The sudden and unceremonious departure of Lisa Rhine from the presidency of Yavapai College ends a tenure marked by tumult and disregard for a third of her tax base in the Verde Valley — a tenure ultimately and unfortunately indistinguishable from that of her predecessor, Penelope “Penny” Wills.
Wills began her tenure as president of Yavapai College on Aug. 1, 2011, after serving as president of Northeast Iowa Community College. Over her tenure, enrollment fell in no small part due to her decisions to pull programs from the Verde Valley campus in Clarkdale and the Sedona Center on the edge of town. The college invested more in online classes to compensate for the drop in physical enrollment and the risk to its finances. While online classes offer taxpayers more opportunities to take community college courses from home, saving on travel expenses and time on the road and in classrooms, many courses require a physical presence — chemistry and physics, which need an on-site lab; most culinary classes, which need a kitchen; and medical and dental classes, which need a patient or human volunteer.
To take classes like these, many Verde Valley students could no longer head to Clarkdale, but had to drive over or around Mingus Mountain to reach Wills’ favored campuses in Prescott and Prescott Valley.
Notably, her office cut funding to the esteemed Zaki Gordon Institute of Independent Filmmaking, a Sedona campus-based program that, for many Sedona residents, was both a fun and entrepreneurial program that launched many into careers in television, film and even commercial video work.
Administrative staff and professors in Clarkdale and Sedona lamented the college’s cuts, complaining privately and sometimes publicly about hardships that left their students out in the cold, taxpayers shortchanged and Sedona and the Verde Valley ignored.
Wills retired as Yavapai College’s president in 2018, and the board hired Rhine in 2019. Rhine had previously led colleges in Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia.
While ZGI was long gone, Rhine opened a Skilled Trades Center in Clarkdale, offering students a free first semester.
Wills had opened a culinary school at the Sedona Center in 2016, promising to work with Sedona-area restaurants to train students in the finer points of culinary arts. But the college never fully invested in the program and many of Sedona’s supposed industry partners felt the school was little more than lip service to taxpayers, without a real effort to build partnerships that would train residents for full-time careers. In 2025, like most things with Wills and Rhine, the college announced that the school was closing and “relocating the academic culinary program to the Prescott campus for the fall term.”
Governing Board District 1 member Bill Kiel, who represents Prescott, and District 3 member Toby Payne, who represents Sedona, Cottonwood, Cornville and Camp Verde, both told our newspapers that they were blindsided by the unilateral decision, which was never discussed by the Governing Board. Some $5 million in taxpayer money was spent to create the culinary kitchens, which will now go unused or be cannibalized for the Prescott program — a literal transfer of Verde Valley tax dollars to benefit Prescott. The person the college assigned to answer questions refused to respond, though one of the associate vice presidents finally claimed enrollment was weak — an assertion undercut by the admission, in the same breath, that 1,279 students had taken classes, averaging 255 students a year, not bad numbers for a small, niche program.
Rhine’s downfall came more swiftly than Wills’, who had the support of domineering 20-year board member Ray Sigafoos — that is, until Kiel defeated Sigafoos at the ballot box in 2024. Sigafoos’ torch-bearer and sycophant, board member Deb McCasland, lacked his charisma, lost control of her petty fiefdom and was finally pushed out of the board chair. McCasland and Rhine tried numerous legal tricks to hold on, but they lacked the votes and their schemes backfired spectacularly. Rhine was placed on paid leave. It was only a matter of time until she was pushed out or resigned.
Rhine technically did neither. Instead, she was hired by a smaller college in Coolidge, apparently by a board inexplicably unaware of her record here. The board considered the announcement of her hiring a de facto resignation letter and canceled her contract.
Since Rhine left, we have happily begun receiving press releases and college announcements again, ending a years-long media blackout of Verde Valley news outlets. The new interim president, Doug Berry, has already scheduled an in-person meeting with our news team. We look forward to a new relationship with the college that will benefit all our readers and taxpayers.
The Verde Valley provides roughly a third of the county’s community college revenues. We don’t ask for perks or special treatment, just a fair return on our tax dollars to build a stronger community.
