SCCC President Trzaska will Leave for Illinois

LIBERAL, Kan. — Seward County Community College President Dr. Ken Trzaska has accepted a new position and will leave the college at the completion of his fifth year at the helm. The college will begin a search for its 11th president immediately.

Trzaska’s selection as president of Lewis & Clark Community College in Godfrey, Ill., was announced Wednesday, with a start date of Sept. 21. The fall semester at SCCC is slated to begin in early August, and the time frame will enable the college to get off to a good start in post-pandemic mode, said Trzaska.

“The emergency management team at Seward has met weekly over the past two months and will complete a half-day strategy and training session June 15 to prepare for the campus to reopen,” he said. With COVID-19 case numbers for Seward County slowly declining, Trzaska emphasized the college’s focus on health and safety for students, team members, and the community and said he would expect no less of a college that lives by its core values of integrity, trust, quality, valuing others, and student success.

“Over five years serving as your president, I have appreciated our collective successes in large part to a strong student-centered College vision, a wise and supportive board, a superb team of employees who demonstrate grit and determination to serve students at a higher and higher level each day, and perhaps most importantly a community who has given 50 years of unwavering support to a great institution of higher education,” he said.

Trzaska, who has family connections and academic roots in the region, said the move to LCCC is, in a way, a homecoming. He earned his doctoral degree in the Illinois university system, and his work as a college administrator began in the Chicago area and continued in St. Louis.

“While I am looking forward to a new opportunity, I will always recall fondly my five wonderful years at Seward,” he said. “The honor and privilege to serve the Liberal community, our students, collective team members on campus has had immense impact on me personally and professionally.”

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