Stark State College President Para Jones will retire in 2027. Her 14-year tenure includes opening its Akron campus.
Standing in her office on a bright spring morning, Stark State College President Para Jones said her coming to work in community colleges was, in part, for her own convenience.
It was the late 1980s and, at the time, she held a marketing position with Goodyear Aerospace Corp., a jetsetting role that took her across the country — but left her with a difficult schedule to balance while raising twin boys.
She figured a vacant marketing position at Stark State College would save her from jetlag for a couple years before she moved on to another company.
Fast-forward to this spring. She announced her retirement as president of the Stark County-based community college after two tenures and 22 years, including the last 14 years at its helm.
“I just kept going because I realized this is really where I belong,” Jones said. “This really brings together my deep appreciation for education, my love of education, and then the way education aligns perfectly with in-demand jobs and the needs of our employers.”
Canton native looks to stay involved
Jones, a Canton native, spent years in various roles at Stark State — starting with the marketing position she took in the 1980s — until she left in 2009 to serve as president of South Carolina’s Spartanburg Community College.
In 2012, after three years in South Carolina, she returned to Stark State to serve as its president.
It was a chance to come home, she said.
“I could work forever — as I tell my board — but as we all know, life doesn’t always give us forever,” she said. “We have children, grandchildren, we want to spend more time traveling, so this gives me the opportunity to do that after a long, long career.”
Jones plans to stay involved, she said, including serving on one of the college’s advisory committees.
Stark State’s expansion into Akron a point of pride
Since her homecoming, Jones has expanded Stark State’s footprint into neighboring Summit County with the opening of its Akron campus in 2018.
Sixty years after the college was chartered to serve Stark County, the sprawling campus along state Route 8 opened to provide better access to the schools’ Akron-based students, she said.
“I know this region, I know this community, I know our students, and I knew for years our students from Akron were asking us to open a campus in Akron so they would have easier access,” Jones said. “That was one of the things I was able to do — for me, that’s a very proud thing to do because it’s more access to more students and a community … that didn’t have its own community college.”
That Akron campus has helped strengthen ties between Stark State and the City of Akron, Jones said, with city employees able to take classes at the community college through a tuition-in-lieu-of-lease agreement between Stark State and the city. Stark State provides 225 credit hours of course work — or just under $30,000 worth of classes — to city employees and their families in lieu of land lease payments for part of the Akron campus, which will be paid off by 2035.
The agreement is the same as one established through a Joint Economic Development District on Picton Parkway for the college’s Commercial Driver’s License program. The college paid off that land lease in 2025 after seven years of tuition-in-lieu payments.
Community colleges look to bridge gap between graduates, employers
Community colleges fill a unique role in education — offering students a mix of general education courses to transfer to four-year universities, two-year degrees or certifications, and trade programs that can lead to in-demand jobs.
Elaine Russell Reolfi, Stark State’s Board of Trustees chair, said the college’s commencement ceremony encapsulates all of those varying pathways: the high schooler earning their associate’s degree through an early college program, the mom walking across the stage to earn a nursing degree while her children cheer for her in the audience.
“Dr. Jones has built a really strong team of faculty and staff who are all focused on both student success and the workforce needs, and that connects people to great jobs that can change their life,” Russell Reolfi said. “[Graduates receive] relevant degrees that meet the employer needs, and they’re earned without going into debt. It offers economic mobility, and it changes lives.”
Stark State, like many community colleges in Northeast Ohio, has focused on workforce demands to help steer some programming, including its manufacturing, automation, HVAC and AI-integrated fields, Jones said.
Successor will be picking a college — and a community
Looking toward retirement, the feeling is bittersweet, Jones said — there are always projects left unfinished, partnerships in their infancy, relationships in the works.
Jones leaves behind a foundation for the next president to build on, Russell Reolfi said, with hopes that the next leader will build on the growth Jones started and value the opportunities Stark State College can bring to the community, students and employers it serves.
“When a president picks a college to apply to, they are really picking a community,” Jones said. “What we do, we do in a community.”
