Shown is the group of SUNY Orange faculty and administrators who accepted the 2026 New York Community College Trustees' Community College Innovation Award.

SARATOGA, N.Y. – The New York Community College Trustees (NYCCT) celebrated SUNY Orange’s work in reforming its math placement process, along with its developmental math curriculum, by presenting the College with the organization’s 2026 Community College Innovation Award on Friday evening, Sept. 18, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Tom Weddell, chair of the SUNY Orange Board of Trustees accepted the award on the College’s behalf during NYCCT’s annual conference and awards ceremony. NYCCT’s Innovation award is given to a community college within New York State that has introduced a unique idea, project, process or procedure that the college’s Board of Trustees has approved and supported, which has resulted in significant improvements in student success.

The work recognized by NYCCT on Friday was the same groundbreaking work that earned SUNY Orange the coveted national 2026 Bellwether Award in the category of “Instructional Programs and Services” this past February. With a focus on cutting-edge, trend-setting 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 has 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.

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. 

For more information about SUNY Orange and its academic programs, visit www.sunyorange.edu, or contact the Admissions Office by calling (845) 341-4030) or emailing apply@sunyorange.edu.