Community celebrates outgoing SEARK chief

As community leaders paid farewell to Southeast Arkansas College President Steven Bloomberg on Thursday, many of his accomplishments over the past six years reached high-water marks almost simultaneously.

A $6.7 million solar panel array was ceremonially turned on just a couple of hours earlier. Moments later, SEARK’s baseball team earned its first-ever victory, defeating Southern Arkansas University Tech 6-2.

SEARK celebrated another milestone Friday with the grand opening of The Reef, the college’s first student housing facility across from its Relyance Bank Athletic Complex. (The bank received naming rights to the old Seabrook Athletic Complex after making a sizable contribution to the college last year.)

Bloomberg told well-wishers at the Pine Bluff Country Club that he and his wife Lynette chose Pine Bluff because it was the place they could do the most good. The Bloombergs, who will mark their 10th wedding anniversary Tuesday, were celebrated one more time in the same ballroom where the community first received them as president and first lady in January 2018.

“I think it’s hard [to put into words] because I never wanted it to be about me,” Steven Bloomberg said, with Kendric Kelley’s saxophonic sounds flowing through the ballroom. “Even tonight, it’s hard for me to make it about me because it never was. It was about the college, our students, our faculty and staff, our community. It’s hard to make it about me because I want it to be about everybody else.”

In December, Bloomberg announced his decision to leave SEARK for the role of chancellor at the Kern Community College District in Bakersfield, Calif., which he’ll officially assume March 1. His final day at SEARK is Friday.

The reason for the move is more than that a community college chancellor is akin to president of a university system. Family is at the heart of the Bloombergs’ decision.

It is at one of the district’s three colleges where Steven’s oldest daughter works, and he and Lynette will live much closer to her, his son and two grandchildren.

But the feeling of leaving the place Steven led for the last six years didn’t sink in until Thursday’s farewell, by his admission.

“I love this community,” he said. “Pine Bluff will always be a part of us. We have so many friends here, we will never leave Pine Bluff. We will always support this community. This is a place that is near and dear to both Lynette and I.”

Steven hadn’t been selected yet as president when the community first embraced him and Lynette, she said. He was executive vice president at Oklahoma City Community College when he interviewed.

“We talked about it for hours; he had just gotten another offer to go someplace else the night he interviewed here,” said Lynette, an Oklahoma native. “So we had a decision: Do we go ahead and pursue Pine Bluff, or do we try this other opportunity? And we really felt our hearts were telling us to come to Pine Bluff. It was the right decision.”

Part of Steven Bloomberg’s good deeds has been looking out for students whose educational pursuits may be jeopardized because of food and housing insecurity.

Campus leaders are still raising funds for another residential area planned along with a student union on the Hazel Street campus.

Bloomberg also allowed People Shores to establish a location at SEARK. People Shores is a staffing firm that helps people attain jobs and opportunities they may otherwise not have in Pine Bluff.

In November, the SEARK board approved hiring a coordinator and case manager for 100 Families, an initiative of the nonprofit organization Restore Hope that seeks to reduce incarceration and the need for foster care through housing, employment and education.

“We’ve done a lot of great things,” Bloomberg said. “We’ve added housing. We’ve added athletics. We’ve added all these really awesome things. We raised more money than the college ever raised, but you know what? The greatest accomplishments are the people we work with. Without our faculty and staff, none of that happens.”

Lynette gave her own suggestion to the greatest of Steven’s works.

“The greatest accomplishment is just leading people to be able to see that vision and to be able to own it as their own,” she said. “You can come in here and talk about ideas, but to engage people to where they want it and they see it and they can taste it and they do the work to move that forward, I think that’s the greatest accomplishment any leader could claim, is being able to lead people in a way to make the vision and the vision obvious to others.”

Civic leaders have also rewarded Steven Bloomberg for his service.

Pine Bluff Mayor Shirley Washington announced that Bloomberg will receive a key to the city, adding that Bloomberg has made himself available to the community more than any other president in SEARK’s history (it’s been a community college since 1991).

“That’s what I like about your name, Bloomberg, because you have helped Pine Bluff bloom,” Washington remarked.

Jefferson County Judge Gerald Robinson offered heartfelt words to the Bloombergs, locking hands as Robinson proclaimed him a friend.

“I didn’t say to President Bloomberg. I said a friend,” Robinson said. “I thank this man for being the visionary that he is. I think from the first time I met him, the ideas, the heartfelt things he wanted to do for the college — not only the college but the community, and not only for the community but for the southeast Arkansas area — it expanded beyond Pine Bluff the relationships he has built, the bridges he has bridged a gap between race, religion, all those things. He has been so good to this community, and I feel like this room should have been filled to the gills.”

Robinson continued: “Steven, we love you. We will miss the hell out of you, always working with you and talking with you.”

Introducing an athletic department in January 2023 was a recruiting mechanism Bloomberg brought to SEARK in hopes of attracting those with baseball, softball, basketball and e-sports talent to a local junior college. Chad Kline, who was hired as men’s basketball coach and athletic director last February, was sold on Bloomberg’s dream of The Reef becoming reality.

“Having housing and a foodservice this close to our facilities, a lot of junior colleges don’t have it,” Kline said. “That was one of the selling points he sold me on, and I love it.”

Stacy Pfluger, SEARK’s provost whom Bloomberg hired as vice president of academic affairs in May 2022, will succeed him in the interim. Pfluger, a Texas Tech- and Notre Dame-educated former biology instructor, previously indicated her intent to pursue the full-time presidency.

Pfluger said she’s prepared for her new role by being up to speed on ongoing projects.

“There are a lot of things I have been involved in and a few things I haven’t been as involved in, some of that being the housing project and athletics,” Pfluger said. “My biggest goal going into this is making sure we stay the course. We have a lot of things in their infancy, and we need to make sure we grow into some of these programs. Really, into the interim period over the next six months, I need to make sure that we lay the foundations, but get this semester done as well as we can.”

Barbara Dunn, the executive director of institutional advancement and community relations at SEARK, has spent weeks trying to process Bloomberg’s departure.

“I have been at SEARK 24 years. I’ve been under President Bloomberg’s leadership six years, and in the six years President Bloomberg has been here, we have made lots of changes,” said Dunn, in whose tenure Bloomberg is SEARK’s sixth president. “Unbelievable changes, things I would have never thought I would see happen at SEARK, such as athletics, student housing, additional programs.

“I know things will continue to grow and expand, but under his leadership, it’s been amazing. He has left a blueprint like no one else has, and he’s truly going to be missed.”

More important, key personnel at SEARK think of Bloomberg as a man of all people who happens to lead worthy causes.

As Pfluger said she learned from Bloomberg, it’s all about people.

“Obviously, he’s a president, so he’s a politician, but he’s a real dude,” Kline said. “Like, when you sit down with him, you can talk to him about sports. He and I are Lakers fans. He’s a down-to-earth, real dude and he treats everyone — whether you are a CEO, a maintenance crew member — he treats everyone the same and he’s just a real dude.”