The new year brought new Metropolitan Community College (MCC) signs to highways and interstates around Kansas City.
Ho-hum. Right?
Actually, it was an undertaking so complicated, it required a new state law to make it happen.
This excerpt comes from the AACC 21st-Century Center.
The old signs — in some cases at least 25 years old — didn’t even use the correct names of the campuses. Since 2005, when MCC started marketing itself as one college with five campuses, each campus’ official name has been Metropolitan Community College-Blue River, Metropolitan Community College-Maple Woods and such. (MCC-Blue River, MCC-Maple Woods, etc. for short).
The state-installed MCC “wayfinding” signs, meanwhile, didn’t refer to MCC, Metropolitan or Community at all. Instead, they called our campuses “Blue River College,” “Maple Woods College” and the like.
Just replace the signs, right?
Not so fast. New signs would have to adhere to Missouri law, which by then differentiated between two-year colleges and four-year colleges.
“Two-year schools could only get the smaller grouped signs like you see for food or hotels, listing all of the colleges that were at the next exit,” says Michael Banks, a recently retired MCC vice chancellor and campus president. “Whereas the four-year schools could get the larger stand-alone signs with only the school’s name on it.”
Changing the law
MCC and the Missouri Community College Association lobbied state legislators to change the law. This was a passion project for former MCC Chancellor Mark James, who retired without seeing new, properly named MCC signs go up.
Finally, in 2017, the Missouri General Assembly approved Senate Bill 225, a hodgepodge of transportation measures that addressed college road signs. Then-Gov. Eric Greitens signed the bill into law that June.
The law states that “two-year colleges shall qualify for substantially the same signs as traditional four-year colleges, irrespective of differences in student housing or types of degrees offered.”
The bill’s passage was seen as a victory for the state’s 12 community colleges. Before the legislative session ended, East Central College President Jon Bauer told a newspaper that not allowing community colleges to purchase the same signage as four-year schools was unfair.
