Deborah L. Harrington, Founding Director & Project Administrator, is the Dean of Student Success for the Los Angeles Community College District. She also is Co-Director of LearningWorks, a new center designed to link policy and practice in California’s community colleges. LearningWorks is a collaborative organization led by the CareerLadders Project, the RP Group, and 3CSN and is funded by the Hewlett Foundation under the fiscal agency of the Foundation for California Community Colleges.
As Dean for Institutional Effectiveness and Student Success at the Los Angeles Community College District 2007-2010, Deborah brought together faculty and administrative staff in order to initiate the design and implementation of programs that effectively support student equity, access, persistence, and success across the nine colleges; these successful efforts in turn led to the envisioning and funding of the California Community Colleges’ Success Network, the professional development grant of the Basic Skills Initiative.
An experienced practitioner who has taught basic skills, composition, and literature in the CCC for more than twenty-four years, Ms. Harrington has led national and state efforts to improve student access, success, and equity and to provide effective professional learning resources to faculty through her service as faculty coordinator and educational consultant in many nationally-recognized programs including California’s Puente Project, Carnegie/Annenberg/Ford Foundations’ Teachers for a New Era Project, and USC and Irvine Foundation’s Diversity/Equity Scorecard Project. As the grant author and project director for a Department of Education’s FIPSE funded program called STARS (Strategic Team for the Advancement and Retention of Students), Ms. Harrington’s work became a model for the creation of LACCD’s district-wide Student Success Initiative (SSI), an ongoing effort amongst the nine campuses to integrate essential (basic) skills teaching and learning across the curriculum. As co-chair of LACCD’s SSI and as the district liaison for BSI, Ms. Harrington has facilitated and supported the completion of the BSI Phase II self-studiesand the subsequent development of action and expenditure plans for Phases III and IV at the nine campuses.
As an administrator at both campus and district levels and as a faculty coordinator for state and federal specially-funded as well as campus-funded academic success centers and programs, Vice President Harrington has extensive experience in the supervision, management, and direction of staff and budgeting for programs that serve thousands of students and faculty across the curriculum as well as the strategic and operational planning, program review and evaluation of these programs. She has chaired standards committees as well as provided campus-wide training for accreditation self-studies. With experience chairing integral campus committees including Education Master Plan and Budget as well as through years of serving as a member and officer of the Academic Senate, Ms Harrington has also held shared governance leadership roles at the district level. She is the founding chair of the LACCD Advisory Council on Student Learning Outcomes, the Transfer Advisory Council, and the SSI Professional Development Taskforce. Ms. Harrington is the regional head of the California ePortfolio Pilot under the direction of CENIC and CVC. She additionally serves on the K20 California Educational Technology Collaborative as well as the California Community Colleges Open Education Resources Steering Committee.The LACCD Faculty Teaching and Learning Academy was launched under Ms. Harrington’s leadership and is in its third successful year.
Ms. Harrington is the Founding Director of the Writing Center at Los Angeles Valley College; during her five-year tenure, the center was cited for its effective practices by the RP Group’s Center for Student Success (CSS) and was subsequently noted as a model academic resource center in the Poppy Copy. LACCD’s Framework for Student Success, developed and adopted district-wide through the SSI last year, has also been cited for its excellence by the CSS. While serving for three years as the director of STARS, a professional development program that brought together students, faculty and staff to increase success and retention through the development of strategically designed student learning outcomes centering on real-world applications and self-regulating learning practices, Ms. Harrington facilitated more than 50 workshops, serving over 1,500 faculty, students, and staff from Los Angeles Valley College, California State University, Northridge, and surrounding area high schools. Ms. Harrington has presented workshop sessions on basic skills and student success across the country, including at the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges’ Annual Learning College Summit and at the Annual Strengthening Student Success Conference. Deborah holds a faculty appointment in English at Los Angeles Valley College.
