Since May, 14 faculty have resigned from the Cape Fear Community College nursing department, representing an overall 52% attrition rate. Among the resignations were leaders of the college's Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN) program.
This includes the loss of Department Chair/ADN Program Director Brenda Holland, a nearly 30-year veteran, Associate Director ADN Paige Howard, a nearly 25-year veteran, 15-year nursing instructor and ADN Level Coordinator Heather Caldwell, and Practical Nursing Director Erin Ludlum.
CFCC disputes the overall resignation number, but didn’t include the actual number. Those who led the program confirmed it was 14 out of 25 full-time staff.
In particular, Holland's departure meant CFCC had to find someone qualified to fill the leadership position with just 10 days before she resigned on July 31. CFCC selected Karen Sharrah to take over the program. Had they not found someone qualified within that timeframe, the college would have violated North Carolina’s Board of Nursing requirements.
CFCC Senior Vice President Brandon Guthrie told WWAY that “no one was forced to leave Cape Fear Community College. Whenever you have resignations with higher-level leadership positions, sometimes with that comes speculation and fear that a program may not be able to continue the same level of excellence that it always has.”
This number of departures will further impact CFCC's already low employee retention. According to the North Carolina Community College System's latest data, CFCC ranks near the bottom of all 58 colleges in staff retention.
CFCC nursing is widely known in the community for being a reputable program — and a major training pipeline for future nurses in the Cape Fear region. In CFCC’s College Council minutes from May 2026, Mary Ellen Naylor, the Dean of Health and Human Services, touted the ADN program as having recently graduated the largest class to date with 85 students.
This leadership group of Holland, Howard, Caldwell, and Ludlum worked to get CFCC approved to teach up to a cohort of 360 associate degree nursing program students — the second-largest group of students behind Fayetteville Tech at 400. CFCC can essentially have four cohorts of students over a two-year span.
Consultant reviewed department before policy changes
The reason for the departures may trace back to the work of Robert Surles, who was contracted in the spring to look into how the CFCC nursing department was organized. Surles compiled a report looking for ways the department could be more efficient, claiming that the faculty utilization was just 50% of what it could be — a conclusion that some faculty strongly objected to.
Six current and former nursing faculty spoke to WHQR on condition of anonymity, citing concerns about retaliation from the college administration; CFCC has routinely denied engaging in any retaliatory behavior.
These employees provided records and background information — and argued Surles' report and subsequent changes in CFCC policy were one of the reasons for top staff’s departure.
CFCC paid Surles, who was previously a CFCC surgical technician instructor from 2009-2014, $15,050 over a year, moving from being paid $65 an hour to $160 an hour. The college said the $65 rate was for remote work; the $160 included his lodging accommodations and other “associated expenses for on-site work.”
WHQR requested any reports from Surles; the only thing produced by the college was a two-page bulleted list detailing findings and improvements the department could make. A CFCC spokesperson added that his scope of work included, “internal discussions and meetings,” but sent no documentation of these.
CFCC confirmed there were no formal requests for bids or no requests for proposals (RFP) or requests for qualifications (RFQ) for the work Surles was doing.
As for Surles’ business as a consultant, there was no current documentation on the North Carolina Secretary of State’s website. However, Robert E. Surles and Associates, Inc. was suspended in 2009 because of failing to report their returns. WHQR asked for his credentials; CFCC said he has a verified “federal identification number,” which didn’t answer the question of his expertise.
While CFCC relied on and paid Surles to help plan changes to the nursing program, the six current and former nursing employees who spoke to WHQR argued that, based on his recommendations, he didn't really understand how they did their jobs or how the department worked.
Not long after Surles completed his work, CFCC changed its policy on how many 'contact hours' — essentially face-to-face time with students — it would expect from instructors every week. For years, CFCC health science faculty had been doing 18 contact hours per week. The policy change increased the number of expected contact hours to 25 per week.
WHQR asked CFCC if Surles' work was responsible for the increase in expected contact hours; CFCC responded that there was "no change" in the overall workload expectation of 40 hours per week — but didn't address what portion of those 40 hours per week would be made up of contact hours. And, not long after he concluded his work, the college changed its expectations for instructors' 'contact hours' — essentially face-to-face time with students — and how they would assess them.
However, those who left saw it as a change, saying college leadership did not understand instructors were already working extended hours through labs, clinicals, test preparation, and other individualized teaching.
The college maintains these additional roles will now be accounted for in the 25 contact hours, but former and current staff who spoke to WHQR said this was not on the table when the new policy was announced.
According to data analysis provided to WHQR by a former member of CFCC’s nursing leadership, across the 42 community colleges with nursing programs in North Carolina, the vast majority reported that instructors worked between 18 and 22 contact hours; two reported 24 hours on average, and one reported between 18 and 25 hours. Notably, these hours can vary and are higher during weeks with clinicals — sometimes meaning a long day of clinical experience with instructor oversight.
Assessing nursing faculty workload
A 2022 study in the Journal of Clinical Simulation in Nursing noted that no industry-wide standard exists for nursing faculty workloads. However, looking at five different programs, the study found that “Assigning 25 contact hours to health sciences faculty exceeds equitable teaching load expectations when compared to 18 lecture-based contact hours. This discrepancy introduces significant risk related to faculty burnout, reduced instructional effectiveness, and potential noncompliance with accreditation expectations.”
To address this issue, institutions like Ohio State University recommend a weighted workload model that calculates clinical and laboratory instruction at 2-3 times the lecture equivalency.
Another way to show the already demanding nature of any nursing instructor is to look at the way credit hours are assessed. Tuition, which the NCCCS system sets, is charged based on credit hours.
For some classes, the number of credit hours roughly matches the time an instructor spends with students. For example, CFCC’s Psychology 241 Developmental Psychology class or English 111 Writing and Inquiry class both have three hours of class time and are worth three credit hours (although instructors do offer office hours).
By comparison, Nursing 111 — Introduction to Health Concepts — is eight credit hours for a semester. However, students are in class for four hours with faculty, who also spend an average of six hours in labs and another six hours in clinical study. So these instructors are already in front of students — not just in a classroom setting, but in a lab, test preparation, or clinical setting.
Surles’ report aims at boosting ‘efficiency’
In his report, Surles wrote that CFCC “already possesses the staffing resources necessary to support peak enrollment capacity of approximately 340 active ADN students under current regulatory requirements. This is not fundamentally a faculty shortage or student demand issue, but rather an opportunity to improve operational efficiency and instructional utilization.”
However, over the last few years, CFCC has struggled with recruiting and staffing — part of a broader industry-wide challenge.
Several years ago, CFCC was awarded a $10.1 million grant from The Endowment in 2023, as part of a healthcare worker pipeline project that also included UNCW and New Hanover County Schools. The grant was designed to boost the region's capacity to train more nurses. The last round of funding was released in July. (CFCC has received a total of $19.3 million in grants thus far; Endowment Board Chair Shannon Winslow is also now on CFCC’s Board of Trustees.)
In CFCC's report in 2024 to The Endowment, college officials wrote, “We have faced some challenges in recruiting qualified full-time nursing faculty. We hired one full-time faculty member and additional part-time clinical faculty; however, we have current full-time faculty working overload contracts to have sufficient faculty coverage for all clinical groups until we can hire the remaining faculty."
WHQR reported in 2022 that CFCC struggled to maintain highly qualified nursing faculty because of the salary differentials between working at the hospital and at CFCC. These problems were mentioned earlier in 2021; former practical nursing director Carolyn McCormick had already raised them and spoke about the alleged toxic work environment within the CFCC administration.
But now, Surles says it has enough faculty, but they’re not being “utiliz[ed]”. These six current and former employees took issue with the following finding from Surles’ report: Analysis identified that current full-time faculty instructional utilization is approximately 50%, creating opportunities for reassignment of instructional responsibilities and more efficient scheduling practices.
This meant, effectively, that they needed to teach extra hours beyond the 18—and didn’t consider things like clinicals and tutoring. Surles noted his recommendation of shifting from 18 to 25 contact hours would lead to "efficiencies," but acknowledged he didn’t have “additional information related to instructional hours — Open Skills Labs, Simulation, Remediation, and Test Prep.”
According to a college spokesperson, Surles’ analysis “compared the actual work schedules against the 25-hour standard and identified where scheduling fell below that standard. The college is leveraging this data to optimize course scheduling, and strategically plan for future program growth.”
When WHQR asked the college how Surles came up with this analysis, they responded that he used a “standard analytical formula that evaluated official department scheduling data against our workload benchmark of 25 contact hours.” They didn’t provide the formula showing how he achieved his results.
Recommendations include reducing inefficiencies associated with the current “team teaching” structure and exploring more consistent classroom, lab, and clinical faculty assignments to improve continuity for students and maximize faculty capacity.
An employee who spoke to WHQR attested to the importance of team teaching. For example, one instructor can stand in front of the class to demonstrate how to hang an IV while the other instructor stands by a group of five beds, with two students each, ensuring they hang it correctly.
Aside from Surles' “operational findings,” he wrote that the “program continues to demonstrate exceptional student outcomes.”
Endowment nursing grant coming to a close – what comes next?
The CFCC nursing staff who left are confused about why Surles was called in to produce this report; some think it’s because The Endowment grant money was coming to an end this year – and that Surles had to make the argument that they had enough staff to instruct CFCC students, with the additional claim that those who were already employed could take on more work.
Some staff in the department said The Endowment grant was mainly for new hiring, but were then told to code all part-time nursing instructors under the grant. In essence, staff felt the grant was being used to fund what the college was already supposed to fund, instead of supporting the additional capacity the grant was meant to create.
CFCC didn’t respond to questions about how Endowment funding was being used. But emails acquired by WHQR indicated that, at least in some cases, the grant was being broadly applied to all part-time staff, not just new staff hired to increase capacity.
In an email exchange between HHS Dean Mary Ellen Naylor and former CFCC department chair and program director Brenda Holland in September 2025, Holland confirms with Naylor that all part-time workers in the department can be coded under The Endowment grant, even though the grant was supposed to be used for new hires.
Holland wrote, “I thought we were only supposed to use the grant for additional PT [part-time] faculty, but you’re saying now to use it for all PT faculty even if they are replacing someone here before the grant, right?”
Naylor responded, “Yes. I met with the Foundation Office and Christina Greene [CFO] this afternoon. Since the PT can change more frequently, for now it would be easier to code them all the same.”
Staff of The Endowment have reiterated that non-profit should not replace government funding but supplement it.
