This year Northeast State Community College at Elizabethton will celebrate a milestone achievement as the campus marks its 20-year anniversary.
For two decades, the college has served as a higher education fixture in Carter County. The campus will begin the celebration when students return for the Spring semester and anniversary events will carry on throughout the year.
The first special event will be an Open House to celebrate the opening of the college’s new expanded Learning Resource Center on Thursday, Jan. 28.
“We are going to start at 9 o’clock that morning and carry that through the day,” said Chris Hitechew, director of Northeast State at Elizabethton.
The campus will host more events in March and April to celebrate the milestone.
“We were waiting until we got past some of this bad weather before we planned too many events,” Hitechew said. “There are things going on almost every month as we look forward to this big 20th anniversary.”
One of the biggest events will take place on April 12.
“We’re going to have a big celebration with games here on campus,” Hitechew said. In past years, the games day has included activities for students such as a football toss, a climbing wall and a dunk tank, Hitechew said.
The public is invited to take part in the celebration by visiting the campus during Open House events where they can tour the facility and learn more about what the college has to offer. Hitechew said he and other campus officials will also be attending several community events and festivals throughout the region to promote the college.
The Elizabethton campus has received high marks from students over the years. A student satisfaction study released in 2010 reported more than 60 percent of those surveyed ranked individual attention from instructors and accessible computers labs as “highly important” to their experience at Northeast State. The survey also found a whopping 98 percent of enrolled students would recommend attending Northeast State to friends.
The Elizabethton campus schedules more than 100 course offerings each semester to accommodate student enrollment consistently exceeding 500 students and rising to over 650 students for past semesters. The campus also provides financial aid, business office, student health, and tutoring services for students.
The college began operating as a college campus in November 1995. The Elizabethton campus was formed after a committee of Carter County government and Northeast State officials met during the early summer of 1995 to discuss establishing a satellite campus. Individuals from the Workforce Development Complex, Alliance for Business and Training, the First Tennessee Private Industry Council, and county mayors of Carter, Johnson, and Unicoi counties collaborated on the project.
During the past 20 years, course offerings were added and enrollment grew to over 500 students. To meet the needs of scores of new students enrolling for classes, Northeast State at Elizabethton completed a multi-phase expansion that more than doubled the college’s physical space in 2010. The expansion added 15,000 square feet of available space to the teaching site.
Phases one and two added two new classrooms, one Interactive Television (ITV) classroom, one new computer lab, additional restrooms, and new office space for administration. The expansion also creates office space for financial aid, business office, student health, and tutoring service services at the existing entrance. The final phase completed in 2015 created laboratory space enabling the Elizabethton site to offer Intro to Microbiology courses for Health-Related Professions majors.
Today, the college boasts conventional classes as well as evening and distance education courses through online, video, and ITV formats.