This year the Hayward Award for Excellence in Education was granted, along with $1,250, to the ninth City College employee since 1989, when the very first award was given.

The Hayward Award is given annually to four faculty members from California community colleges. The winners are chosen by their peers based upon excellence in teaching and in professional activities that show outstanding commitment to their students and college.  

This year’s winner, Kathy Molloy, has been an English professor at City College since 1987, and is Director of the Partnership for Student Success and Chairman of the Express to Success Program. The programs have been developed to help students quickly complete math and English requirements that lead to college-level courses.

“This has become the part of the City College culture, but at first we had to twist people’s arms,” Molloy said. “Students looked at it as a negative thing.

Molloy said at first students looked at these programs as more work, but the programs have given students the option of completing up to two classes in one semester.

Partnership for Student Success was started in 2006 and merged with the Express to Success Program when it started in 2011. Since then, the two very effective coalitions have given students the opportunity to do what some may call impossible, and transfer to a four-year university.

“The programs work has always been focused on the underprepared students,” said Molloy. “Since the program started we have had a much higher success rate when it comes to the student’s transfer.”

But Molloy isn’t taking all the credit for the program’s success.

“There are so many wonderful people involved I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she said.

Marsha Wright, Director of the Extended Opportunities Programs and Services, has been a contributor since the beginning along with Pamela Guenther, a City College math professor says Molloy.

“Pamela was doing this before we started, and because of Pamela we have had wonderful statistics in math,” Molloy said. Wright has been involved since day one and she has been excellent to work with, Molloy said.

The respect Molloy gives, and also receives, not only from the Board of Governors but her peers as well, is one of the main reasons she was awarded the Hayward in 2016.

“Kathy has spent her professional career passionately helping students with their academic success,” said Wright. “Her leadership of the PPS and ESP programs reflects on the programs’ tremendous success.”

Since the program’s five-year grants expired, City College has done everything they can to keep the two allies going strong by funding the highly successful programs which Molloy says, “We wouldn’t have been able to do without the statistics and data that shows results in terms of transferring.”

Molloy is honored to have been awarded the Hayward Award for Excellence in Education and gives the two programs a lot of the credit.

“I am the ninth employee at City College to have won the award,” she said. I guess this was my time.”