Coping with move to the district level is a new challenge for service learning coordinator.
By Jade Villarreal
Oct. 31 marked the last day for Audrey Grams to serve as this college’s service learning coordinator.
She has moved to the Alamo Community College District as coordinator of donor relations.
“I’ll be working with all five of the ACCD colleges as opposed to one,” Grams said Oct. 30 in an interview.
She will work at this college on Fridays until a new service learning coordinator is hired. The college will hire a replacement, Grams said.
“And I’ll be here to train the new person when they come in,” she said.
The service learning coordinator helps teachers incorporate service learning opportunities into the curriculum. Her office seeks grant money to fund service learning opportunities and sponsors a service learning fair each semester for nonprofit groups to recruit volunteers.
Grams started working at this college in June 2001 as a job placement specialist and became service learning coordinator in November of that year.
“Well, now I’ll have an opportunity to get students scholarships and to actually arrange the funding for them to get scholarships,” she said. “I’ll be helping facilitate the process of recruiting donors for the colleges in terms of scholarship funds for the ACCD Foundation.”
She said she will work with financial services offices at the colleges to find out where scholarship recipients are and will ask questions like, “Are they succeeding? What is their grade-point average? What kind of jobs did they acquire after school?”
“And then I’ll get this information back to the funders and donors. If they think their money is going to a good cause, if the students are, one, actually using the money, and, two, succeeding because of it, they’ll continue to give more and more scholarship money in the future.”
Grams describes her leaving as bittersweet but exciting.
“It really is kind of hard leaving SAC,” she said. “I mean, I’m going to miss my friends here. That’s what I’ll miss the most. I like being on a college campus and I like the whole atmosphere.”