Stephen Head became the chancellor of Lone Star College System in 2014 after working at LSCS for 30 years in various capacities, including as president of Lone Star College-North Harris. LSCS has numerous educational centers and six campuses, with a seventh campus slated to open in 2019 serving the North Houston area. The college system focuses heavily on academic transfer students and its workforce programs. LSCS sustained $34 million worth of flood damage during Hurricane Harvey in August, and its Kingwood campus will not fully reopen until 2019, Head said. The college system is in the midst of opening new buildings throughout its service area as a part of a $485 million bond package approved by voters in 2014.

What role do you see LSCS playing in the North Houston community?

Our general view is that education is really the key to success for our future region. The second part of that is the workforce development that goes along with that. We have really focused on workforce programs in addition to the academic transfer, and we are in the middle of  $485 million [in] bond construction projects, and $300 million of that has gone to workforce centers of excellence. So we are doing our part, we think, to try and meet the needs of the community that helps everybody in the long term.

What sort of trends have you experienced regarding what programs students are enrolling in?

First of all, medical is always a big growth area, and it pretty well reflects what we are seeing in the Houston metropolitan area. We actually have seen a lot in public safety, like firefighters, [emergency medical technicians] and police. Construction trades [are] hot right now. And we just opened a new facility also for processed technology, which is for all of the chemical plants that are opening. We still have large enrollments in teacher education and business classes.

Has enrollment growth matched projections made before LSCS’ $485 million bond in 2014?

We were actually ahead of what we projected until the hurricane. And we actually grew in the fall after the hurricane, but this spring we flattened out, so we are still ahead of what we projected. We were pretty conservative in what we projected. Our baseline number is 3 percent growth every year. We rely heavily on data and metrics, so we know for the entire population about 4 percent goes to school here. And we have been following this trend for 15-18 years.

Why was the decision made to combine multiple centers for the seventh campus opening in 2019 in Aldine?

We have some major income and success disparities across our system. For example, the average family income in the Aldine area is about $30,000, and in The Woodlands it is about $107,000. I thought we needed a new look at things and [to] have smaller classes ... where they stick together and block scheduling. We are going to have a lot of eight-week courses so they can get through and show some progress. We also know we need extensive tutoring and mentoring in that college. The goal is to increase student success, especially in areas that do not normally go to college.

Why is it easier to do all of these things at one campus rather than each individual center?

The reason we did this is because North Harris had oversight of East Aldine, Victory and Greenspoint. Cy-Fair had oversight over Fairbanks, and those colleges are big colleges themselves, even without the centers. The average size of a community college in Texas is 5,500; and Cy-Fair has 20,000, and North Harris has 16,000. What happens is you are just stretching resources and time. And I did not think the centers were receiving as much attention as I thought they deserved. And there are some commonalities [between the centers]. What we are going to do, we will have a dean over each center and then a president and vice president pulling everything together. It is easily doable, and we are increasing the resources to each of the centers.