Alamance Community College president Dr. Algie Gatewood won’t be alone in retiring from ACC tomorrow: also retiring, effective June 30, is Scott Doron, who has served as the special assistant to the president and grants officer at ACC since 2017.
Doron joined Gatewood’s administration after a four-year stint with the state Department of Commerce and nearly two decades as director of the Southern Technology Council at Research Triangle Park.
During his tenure at ACC, Doron has helped secure millions in grants to fund new and existing programs, including an estimated $26.6 million in grants for the 2022-23 fiscal year, based on a presentation ACC’s trustees heard earlier this month.
The total dollar figure in grants for ACC this year includes $637,951 in new annual state funding, which has been penciled into the state budget but is awaiting passage by the General Assembly, to support the Dillingham Center in Burlington.
“Senator Amy Galey invested many hours to get us to this point,” Gatewood told the trustees earlier this month, referring to the additional funding that the Dillingham Center would receive from that provision. Also pending – and reflected in the $26.6 million figure that ACC hopes to receive this year – is another $5.73 million that U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis submitted for the federal budget in order to help fund construction of an indoor firing range at the Public Safety Training Center that ACC plans to build in Green Level, Doron told the trustees earlier this week.
Most recently, Doron helped to secure a $200,000 grant earlier this year from the Golden LEAF Foundation, which was created in 1999 to distribute proceeds from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with cigarette manufacturers to educational institutions and other types of nonprofits. That grant will be used to fund start-up costs for a new Practical Nursing program that ACC has launched to ease nursing shortages in Alamance County.
Doron has also secured $200,000 in grants to fund the first two years of operating the Alamance Juvenile Opportunity Bridge (AJOB) program. Announced in January of this year, AJOB is a court diversion program for first-time juvenile offenders that ACC has launched in collaboration with the Alamance County courts system and Alamance-Burlington school system. The grant funding for AJOB is being funded through the North Carolina Governor’s Crime Commission and Juvenile Crime Prevention Council, among other sources.
Doron said in a recent interview with The Alamance News that he plans to take some time off and then hopes to volunteer with “a mentoring group called GAP” that works with students at Broadview Middle School.
Doron, who holds an MBA from Kenan-Flagler business school at Carolina, told the newspaper that his proudest accomplishments over his 30-plus year career in public service was helping to create and fund the minority male “medical bridge” and AJOB programs at ACC.
