[09/09/02]Hinds Community College’s Warren County location is to get more full-time instructors thanks to an increase in state funding that will be allocated here, it was announced today.

After many years of trying, the Warren County branch has been designated a “comprehensive center,” meaning that its share of state, per-student money will increase from 55 percent to 95 percent, Mississippi State Board for Community and Junior Colleges associate executive director for finance and administration Deborah Gilbert said. By decision of the Hinds board, however, the local site will now be called a “campus,” the same as each of the other five sites in the Hinds system, Dean Hilton Dyar said.

Until July 1, there were only two community-college site designations, “campus” and “branch.” A statewide change that took effect then created five new designations, with the funding formula for “comprehensive center” one step short of “academic campus,” which receives 100 percent of the state allocation for each full-time academic student.

With the change the state’s per-academic-student funding allocation for Warren County will rise from about $2,500 to $3,000, Dyar said. The new designation will mean more courses and more faculty.

The component of Hinds’ total income that is affected by the change, state funding, is its largest, 41 percent, Dyar said. The Warren location receives about 19 percent of its funding from student tuition, 16 percent from federal sources, 11 percent from auxiliary services, 11 percent from the counties served by units of the system and 2 percent from other sources.

Current tuition at Hinds for in-state part-time students is $75 per semester hour. For full-time, in-state students, tuition is $730 per semester. Tuition is significantly higher for out-of-county and out-of-state students.

The annual budget is about $3.2 million, Dyar said.

“We’ll be able to add more classes as we need them, which will make it easier for students to schedule classes,” Dyar said.

Dyar said the branch, located in three buildings on Mississippi 27, has about 280 full-time academic students and about 230 part-time academic students.

“Those numbers have been pretty consistent over the past few years,” he said.

“We’ve been trying since inception to become a campus,” Dyar said. “It took over 20 years and a lot of pressure from this branch and the Vicksburg community.”

Dyar said ultimately the state changed its funding formula statewide, which benefited the Vicksburg-Warren location as well as other colleges across the state.

“The biggest benefit from the name change is this puts our students on a level playing field,” Dyar said. “We just wanted to be funded equally.”