News

The Tennessee Board of Regents today appointed Dr. Carol Puryear as president of the Tennessee College of Applied Technology Murfreesboro, where she has served as interim president since May 2019.

She previously led the college as its director from 2007 to 2012, when she left to join the Tennessee Board of Regents system staff, first as associate vice chancellor of instruction and special projects for all 27 Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology and, since 2017, as vice chancellor of economic and community development.

The Tennessee Board of Regents will convene its regular quarterly meeting June 18-19, with an agenda that includes consideration of tuition, fees and budgets for the 2020-21 academic year.

The Board of Regents governs Tennessee’s 13 community colleges and 27 colleges of applied technology.

Volunteer State Community College's Springfield campus has received approval from the Tennessee Board of Regents and Tennessee Higher Education Commission to offer complete college degree programs in Robertson County starting this fall semester 2020. The college has offered classes at the Springfield campus since 2011 but until now, students have had to combine the courses offered in Springfield with other courses held online or on the Vol State Gallatin campus to obtain a degree.

The Tennessee Board of Regents today appointed Dr. George J. Pimentel as the next president of Jackson State Community College, effective July 1.  A U.S. Army infantry veteran, he has been vice president of academic affairs at Volunteer State Community College since 2014 and has 26 years of teaching and academic administrative experience.

The College System of Tennessee fully supports the Tennessee Pledge for Higher Education, an array of guidelines and best practices for the health and safety of campus communities while continuing high-quality instruction during the Covid-19 era, Chancellor Flora W. Tydings said today.

The Tennessee Board of Regents will convene a special called meeting Tuesday, June 2, to receive and act on recommendations by Chancellor Flora W. Tydings for the next president of Jackson State Community College and the board’s next general counsel.

The virtual meeting will be streamed live and archived on the TBR website at https://www.tbr.edu/board/june-2-2020-special-called-board-meeting starting at 8:30 a.m. CT, with consideration of the two appointments the only items on the agenda.

Tennessee’s Cleveland State  and Motlow State community colleges captured two of the three annual awards issued by Community Colleges of Appalachia, an association of nearly 100 colleges in 13 Appalachian states from New York to Mississippi.

The three finalists for the next president of Jackson State Community College will participate in virtual open forums May 11-13.

The schedule for the virtual forums, the finalists' resumes, and links to a live stream of the forums are posted on the Presidential/Executive Searches section of the Tennessee Board of Regents website at https://www.tbr.edu/hr/executivesearches/president-jackson-state-community-college.

The finalists and the dates of their virtual forums are:

Nearly 1,500 students from 311 community colleges applied for the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s prestigious Undergraduate Transfer Scholarships for 2020 – which provide up to $40,000 a year to complete their bachelor’s degrees.

Only 50 students from 17 states were selected as recipients. Two of them are College System of Tennessee students:

The Finance and Business Operations Committee of the Tennessee Board of Regents will meet by telephone conference call at 1 p.m. CT Wednesday, April 29, to begin discussion of student tuition and mandatory fees for the 2020-21 academic year at Tennessee’s community colleges and colleges of applied technology. This will be an informational meeting and no action will be taken.

Tennessee SkillsUSA today announced its college Chapters of Excellence for 2020 at nine Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology and the Advisor of the Year.

The five Gold Award Chapters of Excellence winners are the Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology at Pulaski, Paris, Chattanooga, Memphis and Knoxville (ranked by order of their scores in the competition).

The four Silver Award Chapters of Excellence are TCATs Hohenwald, Dickson, Harriman and Hartsville.

The College System of Tennessee honored six outstanding students, faculty and staff members and two colleges of the year in its second annual Statewide Outstanding Achievement Recognition (SOAR) Awards during the Tennessee Board of Regents quarterly meeting Tuesday, April 7.

The Tennessee Board of Regents will conduct its spring quarterly meeting by telephone conference call Tuesday, April 7. The agenda includes announcement of the outstanding students, faculty, staff and colleges of the year in the second annual Statewide Outstanding Achievement Recognition (SOAR) Awards.

The Board of Regents governs the 13 community colleges and 27 colleges of applied technology comprising the College System of Tennessee.

Other agenda items include:

Tennessee’s community and technical colleges are playing a major role in a crash project by the state’s public higher education system to manufacture face shields to help protect Tennessee health professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Tennessee Board of Regents and our 40 colleges continue to coordinate with state and national officials in monitoring the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19). 

The state’s community colleges and colleges of applied technology comprising the College System of Tennessee were given broad flexibility today to alter their classes and other operations as needed locally to protect students, faculty and staff from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), including extending spring breaks before transitioning to online classes where possible.

Two committees of the Tennessee Board of Regents and the chairs of the board’s six standing committees will meet Tuesday, March 10, to review and consider a number of items in advance of the full board’s next quarterly meeting, March 26.

The Finance and Business Operations Committee will convene at 10 a.m. CT March 10 to consider approval of its recommendations for student incidental fees for Academic Year 2020-21. It will be followed consecutively by meetings of the Audit Committee and then the Committee Chairs.

A Tennessee Board of Regents Search Advisory Committee has selected four finalists for the next president of Jackson State Community College. All four will participate in campus visits during the week of March 16, the next step in the selection process.

The finalists are:

Two of the four colleges from across the country newly earning the prestigious Leader College status from the national Achieving the Dream Network for steady improvement in student success outcomes are Tennessee community colleges.

Across Tennessee today, proud parents and school administrators cheered on hundreds of high school students who signed on to pursuing career and technical educations at Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology.

It was National CTE Letter of Intent Signing Day across the state and nation – an event modeled after the NCAA’s National Signing Day for high school athletes. National CTE (Career & Technical Education) Signing Day honors students choosing to enroll in technical colleges to further their educations.