New Big Bend Community College president takes the reins

MOSES LAKE — Sara Thompson Tweedy said her research into the Washington community college system made her interested in applying for a job in the state, if the opportunity were available.

And the opportunity came. Thompson Tweedy took over the job of president of Big Bend Community College on Aug. 17. She replaces Terry Leas, who retired after the 2019-20 academic year.

Prior to coming to BBCC, Thompson Tweedy was an administrator at State University of New York, Westchester, in Valhalla, New York. She is a veteran of the New York state community college system, as a professor, coach and administrator. Prior to that she was a minister in the United Methodist Church, she said.

Thompson Tweedy conducted research into the Washington community college system as part of her doctoral program, and she liked the support provided to community colleges, and how they evaluated their results. Washington community college leaders focused on how students did, whether or not they graduated and how they fared in the job market.

“So I became interested in the Washington system,” she said.

She had visited the west with family members, and they had liked it. “I just began to look for opportunities out West, and specifically in Washington,” she said.

But when the opportunity came, it was a difficult decision – after all, she had lived in New York for nearly 20 years.

“It was a decision that we thought long and hard about. Not easy – but sometimes you’ve just got to answer when life calls,” she said.

Her first job in higher education was as a classroom teacher, but she was concerned about her students when they weren’t in class.

“Then I went into coaching basketball,” she said. (She’s a lifelong basketball fan.) She was the women’s basketball coach at SUNY Sullivan, a community college in Loch Sheldrake, New York.

A lot of her players needed support off the court.

“The community college was not only an educational resource. We were housing students in our resident hall who otherwise might have been homeless, we were providing financial advice, making sure they had food, that they had places to go on breaks, because they didn’t always have family that they could return to,” she said.

She’s always been interested in helping others, she said, and teaching and college administration were extensions of that.

One of the traditional roles of a community college is providing access for who might not go to college otherwise. But the value of community college goes beyond that, Thompson Tweedy said.

“Communities can leverage them. Community colleges work with business and industry partners to ensure the workforce is skilled and competent for the jobs that are in that area. So there is great opportunity for economic development through the community college,” she said.

She said many of the people she has met in the college’s service district are BBCC alums or have family who attended Big Bend. “That really is the ideal – when people throughout the service area are directly connected to the community college through some form or facet in the realm of education,” she said.

She has been impressed with the faculty and staff she has met, and she wants to build on the work that faculty, staff and administrators have done. “I want to bring – I don’t want to say create it, because I think it’s really already here. I want to unleash an innovative spirit among the faculty and staff, and ensure they have the proper resources to be innovative and bold in the work that they do for students. So that they’ll try new things, so that we’ll develop a culture where people aren’t afraid to fail, because they know that they’ll have the support that they need to learn and grow. If we do that, then our students will see that too,” she said.

There’s more to an education than learning class content, Thompson Tweedy said. “It’s also about how to persist. How to have grit. How to have hope. And the community college can teach that,” she said.