Monthly Archives: May 2021

May 2021 Advocate: Faculty Focus: Rod Daus-Magbual

Faculty Focus

Rod Daus-Magbual: Working for social justice in the classroom and community

by Eric Brenner, Advocate Editor

“Faculty Focus” is an occasional Advocate feature that highlights the unique work and accomplishments of our members.

Dr. Rod Daus-Magbual began teaching Filipino Studies in the Kababayan program at Skyline College in the Fall of 2004 and very quickly decided “This is where I want to be!” He had met Kababayan Program Coordinator, Liza Erpelo, at a Filipino-American education conference shortly before he started teaching his first Skyline classes and, as he continued to teach in the program, he and Liza worked together to build the Kababayan program. Before he started at Skyline, Rod was Director of Curriculum and Program at Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP), a service-learning program in which graduate and undergraduate students from San Francisco State (SFSU) and surrounding universities receive an opportunity to teach critical Filipina/x/o American studies and develop skills in the practice of culturally relevant & responsive pedagogy, lesson planning and teaching. PEP’s pedagogical orientation aligned well with the Kababayan program’s instructional focus on the Filipina/x/o and Filipina/x/o American cultural experience.

Building a Skyline to PEP to grad school “pipeline”

While Rod has continued to teach as an adjunct professor at Skyline, he has also continued to work at PEP, where he became Executive Director in 2018. With his PEP connections, Rod started recruiting Skyline students who were transferring to SFSU into the PEP program and, as he put it, “a really cool pipeline was happening.” Students would go through the Kababayan program at Skyline, then transfer to SFSU and teach in the PEP program, and then some would go to graduate school in Ethnic Studies or Counseling or other related programs. Some have even come back to work at Skyline.

Growing up in SoCal

Rod’s parents were part of the generation of the post 1965 Filipino immigration to the U.S. and he grew up in Southern California, first in Long Beach, which had a large Filipino community, and then Riverside for his middle and high school years, where he was one of the only Asian kids in a class of predominantly white students.  A lot of his political perspectives developed during that time as he experienced anti-Asian racism, listened to the hip-hop music of the time and watched the police beating of Rodney King, the acquittal of the four officers involved and the ensuing L.A. riots. He personally encountered harassment by police and other authorities and saw friends and relatives assaulted and incarcerated. At the same time, during high school Rod became part of a UC Riverside student outreach program called Asian Pacific Student Programs. In that program he started to learn about Filipino American history by reading books like Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and he began working in coalitions with other students of color organizations, in particular to campaign against the anti-immigrant Proposition 187.

Rod went on to UC Riverside for his undergraduate education, where he continued working with Filipino student organizations and was very politically active. After graduating in 2000, he worked with youth of color and first-generation college students in student support services such as an Upward Bound program. He and his wife, Arlene Daus-Magbual, then both decided to get their Masters in Asian American Studies at SF State and they moved to Daly City. At SFSU, Rod met Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, the founder of Pin@y Educational Partnerships, who recruited him to work in the PEP program while he completed his MA. In PEP, Rod learned to write curriculum, develop pedagogy and taught and mentored large numbers of working-class Filipino American high school students. That experience was a perfect preparation for him to become a teacher in the Kababayan program at Skyline.

From the classroom to Daly City politics

As Rod taught at Skyline and continued working with PEP, he saw many students struggling to afford to live and survive in the area as their families were forced to move to places like Stockton or Tracy or Sacramento, and he also heard the hardships of many undocumented students. Then, following the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, he began to think: “Everything that I’m about, I’ve got to take what I’m doing in my classroom, and take it outside these four walls, and change the narrative.” That’s when he decided to get involved in Daly City politics. He’d completed an Ed.D. program in organizational leadership with a minor in international multicultural education in 2010 and he was encouraged by longtime Daly City councilmember and PEP Board member, Ray Buenaventura, to become a member of the Daly City Library Commission and the city Planning Commission.

In 2018, Rod successfully ran for City Council, and many of his former students were part of his campaign. One central focus of Rod’s campaign was engaging communities of color, especially the FilAm community, to get them to vote despite their large population and low voter turnout. He thought: “If we’re trying to maintain communities of color that have been here for 20 plus years, what are we doing to keep them here?” He wanted to “find ways to provide more services for people that are having a hard time with rent, more affordable housing and teacher and staff housing.”

Since joining the Council, Rod is proud to have helped pass affordable housing developments such as teacher and staff housing for Jefferson Elementary School District and Jefferson Unified High School District. Rod has also worked to develop more culturally responsive programs in Daly City, especially those reflecting the Filipino community.  He has worked with the Filipino Mental Health Initiative to help them secure a multi-million dollar state grant to establish a Filipino youth center.

Political future?

Along with these successes, Rod has occasionally felt his leadership position has come into conflict with his personal values and he hasn’t decided whether he will run for City Council again in 2022. He explained that “I share a lot of progressive and radical beliefs with a lot of my constituents, and some people will look at me and say that ‘You teach ethnic studies, but you’re not about it’… And those are the things that kind of hurt.” But then he reflected on the positives of what he’s been able to do: “I feel like we’ve been able to actually change the discourse on City Council, that we can actually now talk about race. That means it’s okay to talk about culture, that we can talk about police. We can talk about affordable housing that’s actually getting projects in the pipeline and money invested and shovels in the ground, that it’s happening.”

Connecting his political work back to his work with his students, Rod commented that “It’s really cool to see students not only learn about the struggle and survival stories of their people, understanding that that traumatic history was part of their history, but also to be part of and taking part politically in organizations that are doing work to address that generational trauma. That’s really fantastic.”

Teaching as an adjunct at Skyline

When asked about his experiences working as an adjunct at Skyline College, Rod reflected, “I’m not gonna lie, being an adjunct for this long has definitely been tough, but then I also appreciate those [in the union] who are fighting for me when I can’t be present.” Despite the difficulties of working as an adjunct faculty member, Rod expressed very positive feelings about teaching at Skyline: “At Skyline, I feel appreciated, I feel loved. I feel like I’m in a community… I’ve felt this sense of connection to Skyline more than I have in other institutions… There’s something at Skyline that has kept me here. And it’s those relationships that I have with… all these people that I’ve kind of grown up with.”

That Skyline community hopes that Dr. Rod Daus-Magbual will continue as a Skyline faculty member as well as continue his advocacy efforts in the larger community for many years to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE TENTATIVE AGREEMENT BETWEEN AFT AND SMCCD

  • When will the contract go into effect?If we ratify (in our electronic ratification vote May 3rd through 6th), the Board will vote on approving the contract at their meeting on May 12th. If they approve it, it will immediately go into effect.
  • If we ratify, will negotiations begin on another contract soon?Yes, the current contract will expire June 30, 2022, so the idea would be to start working towards the next contract in the Fall by surveying faculty on their needs and priorities. We would then “sunshine” (publicly share) what we want to negotiate, then start negotiating late Fall 2021 or early Spring 2022.
  • What is the schedule for raises?2019-2020: 3.44%
    2020-2021: 5.68% (compounding with the previous year’s raise for a total of 9.32%)
    2021-2022: additional raise to be determined once the San Mateo County property tax assessment for Fiscal Year 2020-2021 is known.Adjunct instructional faculty will get an additional 4% for 2020-2021, plus the District will add $1.5 million to the adjunct instructional schedule in 2021-2022.
  • When will we know the percentage raise for all faculty for 2021-2022?We will know in the summer. The fiscal year ends at the end of June, and then it takes the District a couple of weeks to figure everything out. Our raise will be determined by a formula that uses the property tax assessment.
  • How will the pay scale and retro pay work?There will be retroactive pay going back to the beginning of 2019-2020.
  • Will there be interest on the back pay?
    Unfortunately, no, just the back pay itself.
  • What about overload? Is there also retro pay for that?Yes, for anything faculty have worked since the beginning of 2019-2020.
  • Will overload get the special raises for adjunct instructors? What about non-instructional adjuncts—will they get these raises?Overload and non-instructional adjuncts will get the raises all faculty get, but not the special raises for instructional adjuncts.
  • When will faculty first see the raises? What about the retro pay?The District has said that if we ratify the contract and they approve it at their meeting on May 12th, we will see the raises on May paychecks. We don’t know yet about the timing of the retro pay but will be in touch with faculty as soon as we have more information.
  • What about pensions and retroactive contributions?If 2019-2020 or 2020-2021 is one of the years used to calculate your benefit payment (either your highest year or one of your three highest, depending on how many years of service you have), the benefit amount will be recalculated based on the new, increased salary. District payroll reports pay changes to CalPERS and CalSTRS every month so they can recalculate.
  • What about health benefits? Are they going up?Yes. For full-time faculty, we are going to have a $50 increase to the per-month cap. This is a one-time increase.For part-time faculty, there will be an increase of $600 in the semesterly medical stipend each January 1st of the contract. So the stipend will be $2105 per semester effective Jan. 1, 2020; $2705 per semester effective Jan. 1, 2021; and $3305 per semester Jan. 1, 2022.
  • Are health benefits subject to retro pay as well?Yes. We are figuring out the logistics for retro pay for the part-timer medical reimbursement, since part-timers generally have to submit documentation that they’ve spent the money in order to get the reimbursement. We will be in touch with more details once we have them.
  • Is there going to be a new MOU that’s going to be in effect for the next academic year?Since the pandemic started, we’ve been negotiating an MOU for each new semester; we just surveyed membership around their needs for the Summer/Fall 2021 MOU and will be negotiating this soon.
  • I have heard there are going to be more steps and columns added to the adjunct instructional schedule. What about summer salary scales? Are there going to be new steps here?We don’t have separate salary schedules for summer—for full-timers, this would be the overload schedule, for adjuncts, the salary schedules are the same as in the fall and spring semesters. There will be new steps and columns starting in 2022-2023 only for instructional part-timers, so the first summer when instructional adjuncts will be paid on this new salary schedule will be Summer 2023.
  • What about the Discipline and Investigations article?This article sets forth a clear process and protections (like notification requirements) for faculty under investigation. In the past, we had no set process or protections, so faculty sometimes didn’t even know what they were being investigated or disciplined for, and the process was wholly up to the investigator. You can read more about the process and protections in Article 24 of the Tentative Agreement document.
  • Do we know anything about HOW they will implement the Workload pilot project for the fall? Or is that all TBD still?Because most of instruction will be remote in Fall 2021, we have pushed the first year of the two-year pilot back to 2022-2023.
  • Will the workload plan apply to part-timers?No, it’s for full-timers only. Our position is that part-timers shouldn’t do any work they don’t get paid for. Our hope, though, is that the workload plan might help us standardize part-time pay for committee and service work: as it is, part-time pay for service is often determined on a case-by-case basis.
  • When will the pilot points system be open for negotiation?In Spring 2024.
  • What happens if we don’t do all the points expected in the workload point program? Could we be fired or docked pay?If faculty are evaluated, that could go into the dean’s assessment of non-primary duties. However, at this point there are no clear consequences of what would happen if faculty don’t do enough points. The initial direction of the District was to take a very punitive approach, and we were able to push back and take that aspect out of the pilot program.
  • Are the points per semester or per year?Anything that extends the entire year, you do for the entire year to get the points. Anything that doesn’t take the entire year, you get the points for doing it as long as it lasts.
  • What about high-demand activities that don’t get points in the workload grid? Things like being principal investigator on a grant, or a counselor serving on the CRM task force?Other activities can be added or included if agreed upon by the faculty member and their dean, as we understand that not every service task will fit into the descriptions included in the points grid. If there isn’t agreement between a faculty member and their dean, there is a District-wide committee that can be appealed to.
  • What if you’re assigned some new duty in the middle of the year? Can extra points carry over?The pilot is only for two years, so if you do more points in the first year, you can bank them for the second year. Otherwise you can get paid for the actual hours spent on the excess points. Plans can also be adjusted mid-year—you could talk to your dean about deleting some other activities to offset the new, excess activities.
  • For counselors: what is the rule regarding whether meetings should be in prof time or out of prof time?Meetings part of the Professional Responsibilities Plan for the workload piece cannot be during prof time: the Professional Responsibilities Plan is meant to be something counselors complete beyond counseling time and prof time. Other meetings can be taken during prof time.
  • Is immunization and vaccination addressed? Or is the contract even the place to address that?There is nothing about vaccinations in our contract. That would be a topic for discussion for a future MOU.