AFT 1493 BOARD PRESENTATION

Does the District’s commitment to equity include the commitment to a fair contract for our faculty?

Comment to the SMCCD Board of Trustees

by Kolo Wamba, Skyline College Faculty Member,
January 27, 2021

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My name is Kolo Wamba.  I teach physics at Skyline College, and I am a newly elected Faculty Representative to the AFT 1493 Executive Committee at Skyline College.

To the esteemed members of the Board of Trustees, let me begin by expressing my pleasure at the sincere attention that you have decided to pay to the causes of anti-racism and equity in our district.  Clearly you understand, as we do, how institutional inequities lead only to inequitable learning outcomes, and you recognize that they must be stamped out wherever, whenever, and however they arise.  Indeed, as we have seen, the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis it has triggered, have only reinforced deep inequities that were already there, making the issue all the more urgent.

The only question, then, is whether the District’s commitment to equity includes the commitment to a fair contract for our faculty.  I’m talking about a contract with parity in part-time pay, and a meaningful health benefit for adjuncts.   Indeed, I would even say that these things are the absolute bare minimum we ought to be able to expect during a deadly global pandemic.

I happen to know the struggle faced by adjuncts in this district first-hand– I was one myself, barely a semester ago.  And while going full-time is certainly something to celebrate, it has been, for me, a bit of a hollow victory.  This is because the very inequities that I suffered as an adjunct continue to persist and continue to victimize most of my colleagues– adjuncts, who, I remind you, make up the majority of faculty in the District.

When I was an adjunct I earned at best about 70% of what an equivalent full-timer would get, and the meager health benefit I received was reimbursement of a modest fraction of my exorbitant insurance premiums.  This is still true of adjuncts in our district today.   Then there’s the fact that my very occupance of a FT position, in a small way, does help to perpetuate the deeply inequitable two-tiered system of faculty labor, which I and my colleagues, and anyone else who’s paying attention, simply abhor.

Our AFT negotiations team have provided you with a data packet  containing facts and figures that underscore the depth of the problem, and I won’t rehash them all here.  Instead, here is a quick rundown of what the figures show.

• SMCCCD Part-Time faculty salaries are significantly behind other Basic Aid districts and in the bottom half of all Bay 10 districts despite our high revenues
• SMCCCD is the only Bay 10 district that has NOT formally addressed Part-Time Parity
• SMCCCD does NOT pay PT faculty load-based salaries. SMCCCD continues to pay PT faculty by the hour.
• SMCCCD does NOT pay PT faculty on a mirrored salary schedule.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, let’s not forget that we are in the middle of a deadly global pandemic.   And yet somehow in our district substantial and meaningful health coverage is not guaranteed to ALL of its employees.  Let me reiterate this point.  My esteemed adjunct colleagues, who, I’ll say again, provide a solid majority of the instruction in this district, do not receive a meaningful health benefit for their work. When you consider that this is happening during a global pandemic, the likes of which we haven’t seen in over 100 years, it becomes apparent that the contract that our adjuncts are working under is arguably dangerous to their physical persons!

The good news is that we are now in a position to start addressing these issues with the Board, and our contract negotiations thankfully are back on track– we have 5 negotiations dates set and agreed upon that are coming up.  Part-time parity was, and still is, our priority in negotiations, because it is such a glaring manifestation of structural inequity in our district.

Thank you for your attention.

AFT 1493 BOARD PRESENTATION

Brief Comparison of SMCCD Administration and Faculty Salaries

Comment to the SMCCD Board of Trustees

by Shaun Perisho, Skyline College Faculty Member,
January 13, 2021

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In many ways, the SMCCD budget is an objective and empirical measure of its priorities. To that aim, I’d like to quickly summarize some trends in the budget over the last few years. The data will extend up to the 2019-2020 school year, which is the most recent year that much of that data was available for.

Starting with some good news.

SMCCCD revenues increased 83% between 2009 and 2019. This in part reflects our unique status as a basic aid district.

Furthermore, the district has consistently underestimated revenues and overestimated expenditures. In 2019, this amounted to a gap of over $36 million dollars between revenue and expenditures. That is, actual revenues exceeded expenditures by over $36 million dollars.

In short, the state of the SMCCD budget is healthy, especially in comparison to other districts in the state.

That health is reflected to some degree in the trajectory of our administrative salaries. Between 2012 and 2019, chancellor and vice chancellors’ salaries increased by an average of 90%

Unfortunately, this effect has failed to trickle down, as faculty salaries only increased by an average of 27.5% over the same period.

Additionally, classified and academic administrator salaries ranked 1^st in the Bay 10 between 2017 and 2019 while academic part-time salaries ranked between 7^th and 9^th over the same period. Actually, it’s worth noting that SMCCD administrators were not only first in the Bay 10, but first in the entire state over that period.

Below, you will find a table comparing part-time faculty compensation for a 3-unit class between SMCCD and nearby districts. This table illustrates the fact that SMCCD ranks particularly low in its pay for part-time faculty.

[See complete part-time faculty pay comparison chart for all Bay 10 districts]

I’ve tried to paint a very streamlined picture with the brief amount of time I have, but it’s important to note that the budget and salaries really are very complex and nuanced. These are difficult numbers to compare directly (part time, full time, admin). AFT would like to address these figures in more detail in a future agenda item.

In closing, faculty (both full-time and part-time) are the contact point between our district and the community. We are the faces students see when they come to class every day. However, these figures show that, objectively, faculty are not prioritized in a way that reflects the role they play in this district’s success and the success of our students.

ANTI-OPPRESSION COMMITTEE

AFT members share their classroom practices at Flex Day workshop to explore conditions for equitable teaching and learning

By Rika Yonemura-Fabian and Doniella Maher 

Over 100 faculty and staff members attended the Flex workshop organized by the Anti-Oppression Committee of the AFT on January 14. The workshop was organized with the aim of engaging faculty members in reflection and conversation about the connection between anti-oppression pedagogy and institutional conditions, including smaller class sizes. The breadth of unique programs across our district is inspiring. The workshop was a chance for faculty to come together to see work that is already being done and the possibilities of what anti-racist pedagogy and student support can look like in the classroom.

Jeramy Wallace, District Academic Senate President and CSM UMOJA instructor, shared a framework for thinking about anti-racist pedagogy in the classroom, and Anne Stafford and Teeka James from CSM Writing in the End Zone (WEZ), Liza Erpelo and Jayde Nieve from Kababayan Learning Community at Skyline College, and Michael Hoffman from the Math department at Cañada College presented successful classroom practices for equity. The presentations highlighted the common themes and principles of equitable teaching and learning that panelists have been practicing in various disciplines including anti-racist curriculum, humanization of the teacher-student relationship, active community building to create trust to allow students to feel connected through their common identity and history, targeted and frequent check-in, and the central role of student-centered learning. The workshop also featured a student presentation that shared a student perspective on class size and learning experiences based on the District-wide survey they conducted with 350 student responses. The students shared some key findings including that class size seems to have an impact on students’ sense of belonging to a class and their access to faculty.

Should faculty be included in the process to determine class size? We believe so. We are not proposing a one-size-fits-all solution to a pedagogically-sound class size.  However, right now, decisions about class size are made without faculty input on best practices. Many of the successful practices highlighted in the flex day session would be impossible to implement in a large sized class. It is also difficult to implement anti-racist curriculum, which requires a thoughtful approach to teaching and discussion of materials, in a larger class. We believe that faculty and departments should have a voice in determining the best pedagogical approaches to support equity in the classroom and to implement anti-racist pedagogy. The workshop inspired the attending faculty to think about how faculty input to our class caps could facilitate our ability to implement the pedagogy that we want to apply to increase success, retention, and completion for all students.

The Anti-Oppression Committee will continue the work on this issue with local Senates and AFT. If you are interested in getting involved, please email Doniella Maher at maher@aft1493.org or Rika Yonemura-Fabian at fabian@1493.org.

DISTRICT BUDGET

District’s continuing willful violation of the 50% law exposes unwillingness to prioritize funding for classroom instruction

By Eric Brenner, Advocate Editor

Our college district continues to brazenly violate the “50% law,” the California Education Code requirement that community college districts must spend at least 50% of their educational expenses on classroom instructors’ salaries. The purpose of the 50% law is to ensure that districts keep faculty salaries in line with the growth of district budgets, reduce class size, and rein in non-instructional costs, such as administration. SMCCD’s lack of compliance with the 50% requirement is not only completely unlawful, but it also points out the district’s failure to prioritize classroom instruction.

SMCCD first failed to comply with the law in 2015-16 when the percentage of its educational expenses spent on classroom instruction fell to 48.38%. SMCCD has been the only district in the state to not follow this law. Since 2015-16, our district has continued to fail to comply with the 50% law each year and has, in fact, significantly reduced its percentage of spending on classroom instruction each successive year, dropping to just 42.24% in 2018-19. The District then managed only a minimal increase in 2019-20 to 42.46%! (See chart below.)  The state Chancellor’s Office has continually called out our district for its failure to comply with this mandate.

To put this percentage in actual dollar figures, the district spent $12.2 million less on classroom instruction salaries in 2019 than was required to just meet the bare minimum of the 50% law.

While AFT 1493 has been raising the issue of the district’s violation of the 50% law since they first failed to meet the requirement in 2015-16, members of the Board of Trustees have only more recently expressed concerns about this situation.  In response, the district’s 2020-2021 Final Budget Report included a brief section titled: “Commitment to 50% Law Compliance.” This section states:

As a community-supported district experiencing declining enrollment while implementing various student-centered initiatives that fall on the non-instructional side of the equation, the District has struggled since 2015-16 to comply with spending at least 50% of its unrestricted general fund resources on the instructional side of the equation. Recognizing the Board of Trustees’ concern with the year-over-year declines and the importance of investments in full-time faculty, the 2020-21 Budget allocates $0.7 million in on-going funds to convert part-time faculty to full-time faculty as follows: four teaching faculty at Skyline College, three teaching faculty at the College of San Mateo, and three teaching faculty at Cañada College. The colleges will begin the process of prioritizing and filling these new full-time positions as soon as possible.

While AFT 1493 heartily supports the conversion of part-time faculty to full-time faculty, it is hypocritical of the district to highlight the allocation of $0.7 million to show their “commitment to 50% law compliance” when more than $12 million is required to minimally meet the standard.  The district’s statement also suggests that somehow being a community-supported district is an excuse for failing to meet the requirement to spend at least 50% of their general fund resources on classroom instruction. In fact, all other community-supported districts in the state have consistently complied with the 50% law. (See list below.)  Again, SMCCD is the only district in the state that has failed to comply with the 50% law requirement which equates to less money to hire full-time instructors and less money to increase all faculty salaries and achieve part-time parity!