Superintendent David El Fattal.

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The revenues from this annual rent payment were decided in 2006 by the Board of Trustees to promote student success.

Bryan Reece, dean of academic success and institutional effectiveness, explained the concept to the Board of Trustees on Sept. 21, saying, “The Student Success Center is a place where students are going to be able to go to get help and academic support.

“A lot of that is going to be built around writing, reading, English as a second language, modern languages and math support.

“We’re developing a whole series of services that we’ll be offering to students, so students can come there on their own.”

The modernization of the Learning Resource Center to make the Student Success Center a reality led to a construction cost of $4 million.

With Cerritos’ G.O. Bond funds getting tighter, El Fattal said that there was a need to augment some funds to pay for the construction of the Student Success Center, which is now in phase two of the construction process.

The $600,000 will be split into construction costs, which accounts for $500,000 of the awarded funding, and a one-time only operating cost of $100,000 over three years.

The operational costs would help with technical aspects, such as a data collection system and institutional survey system, and retraining of the tutors and faculty working in the area.

Reece mentioned that the idea is that the faculty will encourage students to use it, either required through the class structure or just as a suggestion to use the services.

Cerritos College President Linda Lacy said at the board meeting, “There’s pretty extensive remodeling that needs to occur in the LRC building. If you had gone in there before, everything was in little silos; and there were walls all up and down and everybody had individual staff for every little idea that was happening in there.

“And the concept is that students need the learning center, even if [they’re] not in English, reading or math.”

Lacy identifies the key problem for students as the physical space of the current LRC as an obstacle to their success, and that the remodeling will make the new Student Success Center “multifunctional.”

The Student Success Center is modeled closely after Chaffey College’s plan, as it has been recognized by the Cerritos Office of Research and Planning as a best practices plan relative to other schools in the state.

Currently, Reece estimates that a few thousand students going through the success center on an annual basis, but he said he expects that by following the example of Chaffey that he can easily see 15,000 to 17,000 students using the services each year.

The Student Success Center, once complete, would provide academic support to students from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday.

Some services, however, will be available to students 24/7, such as technical support and possible math tutoring over the phone.