The president of the Eastern Gateway Community College Foundation said Friday its members haven’t given up hope another educational institution will step in to fill the void left by the college’s dissolution.

Until that happens, however, Foundation President Scott Campbell said they’ll continue to award scholarships to help high school graduates in Jefferson County who want to pursue associate’s degrees or certificates at schools other than Eastern Gateway, which is no longer operating as an educational institution — but they’re going to do it under a new name.

Going forward, he said they’ll be operating as the Eastern Ohio Community College Foundation.

In a release issued Friday, Campbell said the foundation “will continue its mission of serving the educational scholarship needs of our communities,” reminding residents that the foundation was established as a separate entity from EGCC and, “As a result, the scholarship assets have been protected from the college’s finances.”

He added the foundation’s mission will continue to be to assist individuals within the community who are looking to further their education, writing that, “We are hopeful that another community college might become available in our region, and then a focus will be made toward meeting the needs of (those) students. (But) in the absence of a local community college, the foundation will continue to identify and help individuals with community college-level educational pursuits.”

Later, Campbell said the foundation’s members “have been meeting all along.”

“We’re still together as a foundation, we’re moving forward,” Campbell said. “We want people to know we’re here, functioning, and we always planned on functioning and being involved going forward. But we were like everyone else, we had to find out what was going on with the college.”

The college’s problems, fiscal and academic, stemmed from a long-running dispute with the U.S. Department of Education over EGCC’s extremely popular free college program, which DOE contended was being funded with federal student aid meant to help income-eligible students earn two-year degrees and certificates.

After the department ordered the college to terminate the program and submit a teach-out agreement in July 2022, EGCC responded by filing suit to prevent the agency from enforcing its edict and was granted a preliminary injunction enjoining the DOE from limiting the college’s access to the student aid dollars, but the case became mired in legal briefs and in August 2023 the college announced they’d reached a tentative settlement and “voluntarily dismissed” the lawsuit.

DOE tightened scrutiny of the college’s student aid reimbursements, rejecting many “due to deficiencies in the applications for those reimbursements.”

In 2021 EGCC was put on academic probation by the Higher Learning Commission, which cited “core concerns centered on assessment, data collection and analysis and human resources record keeping.”

The Auditor of State raided the campus in January 2024, seizing computers and financial records, and two months later EGCC’s board of trustees announced the school would be dissolving.

The school’s termination “necessitated much work and dedication from the volunteer board members,” the release stated. “The foundation has transitioned from being an organization dependent on EGCC resources to a completely self-sufficient organization. We have engaged accounting and legal counsel and are in the process of re-reviewing all historic donations.”

Campbell said foundation funds have been tightly controlled and regularly audited throughout.

“We’ve been very good stewards of the money,” he said. “We’ve grown the amount of money there that’s available for scholarships.”

In the release, the board pointed out it is engaged in what was labeled as “an exhaustive, multi-year audit” by the state auditor’s staff, which is expected to be complete in the next few months.

Plans also are in the works to establish direct relationships with community members, organizations and local high schools to identify community needs and will be “directly reaching out to many scholarship/endowment donors to discuss the continuation of our mission and how their gifts will continue to help our community.”

“All of us feel very strongly that the money is there for us to be part of the educational economic growth of this community,” Campbell said. “That’s why the money is there, to help promote that and help people going to school.”