Lenore Rodicio
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Lenore Rodicio
She describes the job ahead in the language of a builder, not a caretaker. Her theory of change starts inside individual colleges — opening doors wider, retaining students through that first fragile year, connecting credentials to jobs that pay a living wage — and scales outward.
“One of the things that most excited me about this role is this is an organization that has been building from the moment it first began a couple decades ago, through all the work my predecessor has done,” she says, adding that she is looking forward to “ensuring this spectacular network of colleges that are doing phenomenal work are learning from each other.”
Her first major task is building ATD's next strategic plan, and she wants it to describe an organization built for motion. “I want us to be dynamic,” she says. “I want us to be an organization that is ready to respond to change and that we are ahead of it.”
Much of her approach to the work is rooted in her experiences at Miami Dade College, where she spent 18 years, rising from part-time faculty member through department chair, dean, and vice provost to executive vice president and provost. When the presidency opened in 2019, a newly reshaped board of trustees rejected three of the four finalists and kept only Rodicio, though they ultimately chose an outside candidate.
But her path to MDC started in a household where higher education was treated as inevitable, despite how little of it the adults in it had actually gotten. Rodicio, the daughter of Cuban immigrants who came to Miami and went straight to work, said her parents were adamant she and her siblings would obtain college degrees. “Education's always been important in our family,” Rodicio says.
She enrolled at Barry University, a small liberal arts college in Miami, prepared to study pharmacy and take her grandparents up on their offer to buy her a one to run herself when she completed her schooling.
But faculty members had other ideas, pushing her toward research instead. She would go on to finish her bachelor’s degree in chemistry, not pharmacy, graduating on the same day as her father, who was inspired to enroll with his daughter while sitting with her in an advisor’s office.
“I still say I’m the first in my family to graduate from college, because I walked across the stage first,” she says, laughing at the “little bit of a competition” between she and her father.
She came to Miami Dade College almost by accident after receiving her doctorate from Louisiana State University, taking a part-time teaching position after her second child was born because it offered more time at home. She stayed 18 years and ascended to the highest academic post on campus.
“I fell in love with the students, the mission of the college,” she says — the range of people in a single classroom, and the experience of watching them “transform over the course of the semester.”
One of the earliest students she remembers is a young Haitan woman whom she first met when the young woman came to office hours fresh out of ESL coursework, wanting to confirm that she understood what was being asked of her and her language barrier would not be in the way of her ability to succeed in class.
“I’m always trying to show the students you can do this. It's not about a lack of talent,” she says of the many students she encountered at MDC. “You have talent, it's tapping into that talent and turning it on.”
“That is what I think community college is all about — turning on that light that they don't even know is in there.”
This story originally ran in The EDU Ledger's September 3, 2026 edition. Subscribe here for full access.
