Rockland Community College has been named one of Campus Pride’s “Best of the Best” Top 5 LGBTQ-friendly two-year and community colleges nationwide for 2018. The College was recognized among a select group chosen for setting the highest standards for LGBTQ inclusion in policy, program and practice.
Campus Pride is a leading national educational organization for LGBTQ and ally college students and campus groups building future leaders and safer, more-LGBTQ-friendly colleges and universities. This is the first time Campus Pride has included a category for community colleges in their rating system, called the Campus Pride Index. The index is acknowledged as the premier national benchmarking tool for self-assessment of LGBTQ-friendly policies, programs and practices.
RCC was joined in the Top 5 rankings by College of Lake County, Grayslake, Ill.; North Seattle College, Seattle, Wash.; Pellissippi State Community College, Knoxville; Tenn.; and Red Rocks Community College, Lakewood, Colo. Campus Pride also named its 2018 “Best of the Best” Top 30 LGBTQ-friendly four-year institutions. The lists can be found at www.CampusPride.org/2018BestoftheBest.
“Student Involvement spent several years’ time and a lot of resources to bring meaningful LGBTQ events to the campus,” said Tammy Collins Richardson, Director of RCC Student Involvement. “We want to provide programming that piques students’ interest and events that they want to participate in.” Among the LGBTQ-friendly events RCC has hosted regularly are the Second Chance Prom, Coming Out Day, and various drag shows.
“We have an open-door policy and always encourage students to let us know if there is something they would like to see in our LGBTQ programming that we are not doing now,” Collins Richardson said.
Campus Pride works alongside students, faculty, staff and administrators at more than 1,400 campuses nationwide to help support and improve the quality of campus life for LGBTQ people. To be included in the “Best of the Best” listing, an institution had to score the highest percentages in the LGBTQ-friendly benchmarks for policies, programs and practices. Many of the top campuses and others on the Campus Pride Index will be featured at upcoming college fairs in Boston, Los Angeles and New York. The fairs provide a welcoming setting for LGBTQ-friendly campuses to recruit openly LGBTQ and ally students to their campus and promote their LGBTQ inclusion and safety.
For more information on RCC’s LGBTQ-friendly programs, contact Student Involvement at 845-845-574-4373, or getinvolved@sunyrockland.edu.
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