During its fifth decade, Merced College’s Los Banos Campus expands, looks to the future

This is the fifth in a series about the Los Banos Campus of Merced College, which recently celebrated its golden anniversary. This article narrates the campus’s fifth decade, from 2011 to 2021.

Three deans led the Los Banos Campus of Merced College during the last ten years, each applying her individual talents to the campus. The one constant during this decade was Merced College Trustee Joe Gutierrez, the district’s representative for the west side of Merced College since 2013.

Gutierrez, a local businessman who at one time served as an adjunct Merced College professor, advocated for the Los Banos Campus throughout the decade at board meetings and behind the scenes, making sure persons in Merced treated the campus as an integral part of the college.

Dean Brenda Latham completed her 11th year as the successful leader of the campus in 2019, the year after she helped bring to Los Banos a new career technical program in welding. She retired to travel the world with her husband Ray, who had been a natural sciences professor at the Los Banos Campus.

In May 2019, Dr. Lonita Cordova was selected by college president Dr. Chris Vitelli to be the new Los Banos Campus dean. Cordova, a military veteran with a master’s degree in educational counseling and a doctorate in psychology, brought a breadth of experience to the position.

She became involved in the community and developed collaborations with the local businesses and other educational institutions. She continued to look for new programs for the campus and she worked with the Los Banos Unified School District to enable more high school students take college classes in a dual enrollment program.

Cordova would have stayed longer had it not been for a job opportunity opening in Stockton, where she lived with her family while commuting to Los Banos. In March 2021 she was named Vice President of Student Services at Stockton’s San Joaquin Delta College.

When Cordova left, college president Vitelli named Jessica Moran as acting dean. On April 13, 2021, Moran was confirmed by the Merced College Board of Trustees as the ongoing dean.

Moran, born and raised in Los Banos and fluent in English and Spanish, was the valedictorian when she graduated from Los Banos High School in 2005. She attended UC Berkeley, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Economics and Policy in three years.

Since then, she has earned two master’s degrees, in business and in academic counseling and is currently pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership.

Dean Moran has already made an impact on the campus, adding a free noncredit program in medical assisting to go with the existing certified nursing assistant program. She is using her previous experience as Merced College’s Dean of Workforce Development to continue to expand career technical programs in Los Banos.

She moved into the Los Banos Campus’s dean’s position during the COVID outbreak and has worked to provide a balance between safe in-person classes and remote education. She has developed a plan for new synchronous technology, enabling instructors to teach not only students in person in the classroom but also students at home and at the Merced Campus via videoconferencing.

Moran is already planning for the sixth decade of the Los Banos Campus. She is working with other college officials to add a career-technical building to the campus, which would add space for classes in computer technology, allied health, agriculture and welding (moving the welding program from its current rented site on G Street to a permanent site on campus).

She has also realized that the campus has room on its 125-acre site to further expand and plans on soliciting ideas from everyone in the community on how the campus could grow.

Moran feels that her assignment as the Los Banos Campus lead administrator is a “dream job,” the dean of the college campus in her hometown. She may well still be dean when the campus’s next decade begins, in 2031.