Story by Laura Canida

For the first time in many years, the college stopped sending home the schedule of classes. Clackamas Community College was one of the last remaining community colleges  in the state to still mail printed schedules to the community. Many institutions had already moved to a newsletter or a magazine; according to the college, a mailed print schedule was no longer affordable or sustainable, due to the steadily increasing costs of paper.

The college performed extensive work about five years ago to get community and college input as to whether or not to discontinue mailing the physical schedule. They spoke with  community education partners, college leadership and key stakeholders about moving from mailing the print schedule in favor of a community newsletter.

The funds for printing the schedule come from the College Relations and Marketing Department  — that money is now being used to print and mail the new newsletter, as well as funding  increased marketing for the college.

According to Lori Hall, CCC’s Public Information Officer, there were 545,191 schedules mailed over the course of the 2017-18 academic year. On average, each schedule is 136 pages, for a total of 74,145,976 pages. The new community newsletter is just four pages, so, that is a savings of more than nearly 72 million pages of paper. With the mailed community newsletters costing about $40,000 a year, the college says it’s saving around $120,000 a year.