Ashland Daily Independent

Everyone from administrators to faculty to students at Ashland Community and Technical College had reason to be elated Friday as the school's six-year capital campaign came to an official end. After all, the campaign garnered some $5.2 million in cash and other gifts, which is $2 million more than the original goal.

Think about that: How many fund-raising campaign exceed their goal by almost 40 percent? Not many that we know of.

ACTC students will be among the biggest benefactors of the successful campaign, as $333,000 is earmarked specifically for scholarships. They include the Saul and Harriet Kaplan Foundation scholarship and the Lincoln and Katherine Scott Scholarship Fund. The campaign also includes gifts for an emergency student support fund, a unique program that provides help for students that need short-term assistance -- for rent, utilities, child care, etc. -- to enable them to stay in school.

The science and mathematics programs at ACTC are the benefactors of the largest single gift: $1 million from an anonymous donor for an endowed chair in science and mathematics. Other academic programs also will benefit from the campaign, including gifts from King's Daughters Medical Center for funding of faculty and nursing classes, from Our Lady of Bellefonte Hospital for evening nursing classes, and from the Booth Foundation for health science programs.

About $1.5 million of the campaign came in the form of donations of property. The largest one was the gift of the former Parsons Department Store building on Winchester Avenue by businessman Perry Madden. While the Highland Museum and Discovery Center will continue to be housed on the lower levels of the building, the college hopes to develop the upper floors as a conference center, offices and classrooms for its health occupations programs. Developing the upper floors likely will require another fund-raising campaign along with some state funding.

The campaign also received property in Russell and at EastPark as part of the campaign.

For many years, Ashland Community and Technical College -- known as Ashland Community College before its merger with the old Ashland State Vocational Technical School -- did not put a high priority on fund raising. However, particularly since the 1997 Higher Education Reform Act separated the community colleges from the University of Kentucky, the school has put nearly as much emphasis on raising money from alumni and the community as the state's four-year universities.

And, as evidenced by the latest campaign, Ashland Community and Technical College is proving it has the broad-based support of this region to be quite successful in raising money from private sources. That can only serve to benefit the college, in particular, and the community as a whole.