MIDDLETOWN, N.Y. — SUNY Orange has been named the winner of the coveted 2026 national Bellwether Award in “Instructional Programs and Services” in recognition of its work in redesigning math placement and pathways as a method to generate academic momentum for students.

The award was announced Tuesday (Feb. 24) at the 2026 Community College Futures Assembly in San Antonio, Texas. With a focus on cutting-edge, trendsetting programs worthy of replication, the prestigious Bellwether Award highlights scalable practices and elevates colleges whose work is shaping the future of community college education nationwide. SUNY Orange was among 10 finalists competing for the award in the Instructional Programs and Services category, and was the lone SUNY community college represented among the 30 finalists across the three Bellwether Award categories.

The winning SUNY Orange presentation team included President Dr. Kristine Young, along with Dr. Erika Hackman, provost; Dr. Josh Lavorgna, academic associate vice president for business, math, science and technology programs; Kaitlin Curry, professor and math department chair; Donna Avery, professor and assistant math department chair; and Dr. Christine Leroux, professor and past math department chair.

The team successfully detailed how SUNY Orange reconfigured its math placement process and revamped its developmental math course sequence, generating positive student outcomes that were sustained across multiple cohorts, and demonstrated durable and sustainable reform.

Read about the project and results here.

For many community colleges, the process for placing students into appropriate math courses has long held direct implications for persistence, completion and equity. Thus, improving placement processes is crucial to overall student success. At SUNY Orange, like many of its peers, a reliance on standardized placement testing resulted in widespread misplacement and disproportionate assignment of Black and Hispanic students to lengthy developmental mathematics sequences. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and intensified those imbalances, creating an urgent need for a more accessible and equitable approach to placement.

In response, the College developed a guided self-placement survey through collaboration between the math department, advising staff, and academic leadership. Recognizing that placement reform required corresponding curricular changes to be effective, SUNY Orange redesigned its developmental math program with an integrated approach that aligned placement with curriculum to support student progress. What began as an emergency measure evolved into a comprehensive placement reform that has become the College’s ongoing model.

Results have demonstrated that the proportion of students placed at the lowest developmental course level have decreased, while enrollment in gateway and general education mathematics courses increased. Pass rates in gateway courses remained stable or improved, even as more students bypassed developmental coursework and moved directly into credit-bearing math courses. Significantly, equity gaps also narrowed: students from historically underrepresented backgrounds enrolled in and succeeded in gateway mathematics at higher rates than under the previous system. 

SUNY Orange President Dr. Kristine Young: “I’m tremendously proud of our presentation team, along with everyone at the College who had a hand in our developmental math redesign. This effort has generated student momentum that is both powerful and promising, built from pioneering work that has resulted in dramatic and positive results. We saw some amazing presentations from our fellow finalists in San Antonio and we learned a great deal from our colleagues that we’ll bring back to SUNY Orange. It was tremendously rewarding as a College president to hear that work at our institution rose to the top and was deemed worthy of the Bellwether Award, but more importantly it validates the student-first, retention-centered culture that SUNY Orange has long embraced.”

SUNY Orange Provost Dr. Erika Hackman: “There are so many people at SUNY Orange who can claim a part of this award. We all can take pride in having played a role in helping the College win it. In any project of this size and scope, with its impact upon the curriculum, faculty leadership is essential. I want to especially credit Josh, Kaitlin, Christine and Donna for helping us present our project and its results in San Antonio. But our entire math faculty was involved in this project, and we received tremendous collaboration across the College, including from academic department chairs, advising, registrar, admissions, information technology and institutional research. This was a total College effort that led us to create a model that improves accuracy, supports student persistence and advances equity in the math pathways. It is humbling to think that our student-centered work has been recognized as worthy of a Bellwether Award and that it may be replicated by colleagues across the country.”

Photo caption: SUNY Orange was represented by, from left, Dr. Josh Lavorgna, academic associate vice president for business, math, science and technology programs; Kaitlin Curry, professor and math department chair; Donna Avery, professor and assistant math department chair; and Dr. Christine Leroux, professor and past math department chair.