An equity imperative is embedded within the college’s Educational Master Plan (EMP) based on the 5 elements of USC’s Center for Urban Education’s (CUE) equity-mindedness paradigm:
- Focus on racial equality
- Seek out the existence of inhibiting practices
- Position equity as a comprehensive strategy with a broad impact
- Uncover and eradicate institutional and systemic barriers that limit access, progress, and success
- Recognize growing enrollment of historically underserved students.
The VVC EMP drives all planning efforts across the college. The EMP strategic framework specifies the major initiatives and key priorities that establish a common planning platform for the college’s planning units. In doing so, it enables all planning units to better organize the loosely connected ideas and lists of tasks and activities, and elevate them to a more cohesive plan or set of plans that clearly connect to one or more of the major initiatives:
- Caring Campus
- Guided Pathways
- Pursuit of Excellence
In addition, the key priority areas facilitate the definition of impacts, objectives, and outcomes intended through planning efforts:
- Student retention and success
- Efficient enrollment growth
- Digital learning expansion and enhancements
- Expansion of noncredit and other learning options for students
In this way, integrating unit-level plans with the college’s long-term vision expressed through its EMP is facilitated. Connecting those unit-level plans with resource allocation and operational priorities is ensured through the annual planning process, wherein funding augmentation requests are evaluated by the Fiscal, Budget, and Planning Committee through its rubric. Second, only to compliance/health and safety requests, the alignment of planning requests with equity imperatives provides a lens through which unit-level plans are evaluated and prioritized.