DI XIE TECHNI
President Kelle Stephens:
Future Focused Lorem ipsum dolor sit By Aubrey Gurney
K
elle Stephens’s road to becoming a fierce advocate for technical education started with rejection.
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For the next eighteen years, Stephens spent her time in the St. George business community, addressing the needs of local businesses through custom fit training and helping local businesses to thrive. Stephens continued to work at Dixie College until 2006, when Custom Fit was moved to Dixie Applied Technology College.
the first tech college in the state to adopt this method. The college felt the positive impact: fewer students fell behind, graduation rates increased, and its reputation rose. “Suddenly, students were in it together,” Stephens said. “They were confused together, figured things out together, learned together, and lifted each other up.”
college with a very small budget and few programs, but that would soon change upon her arrival. “I started having ideas, lots of ideas, about how we could grow,” Stephens said.
tackled was funding. In 2009, the small college budget would scarcely allow for infrastructure or program improvements, and Stephens wanted both. With the help of a few team members, she wrote a grant request and received 2.1 million dollars in a Department of Labor grant. A few months later, DXATC was able to make some infrastructure improvements and added its first manufacturing program.
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After completing 130 credits, Stephens left college with an “almost bachelors degree” to run a business with her husband. Shortly after the business sold, Stephens was approached with a job opportunity for which she had the necessary experience but was ultimately denied the job due to her lack of a college degree. “That was a wake-up call for me,” she said.
In true Kelle Stephens fashion, she went above and beyond. She retook math classes, fought for older credits to count, took more classes, and went to school with small children at home. She obtained a bachelor’s degree and later, a Master of Social Science in Economics with an emphasis in HR. Her motto, one that she has shared often since, was ‘“the time will come and go, and I can either have this or not.”
She had so many ideas that she was named Vice President of Instruction. During her first few months as VP, Stephens sat in on classes, taking note of improvements to make and envisioning what DXATC could become. Her biggest concern was the college’s open-entry/open-exit flexible education model. In theory, the model sounded great. Students could enroll at any time and graduate as soon as they finished their coursework. In practice, Stephens saw students fall behind, become isolated, and have no sense of camaraderie with their peers.
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2012, Stephens was named President vitae euismod est, a malesuada justo. DonecInofeu tincidunt lectus, DXATC and knew exactly what she
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While visiting St. George one summer, Stephens had an impromptu meeting with an administrator on the Dixie College campus and was later hired as the Director of Custom Fit. “I had to look up what exactly custom fit was in preparation for my interview,” Stephens said. “I found that it was perfect for me; it involved labor economics and employee training and development, which I had studied in school.”
wanted to do: move the college to a permanent campus on Tech Ridge. This became the toughest and most significant challenge of her career. “The permanent campus was meant to show a passion for technical education, our students, and the careers they chose,” Stephens said. “It would tell the students that they were important, that they mattered, and it would legitimize technical education.”
Sed orci ex, rutrum vitae erat ac, feugiat pretium ipsum. Despite some pushback, Stephens transitioned the students from the open-entry/open-exit flexible education model to a cohort-based, structured learning model, becoming
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52 Southern Utah Business Magazine :: Summer 2022
