For immediate release - Nov. 22, 2005
(DALLAS) – Richland College, one of seven institutions in the Dallas County Community College District, is one of six national recipients of the 2005 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The winners of the nation’s highest presidential honor for quality and organizational excellence were announced this morning by President George W. Bush and U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.
Richland College is the first community college in the United States to receive this award, which was established by Congress in 1987 to enhance the competitiveness and performance of U.S. businesses; categories were expanded in 1998 to include education and health care. Dr. Steve Mittelstet, president of RLC, and other college representatives will travel to Washington, D.C., early next year to participate in an awards ceremony.
Two of the six national recipients are from Dallas: RLC (education) and Park Place Lexus in Plano, which won in the small business category. Other winners include Sunny Fresh Foods Inc. of Monticello, Minn. (manufacturing); DynMcDermott Petroleum Operations of New Orleans (service); Jenks Public Schools of Jenks, Okla. (education); and Bronson Methodist Hospital of Kalamazoo, Mich. (health care).
“President Bush and I proudly announce these organizations as recipients of the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award,” said Gutierrez during a press conference today. “By pursuing excellence in every aspect of their operations, the men and women of these innovative, high-performing organizations have proven ready to meet the competitive challenges of the future. The recipients of the Baldrige Award provide inspiration for all U.S. organizations in their quest for excellence.”
Mittelstet said, “This award is a tribute to each member of the Richland College family, our community partners and the long legacy of encouraging support from both the DCCCD board of trustees and members of the DCCCD Foundation’s board of directors, as well as the work of many former Richlanders whose work preceded our efforts. I want to thank and congratulate the members of the Richland College family for their commitment to performance excellence in teaching, learning and community building; each does a world-class job in a world-class organization. I am honored every day to work with and learn from them.”
“We are extremely proud of Richland College and its continuing effort to achieve performance excellence,” said Dr. Jesus “Jess” Carreon, DCCCD’s chancellor. “Richland administrators, faculty and staff have worked for a dozen years to earn this national honor, and we are excited that Richland is the first community college in this country to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.”
RLC has cultivated a history of pursuing organizational excellence. The college previously received the 2005 Texas Award for Performance Excellence from the governor’s office and the Quality Texas Foundation; was named a Best Practices Vanguard College by the League for Innovation in the Community College in 2000; was one of seven mentoring colleges for the American Association of Community Colleges’ national Service Learning Project from 1998 to 2003; served as one of eight pilot institutions for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ new accreditation standards; and received the American Library Association’s 2001 Library of the Future Award and the 2004 Excellence in Academic Libraries Award.
Sixty-four applicants competed for the Baldrige Award. All six recipients were evaluated vigorously by an independent board of examiners in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; human resource focus; and process management. The evaluation process included approximately 1,000 hours of review and an on-site visit by teams of examiners to clarify questions and verify information submitted on the applications.
The 50-page applications were reviewed in three stages. The first stage involved an independent review of each application by members of the board of examiners, which was chaired by Roy Bauer, president and chief operating officer of Pemstar Inc. Based on the first-stage review, a panel of judges determined which applications would continue to the second-stage consensus review. A team of examiners then developed a consensus evaluation from which 16 organizations were chosen by the panel of judges to move to the third stage, a site visit review, which occurred at Richland College in October 2005.
“Richland College has used the Malcolm Baldrige criteria for performance excellence during the past eight years as a framework that guided us through continuous performance improvement,” added Mittelstet. “We will continue to maintain those standards of excellence both now and in the future.”
For more information, please see the official U.S. Department of Commerce release (PDF) on the 2005 Malcolm Baldrige winners.