Unlikely educator rises to dean

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September 3, 2010 - 12:00 AM

AnDrea Cleaves didn’t plan for a career in education.
For Cleaves, going to college was “about having fun,” she said.
Cleaves, hired this fall as Allen County Community College’s Iola campus dean, said “I was the kind (of student) who changed her major every other week. I was a good student, but I was also the type that, if I got married before I got my degree, so be it.”
She did exactly that, getting married a year before she was to earn her bachelor’s degree at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Instead of finishing, she dropped out of school and moved to Cleveland, Ohio.
In Cleveland, working as a human resource officer at a bank, Cleaves had an epiphany.
“I had to deal with a lot of management types, and I realized that the only difference between them and me was that they had college degrees and I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t really have a plan but I realized that if I wanted something more, I couldn’t continue doing what I was doing.”
She returned to the University of Toledo and earned a bachelor’s degree in communications. Her education was at its end — almost.
With only one additional class standing between her and an added certification for teaching, she took the step. Then, a dean at the college suggested Cleaves pursue a master’s degree and a full-fledged teaching career.
“I hadn’t really thought about it, but he told me this was what I needed to do,” she said.
“I had an opportunity to teach,” she said, “and it dawned on me that those teaching moments seemed to be my best moments.”
She ultimately earned her master’s degree in education at Toledo.

CLEAVES started in elementary education, but found working with older students more to her liking. Her subsequent 13-year teaching career led her to ACCC.
Her new role is in a restructured administrative position. Trustees, noting the growing number of online students, split duties formerly held by a dean of instruction into a dean of online instruction and dean of the Iola campus.
Cleaves, 39, will oversee college curriculums, work with faculty and studies on academic issues and oversee day-to-day maintenance of the Iola campus.
Cleaves has begun working with Regena Aye, the college’s new dean of online instruction, to reshape the college’s academic honesty policy. For years, ACCC’s practice was that if a student was caught cheating, he was removed from class, no questions asked.
“We hope to use (the refined policy) as a teaching tool — a learning experience,” she said. “Instead of kicking out the students we want to use (the experience) to educate them.
The goal, she said, is to retain students who are serious about earning a college education, she explained.
“The college’s academic honesty policies haven’t been changed for a while, so we’re just looking at them right now,” she said.

PRIOR to coming to ACCC, Cleaves worked for three years as an English instructor at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minn., just north of Minneapolis. There, Cleaves worked extensively with Jon Marshall, then Normandale’s dean of humanities and college readiness and now ACCC’s vice president for academic affairs. He was hired by ACCC in the fall of 2008.
At Normandale, Cleaves helped institute a summer bridge program — a series of workshops for area high school students who otherwise might not have considered pursuing a college education.
“It was my responsibility to take that program from its designs on paper and make it work,” she said.
In its first year in the summer of 2008, the summer bridge program served about 50 students from four area high schools. By the third year, those numbers had tripled. “It seems to have found a foothold,” she said.
A phone call from Marshall led her to Allen County.
“Jon called and told me about this position opening,” she said. “I thought I might be a better administrator than an instructor and he said it was something I might want to consider.”
She said that while Marshall was instrumental in introducing her to ACCC, that alone didn’t get her the job. Cleaves underwent an extensive interview process and was hired earlier this summer.
“Jon likes to tell people, and I tell them the same thing, that while he and I have share many of the same ideas about education, we have no problem in letting each other know when we disagree.”

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