The council overseeing the West Virginia Community and Technical College System hired its interim leader as its permanent chancellor Thursday.
Sarah Tucker, 37, said she will receive a $175,000 annual salary to lead the Community and Technical College System, which has nine colleges, 27 campuses and roughly 32,000 students who enroll each year.
The Wheeling native had been vice chancellor for nearly two years, and had worked for the past five years with both the community college system and the separate Higher Education Policy Commission, which oversees the state's four-year colleges.
Tucker said nine members of the community college system council voted unanimously to hire her, effective immediately, after coming out of closed session at their meeting at Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College in Logan County. She said the 10th council member, John Panza, was absent.
Tucker has been serving as interim leader of the community college system since July 1, when Jim Skidmore, who had led the system since its creation in 2004, retired from the position. Skidmore, who made $175,500 in the role, is now on a one-year, $152,500 contract with the school system to be project director of a $25 million federal Labor Department-funded grant program called the Bridging the Gap Consortium.
In early August, the community college system council unanimously decided to reassess its search for a new system leader after it deemed its single finalist unfit for the position following the dropping out of two finalists. Angie Kerns, executive assistant to the vice chancellor and the system council's liaison, said at the time there were 22 applicants and that 17 of them met minimum qualifications.
Tucker previously said she didn't apply for the position, but told the Gazette-Mail the only reason she hesitated to apply was because she didn't know how the position would affect her new marriage.
But she said that once she became interim leader, "I realized that I was able to create the balance I needed both in the position and in my personal life."
She said she wants to concentrate on educating and helping find work for the large number of West Virginians who are unemployed or overqualified for their current jobs.
"I think it's imperative if we want to improve the economy of the state of West Virginia, if we want to grow the economy of the state of West Virginia, we need to focus on those on those individuals ... and get them into the training programs that they need to be successful," Tucker said.
The community college system has also aimed to improve graduation and retention rates, although Skidmore has said the system focuses more on overall degree and certificate attainment, which has been increasing despite a seemingly contradictory drop in enrollment. The system noted in its five-year master plan that only about 14 percent of full-time students who entered West Virginia community colleges for the first time in 2011 graduated within three years.