College of the Desert (COD) hosted a public forum Thursday evening featuring the four finalists for superintendent/president, allowing the community to hear from candidates before the Board of Trustees meets Friday to discuss the appointment.
The four finalists, selected from 73 applicants, include Dr. Kimberlee S. Messina, president of Spokane Falls Community College; Dr. Don Moya-Miller, vice president and assistant superintendent of Río Hondo College; Val Martinez Garcia, acting superintendent/president of COD; and Dr. Monica Chahal, interim president of Clovis Community College.
During the nearly four-hour event on the COD campus in Palm Desert, each candidate presented a 10-minute introduction followed by a 30-minute moderated question-and-answer session with pre-selected questions submitted online.
The Board of Trustees will meet in closed session Friday at 8:30 a.m. to discuss the appointment, according to the meeting agenda.
The search was relaunched in January after being canceled last December due to a reported breach of confidentiality. The selected candidate will become the college’s fourth president/superintendent in five years.
Students, staff and community members attended the forum, which provided an opportunity to hear directly from the candidates vying to lead the community college.
Read more about each of the candidates’ backgrounds on COD’s website.
Dr. Messina is a first-generation college graduate with a background in Hispanic language and literature who has worked in the California Community College system for more than 20 years, including 10 years as tenured faculty. She is currently president of Spokane Falls Community College which she has held since 2019.
Dr. Moya-Miller currently serves as vice president/assistant superintendent of Academic Affairs at Rio Hondo College. His career spans 20 years as faculty, administration, and statewide leadership experience.
Martinez Garcia is the current acting superintendent/president at College of the Desert, with nearly 20 years in California community colleges and 10 years in executive leadership.
Dr. Chahal brings over 30 years of experience in community colleges, currently serving as interim president at Clovis Community College. Her career path progressed from classified professional to faculty member to administrator over the past 12 years.
Each candidate was asked to prepare a 10-minute answer to the following question. You can watch each candidate’s response on the YouTube links supplied:
“Given the challenges posed by budget cuts, declining enrollment and high leadership turnover, how would you approach stabilizing the institution while fostering trust, financial sustainability and long term growth. What strategies would you implement to enhance student recruitment and retention, strengthen shared governance and cultivate a culture of transparency and collaboration among faculty staff and the board? Please provide specific examples from the past experiences or innovative solutions you would consider.”
Dr. Kimberlee S. Messina
(Listen to her full answer here)
Dr. Messina’s response drew on her six-year tenure at Spokane Falls Community College, where she faced a lack of trust and financial sustainability, having inherited issues including declining enrollment and leadership turnover.
“I arrived at my college as the fourth president in four years. There was a tremendous lack of trust in the community. Faculty and staff didn’t trust the administration.”
She said she established trust through visibility on campus and personal connections, then implemented a comprehensive shared governance structure.
“There was no clear understanding at the college of how decisions were made,” she said. She added that she worked hard to adopt “A participatory governance structure, which is now in its fourth year, that really helped us to advance the work of guided pathways, student success, student equity.”
Under her leadership, she said Spokane Falls Community College went from being last in the state of Washington for completion rates of math in the first year to being number one in the state. She tackled enrollment challenges through retention strategies that yielded 5% and 13% growth in consecutive years, while simultaneously addressing equity gaps through targeted outreach to underserved populations like Native American tribes.
Dr. Don Moya-Miller
(Listen to his full answer here)
Dr. Moya-Miller framed his approach to stabilizing College of the Desert around four pillars. The first pillar, trust, emphasizes that “Trust requires transparency, trust requires collaboration. Trust requires deep commitment to shared governance,” highlighting his experience implementing his “dialogs with Don” as interim president of College of Alameda during the pandemic to facilitate open communication.
His second pillar, growth, focuses on enrollment strategies through “recruitment, retention, program development, building and supporting learning communities.” He cited the “almost 400% [growth] in the last two and a half to three years of our non-credit programming” and K-12 partnerships including summer high school math academies and credit recovery programs which help students who drop out of high school recover credits during the summer.
For financial stability, his third pillar, Moya-Miller connects finances to enrollment management while emphasizing “the importance of building up the reserves of the college, of controlling costs” and combating enrollment fraud.
Finally, his community (comunidad) pillar stresses the importance of serving as “a bridge between the board and the college community” while developing robust external partnerships with K-12 superintendents, chambers of commerce, and industry partners.
Val Martinez Garcia
(Listen to his full answer here)
Martinez Garcia started by rejecting part of the premise: that College of the Desert needs stabilizing. He asserted, “not only is College of the Desert postured appropriately, but I think it is even more than ever in a good place.”
He outlined his accomplishments at COD, including developing an enrollment plan that became “the foundation for everything that we have done” by focusing on dual enrollment, increasing ZTC/OER (Zero Textbook Cost Degree Program and open educational resources), increasing basic needs support, and increasing student and staff engagement.
He said his work with the Outcomes and Assessment Committee strengthened governance by reimagining “the College Planning Council … to three chairs, a tri chair model.”
He also highlighted the completion of the institutional self-evaluation report and strategic Educational Master Plan, and stabilization of leadership by hiring “three full-time deans.” Throughout his tenure, he said he has worked across departments, emphasizing that when he served in various vice president roles, he consistently built relationships “across silos.”
Martinez Garcia highlighted that with his help, the campus was able to “fiscally enhance our position and our retention.” He also emphasized cultural initiatives including faculty engagement programs to develop a sense of belonging and connectedness.
Dr. Monica Chahal
(Listen to her full answer here)
Dr. Chahal acknowledged College of the Desert’s challenges while normalizing them as common to all institutions, emphasizing “what makes an institution healthy … is how we respond to those challenges.”
She described her approach as centering on people, asserting that “people are our most valuable resource” and leaders must “create a culture and a climate that allows every single person to feel valued and to be seen and to be heard.”
She emphasized active listening as essential to building trust: “I need to be prepared to hear with an open mind and an open heart… not preparing to say what I think I have heard.”
For financial sustainability, Chahal advocated a data-driven approach to “study the institution … look at the health of the institution” while strategically addressing the student-centered funding formula by exploring new academic programs, support services, and certificates that “address the needs of the community and the local industry.”
She underscored community responsiveness, noting “we are a community college … we must do our due diligence to assure that we are serving that community,” while highlighting her experience with “innovative curriculum, competency-based education, dual enrollment” and grant writing.
To strengthen shared governance, Chahal said she draws on her experience as an academic senate president to implement regular stakeholder engagement and ensuring cross-functional participation from relevant administrators. Her collaborative leadership philosophy reflects her family-centered values, focusing on “taking the skill sets and the talents of every single individual who is part of that family, and then leveraging those skill sets to determine how best to move forward.”
Each finalist was also given 30 minutes to respond in depth to pre-selected questions submitted online, addressing topics like leadership stability, enrollment, financial health, and diversity and equity.
