Pictured Above: “No one can highlight what USF St. Petersburg has to offer better than its local advocates,” Sen. Jeff Brandes (left) says in an email to USF President Steve Currall.
Courtesy of The Florida Senate and USF
By Nancy McCann
The state senator who has become a key player in consolidation wants to discuss returning control of student admissions to the St. Petersburg campus.
“No one can highlight what USF St. Petersburg has to offer better than its local advocates,” Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, said in an email to USF President Steve Currall. “Therefore I would like to discuss admissions being returned to the St. Pete campus.”
The suggestion was one of several Brandes offered as he thanked Currall for the administration’s new five-year plan to create five initiatives designed to boost St. Petersburg’s enrollment and give it distinctive academic offerings.
Before consolidation, St. Petersburg had an admissions staff that controlled the campus’ marketing, recruiting and decision-making on potential students.
That changed in 2018, when Brandes and other key Pinellas legislators changed the statutes to abolish St. Petersburg’s independence and put all three USF campuses under a single accreditation.
In July 2018, admission requirements were made uniform across the three campuses, and in March 2019 control of the entire admissions process passed to Glen Besterfield, the Tampa-based dean of admissions and associate vice president of student success.
As consolidation unfolds, sagging enrollment on the St. Petersburg campus has become a sore point with legislators like Brandes and Rep. Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, and other community leaders.
Since St. Petersburg began rapidly raising its admission requirements in 2018, combined summer and fall enrollment freshman enrollment has plunged from 549 to 386. This fall’s freshman class in St. Petersburg has only one black student.
On Oct. 8, Sprowls – who became speaker of the Florida House of Representatives this week – announced that he, Brandes, Currall and Jordan Zimmerman, the chair of the Board of Trustees, had embraced the goal of 650 first-time-in-college students in St. Petersburg in the summer and fall of 2021.
But the administration has not spelled out in detail how it plans to reach that target.
In his email to Currall, Brandes called the city of St. Petersburg “an incredibly special place that offers world class arts, health care, financial institutions, educational opportunities, and access to the Gulf that serves as a hub for marine sciences.”
He said the administration’s new plan “ties together the unique aspects of our community with the offerings of the University.”
He repeated his suggestion that the Tampa-based College of Education, which the administration plans to dismantle and reconfigure as a school for graduate students, instead be moved to St. Petersburg and made a “K-12 lab school” in partnership with the Pinellas County school system.
He also proposed partnerships between health sciences programs and nearby hospitals and said “faculty, business and other local stakeholders” should be involved in discussions about the future of the St. Petersburg campus.
‘An incredibly special place’
This is the email that state Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, sent to USF President Steve Currall on Nov. 13.
Thank you for your bold vision for the USF St. Petersburg Campus that creates a plan that ties together the unique aspects of our community with the offerings of the University. St. Petersburg is an incredibly special place that offers world class arts, health care, financial institutions, educational opportunities, and access to the Gulf that serves as a hub for marine sciences.
We are fortunate in this community to have business, community, and government leaders that are all dedicated to the success of our students, focused on attracting top faculty, and creating a university campus unlike any other in Florida.
This bold vision should be designed to foster the symbiotic relationship between the campus and this incredible community. Any student that attends the University of South Florida St. Petersburg should discover these incredibly valuable ties as they step on campus for the first time and that their ties to our community should be cemented before they graduate.
I agree with the overall direction of this plan but would like to further discuss the following in our next meeting:
- Partnering with Dr. (Michael) Grego and Pinellas County Schools to enhance the educational offerings in the region. I would like to explore moving the undergraduate College of Education to the St. Petersburg campus and instituting a K-12 Lab School in partnership with Pinellas County Schools. This will further strengthen the ongoing relationship between the community and the Campus. It is my belief that a major urban university must recognize the responsibility it has in shaping tomorrow’s educational leaders. Abandoning undergraduate education degrees, as currently proposed, would profoundly negatively impact our local K-12 students and the University’s perception as a partner in the Tampa Bay region.
- We should be actively seeking partnerships with John Hopkins All Children’s and the regional health care community partners that would offer distinctive opportunities for Health Science students.
- No one can highlight what USF St. Petersburg has to offer better than its local advocates; therefore, I would like to discuss admissions being returned to the St. Pete campus.
- I would like to see proposed investment figures included in the discussion, as well as the target number of students for each of the focus areas.
- We should immediately seek the council of faculty, business, and other local stakeholders as we move forward with the draft vision.
Again, I appreciate this initial vision for the future of the St. Petersburg campus. I look forward to continuing to discuss this with the business and community leaders in the area. I look forward to hearing their feedback and continuing our conversation on this critical topic for St. Petersburg and Pinellas County.
Senator Brandes has finally come to appreciate the specialness of the USF St. Pete campus! Here’s hoping that his suggestions are implemented.
The lack of minority students is dreadful!