Faculty salaries

AFT 1493 calls for re-opening of negotiations on 2021-22 raise for district faculty

In light of the very minimal 2021-22 raise that district faculty are currently receiving, AFT 1493 has called on the Board and the District to re-open negotiations on this year’s salary increase. While the salary formula in the current contract provides for a very inadequate 0.52% raise for this year, the district’s budget could clearly provide a more reasonable raise.  Click here to watch AFT 1493 Co-Vice President and Chief Negotiator Joaquin Rivera as he spoke during public comments at the October 13th Board of Trustees meeting, asking the Board members to support the re-opening of negotiations on this year’s faculty salary increase.

Watch AFT 1493 Co-Vice President and Chief Negotiator Joaquin Rivera as
he spoke during public comments at the Oct. 13th Board of Trustees meeting

CSEA and AFSCME also called for the district to reopen negotiations on the 2021-22 salary increase

The presidents of both of the district’s other two unions–Annette Perot of CSEA (classified employees) and Joseph Puckett of AFSCME (buildings and grounds employees) — also spoke in support of the re-opening of negotiations for their respective unions’ 2021-22 salary increases.

• Click here to watch CSEA Chapter 33 President Annette Perot as she calls on Board to support reopening of negotiations on 2021-22 raise for district classified employees.
• Click here to watch AFSCME Chapter President Joseph Puckett as he calls on Board to support reopening of negotiations on 2021-22 raise for district buildings and grounds employees.

Faculty Focus

Meet Sarah Harmon, Cañada Spanish professor, OER supporter and long-time advocate for the rights of adjunct faculty

Interview by Marianne Kaletzky, AFT 1493 Executive Secretary

Sarah Harmon has taught Spanish in the district–mostly at Cañada College–since 2005.  As one of our many long-time adjunct professors, we wanted to give her a chance to share some of her experiences, accomplishments and ideas to provide one example of the many highly committed and talented part-time faculty members dedicated to giving our students the highest quality education.

Tell us about the path you took to your current role. What led you to become a professor of Spanish and Linguistics?

The short version is that I’ve been fascinated by languages since I was a tot—growing up in a multilingual family (English and Italian) and a multilingual neighborhood, not to mention hearing several dialects of English all around me. I was analyzing all of this in my head well before I had ever taken a linguistics course 😊 As for the teaching side, I started tutoring my friends in Spanish while still in high school, and it all just stuck. I ended up focusing on historical Romance linguistics and theories of language change, which I still dabble in to this day.

How long have you been in our District, and do you teach or work outside the District?

I first started teaching in Fall 2005, at Skyline. I’ve been at Cañada since Fall 2006. (I’ve also taught courses at times at CSM.)

Currently, I do teach the Spanish language labs at West Valley College in Saratoga, which I’ve done for a couple of years now. Before that, I was also teaching at CCSF.

What were you doing before you worked at Cañada?

Skyline! I think I had a couple of odd jobs, too, mostly in retail and contract work doing translations and technical writing/editing; I started doing that work in college, and it was my side gig for years. Also at that time, I was finishing my dissertation.

What influenced you to get involved with Open Educational Resources and Zero Textbook Cost? What advances have you seen in these areas during the time you’ve been involved with them? What do you think would allow more instructors to implement OER and ZTC?

It’s a bit of a long story, but the shorter version is that it’s been an issue for me since college; a good chunk of my student debt for my bachelor’s degree was on course materials. While I was studying and teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 2000s, they were piloting projects that incorporated open-source sites for language learning. This work, particularly that of Orlando Kelm in Spanish and Portuguese and Carl Blyth in French led to the founding of the Center for Open Educational Resources for Language Learning (COERLL). I’ve been associated with them ever since, mostly as a reviewer and a tester of products.

To say that the OER/ZTC (Zero Textbook Cost) realm has grown since then is an understatement. Even as few as 8 years ago, there weren’t many places to go, and the resources for most disciplines were paltry. The big change happened about 6 years ago; there were several projects that got major funding—OpenStax, Pressbooks, LibreTexts, MERLOT, OER Commons, among others at the collegiate level. That funding led to more projects, better projects, and more collaboration.

It is that combination—funding, time, and collaboration—that we know works in helping faculty to consider, and then switch to, using a variety of open resources and other zero-cost solutions. Faculty need the time to evaluate what is out there, to consider options, and even to remix and author their own projects. This takes compensated time off to do this—it’s no coincidence that the most successful programs offer these incentives and support to faculty who want to make the switch. It also takes a support team to encourage good pedagogy, incorporating the materials into the LMS, and ensuring that everything is accessible to all students. The truth is, open-source materials and zero cost solutions allow faculty to exercise their academic freedom in so many ways, but it all needs to be supported.

What, for you, are the best aspects of your current role at Cañada? What would you most like to see improved?

No question, the best aspects are that I work with the best students, helping them to achieve any and all of their goals. Just below that is that the level of collegiality, both at Cañada and across the district, is epic; I truly relish opportunities to work with my colleagues, so that we can achieve our goals and much more.

What I would like to be improved is the number of opportunities to move up for adjunct faculty. So many of us have been working in SMCCCD for 10 years or more—with good evaluations, with both interest and experience in participatory governance and other areas of service on the campus. Yet there are precious few opportunities for us to gain full-time employment with full benefits. That has to change; not just here, but throughout the academy.

How have you been involved with the AFT union?

Mostly, I’ve been willing to lend a hand in speaking my truth—I’ve made statements at Board meetings and at other gatherings. I’ve attended a few meetings, and worked with various union leaders to inform them on some of the positions that have gone through governance. (My schedule usually keeps me from being able to regularly attend meetings or other activities.)

Are there particular gains you think are valuable for adjuncts in our most recent AFT contract?

No question, that pay raise was huge for us! To be able to finally have step-and-column pay rates, that makes it much more equitable. Additionally, the compensation for Flex Time/Days, regardless of when we are teaching, is an impactful one; this will encourage more adjuncts to come to our Flex Days and participate. Overall, adjunct faculty did get some major concessions… thanks!

There’s a lot of discussion about where faculty labor unions should try to go from here—“here” being a situation in which the majority of higher ed faculty are employed in precarious positions with little guarantee of a continuing assignment. Some people talk about building power to pressure administrators to convert all existing adjunct lines into tenure lines. But we also know some adjuncts are adjuncts by choice, or because they feel shut out of the tenure-track system, or due to some other factor in their lives. What’s your vision of the future we should work to achieve, and how do you think we can get there?

In some ways I touched on it above, but ideally it would be to stop pretending that a 2-tier system of full-time/tenure(track) and adjunct/part-time works. It doesn’t. While for some folks it can work, especially if they see this as their side gig, the reality is that for the last 50 years (at least) the balance of FT/PT has been off—not just at community colleges, but throughout academia. Not just the number of hires of FT non-contingent faculty, but getting more representation of all areas—various ethnicities and other identities. We have to be better. We must be more inclusive, more representative of our communities.

We can get there by rethinking our hiring practices—from how a screening committee is put together to how we gather information from prospective candidates to how interviews are conducted. But we can also get there by rethinking our positions in the first place—viewing potential areas of growth and then hiring for those areas. We need to mentor our adjuncts, encouraging them to apply, and then further mentoring them to ensure that they take to their new roles and shine. We need to hire more full-time faculty—our students need us—and since we have more non-teaching duties to perform than ever before, it becomes clear that you need to have more full-time faculty in order to cover everything—both in the classroom and outside of it.

There is more…but my answer is already lengthy!

Tell us a bit more about your life outside teaching. When you have free time, how do you like to spend it?

I spend my free time…working! (I don’t exactly like having much ‘lazy down time’, but I do take it!) I have a YouTube channel (on hiatus right now, but coming back soon!) where I do explainer videos on various aspects of Spanish grammar and Romance linguistics. That’s on hiatus right now…because I’m working with a group of fellow Spanish professors from other California community colleges, writing an OER textbook for Spanish for Medical Professions. 🤪

Ok, it’s not all work. I cook like a fiend (as many folks around here know!), and I love cooking and baking for loved ones. Lately I’ve been working on some new recipes that are based off of our family traditions (my Northern Italian heritage, my husband’s Japanese heritage). I’m also including my young nephews (aged 8+ and 6) into this, as they both love to cook. In the mornings, I’m usually off on a walk along the Los Gatos Creek Trail (I live in SW San José), although I’m very eagerly awaiting the availability of the new Cañada pool! Oh, and photography; my husband was a photographer for many years (hobby-professional), and he’s been teaching me the basics of photography. If you catch me on Zoom, the backgrounds that you see behind me are all my latest work—a new one for each month.

Finally, what’s a fact not many people in the District know about you?

Oof…I’m such an open book…I don’t know!

Maybe that I had a number of major milestones in the CSM parking lots—I grew up down the hill from CSM, right behind the Crystal Springs Shopping Center. (I remember when Dianda’s and Rainbow Pizza went in there, …so much has changed!) My dad brought me up there to practice riding a bike in the parking lots…and then to roller skate in the parking lots…and then swimming in the pool (that may have been more my mom doing that one)…and then driving in the parking lots and the campus roads. I’m a ‘Sammateyan’!

If you would like to suggest a faculty member for us to interview and feature in an upcoming issue of The Advocate, please contact Eric Brenner, Advocate Editor, (brenner@aft1493.org) or Katharine Harer (harer@aft1493.org.)

Disability Awareness

Personal reflections on vision impairment, teaching & accessibility in SMCCCD

by Lori Slicton, AFT 1493 ADA subcommittee member & AFT 1493 Skyline College Health, Safety and Emergency Preparedness Committee (HSEPC) Rep.

October is National Employment Disability Awareness Month. The following is a reflection on some of my challenges with vision impairment, teaching and accessibility at Skyline College.

Tears streamed down my face—but I wasn’t crying. With my right eye squeezed tight, I dragged my thumb across each letter on my computer screen. Unflinchingly, CurricuNet stared me down. The glare from the Enrollment Data Sheets floated on the computer screen in dark clouds. I blinked and blinked as though blinded by a camera flash. Why can’t I read these words? Am I so tired? Am I sick?

It was 2015 and I was working on Comprehensive Program Review (CPR.) Anthropology is a single person department and I, as always, was doing it on my own. It took everything I had and then some, to prepare CPR data on time and for the traditional presentation at Skyline College.

On the day of the presentation, Anthropology was up first. I was asked to set up for my presentation. I remember the President, Vice President, Deans and others look at me with surprise and disappointment when I said, “I don’t have Powerpoint slides to show you.  I’m going to need to do this ‘old school’.” The President and VP both looked at me and shook their heads. My heart sunk. I was nauseous and wanted to bolt out the door. I pulled it together, but not enough to do the presentation in a way the Anthropology program deserved. This experience was humiliating and remains with me today.

The following day on campus I was approached by faculty who I barely knew and who expressed regret that I had been “treated that way” by the President and VP. One person said they needed to “give me a hug after what happened.” Still other faculty had heard about it from others in attendance and offered their support. (Thank you colleagues!)

A challenging diagnosis

Fast forward: I was diagnosed with a rare, untreatable vision impairment. My doctor referred me to the Department of Rehabilitation (DOR) where I was assigned a counselor in Blind Field Services. The DOR promptly had workplace assessments scheduled and adaptive technology ordered. I needed training –and need more! Normally, the DOR makes recommendations for accommodations and the employer is to provide what’s necessary under the ADA. Our HR took nearly a full academic year to order some of the equipment necessary for my office. It took another four years (2015-2019) for HR to adapt my office ergonomically to make it accessible.

Eye disease affects millions of people. But describing vision loss is difficult. The photos above compare normal vision with one type of vision impairment (age-related macular degeneration) that is different from my condition. Click here to view examples of how different types of vision impairments impact vision.

Adaptive technology has made ordinary tasks possible and enjoyable—student papers can be read to me. I can listen to journal articles and review new texts. However, forms and programs remain a source of deep frustration.  I, like many people with vision impairment, memorize forms. Grades of Incomplete, Grade Change, Book Orders. Forms need to be updated but many changes are not an improvement—just different. CurricuNet, SPOL, Annual Program Plan (APP), Enrollment Data all take inaccessibility to a new level. We all work hard on these forms as they are required for our programs. Now that my vision is impaired, they take a phenomenal amount of time or are completely impossible. The APP program is inaccessible. So, with a dean’s approval and a colleague’s support, we created an alternative that would contain comparable information. There is no record of the Anthropology APP’s on the college website.

Next year, the Anthropology department is scheduled for CPR. My vision is worse and Curricunet remains the same. The Enrollment Data Sheets are brighter and there are many more of them. Despite feedback that these forms/programs are inaccessible, there have been no improvements for visually impaired employees.

A possible solution: More accessible forms

VPAT, Voluntary Product Accessibility Template may be a solution to some of these problems.

At its core, a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a template used by the US Federal and state governments and other entities as an assessment tool to evaluate how well digital content conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Section 508 requirements.

Section 508 is an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits the Federal government office or vendor of the Federal government from discriminating on the basis of a disability. Digital product buyers inside and outside of government rely on these statements to “buy accessible.” A growing number of buyers consider accessibility an important factor in choosing a vendor. (Excerpeted from TGPi, a Vispero Company working for Accessibility for the Vision Impaired)

I’m optimistic. My experiences with Canvas Training, the CTTL and my peer mentor have been consistently been positive and constructive. When something is identified in Canvas as inaccessible, Canvas and the CTTL colleagues have been responsive. My peer mentor assists me with changes in the technology and identifying work-arounds when possible. Teaching online during Covid-19 has been a positive and supportive experience. It’s more comfortable and accommodating around my vision and ADA needs.

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution

The excellent documentary film, Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, is freely available to view here. This 2020 documentary has historic roots in the Bay Area and includes local activists, the longest sit-in, Black Panthers, the founding of the Center for Independent Living, and more. It also includes information on landmark legislation such as section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the ADA, which are critical to employee accommodations in the workplace.

Quotes from Crip Camp

“The ADA was a wonderful achievement. But it was only the tip of the iceberg. You can pass a law but until you can change society’s attitudes, that law won’t mean much.” – Denise Sherer Jacobson

If I have to feel thankful about an accessible bathroom, when am I ever gonna be equal in the community?” – Judith Huemann

AFT 1493: Building a foundation of advocacy and action around the ADA!

In recognition of National Employment Disability Awareness month, AFT 1493 would like to highlight a few of its accomplishments in 2020/2021.

• Disability/ADA subcommittee to AFT 1493 to better identify and address faculty needs around accessibility and the ADA
• Disability Issues and Accommodations faculty resource page on the AFT 1493 website. The page includes links for employee rights, information on requesting reasonable accommodations and the interactive process, among others
• Direct faculty support in acquiring accommodations under the ADA.
• Focused support and advocacy around Covid-19 and faculty needs for accommodations

We are here for you! If you need assistance with an issue related to accessibility and or disability, please contact Marianne Kaletzky, AFT 1493 Executive Secretary, at: kaletzky@aft1493.org or Lori Slicton, AFT 1493 ADA Subcommittee member and AFT 1493 Skyline College Health, Safety and Emergency Preparedness Committee (HSEPC) Representative, at: slicton@smccd.edu

– Lori Slicton

Evaluation of administrators

AFT presents results of faculty evaluations of administrators and continues to call for true “360 evaluations” of administrators

by Marianne Kaletzky, AFT 1493 Executive Secretary

This past spring, AFT 1493 launched an online survey to allow all faculty to evaluate the administrators they work with. As many faculty know too well, the current protocols for “360 evaluation” of administrators only allow a few, handpicked faculty and staff members to evaluate each administrator. Moreover, these “360 evaluations” are not anonymous, so faculty may refuse to participate due to fear of retaliation.

Faculty’s overall evaluation of deans’ effectiveness by college Cañada College CSM Skyline College Evaluations by 320 faculty polled by AFT 1493 in Spring-Summer 2021

All faculty and staff should be able to anonymously evaluate their administrators

As a union, our position is that all faculty and staff should have the opportunity to evaluate their administrators—just as all students have the opportunity to evaluate faculty. Since the District has not instituted a true 360 evaluation process, we created one. On May 11, 2021, all faculty were sent a unique link allowing them to evaluate their dean, a college VP, their college President, and Chancellor Claire. Several reminders were subsequently sent. Ultimately, out of 926 invitees, 320 faculty participated in our evaluation process. Moving forward, AFT plans to present the data to Chancellor Claire so that he and his cabinet can share it with individual administrators. We will also request that our District adopt the tool we developed, or a similar one, that will allow all faculty and staff to participate in a true 360 evaluation of administrators.

Of these 320 faculty, 59% were full-time and 41% were part-time. The three colleges were all well represented, with 38% of responses from Skyline, 38% from CSM, and 24% from Cañada.

Most deans were rated were rated as “effective” or “highly effective”

In general, deans at all three colleges received fairly high ratings, with 47% of faculty describing their dean as “highly effective,” 24% describing their dean as “effective,” 17% describing their dean as “somewhat effective,” “8% describing their dean as “not effective,” and 4% saying that they could not judge. Faculty were asked a total of 22 questions about their deans. View the results for Cañada deans here, the results for CSM deans here, and the results for Skyline deans here. (Note: at this point AFT is only making public aggregate data for deans at each college, although we may share data regarding individual administrators in the future if the District is not responsive to our request to begin a true 360 evaluation process.)

Two deans were rated as more ineffective

However, there were exceptions to faculty’s generally positive evaluations of deans. On average, 74% of faculty who gave their dean a rating (as opposed to “cannot judge”) said their dean was either “highly effective” or “effective.” However, two deans—one at Cañada and one at Skyline—had fewer than 50% of ratings in the “highly effective” and “effective” categories. (For this count, we did not include deans who received fewer than 5 total ratings due to the small sample size in their cases.)

Ratings of Vice Presidents were lower

College vice presidents across the District generally received lower ratings than deans. 17% of respondents rated their VP as “highly effective”’ 22% rated their VP “effective”; 20% rated their VP “somewhat effective”; 26% rated their VP “not effective,” and 14% said they could not judge. Of faculty who gave their VP a rating, only 45% described the VP as “highly effective” or “somewhat effective.” Two individual VPs had more ratings in the “somewhat effective” and “not effective” categories than in the “highly effective” and “effective” categories.  View all results for District VPs.

Cabinet-level administrators’ ratings ranked between those of deans and VPs

Finally, cabinet-level administrators, including Kim Lopez (as the Interim President of CSM), Jamillah Moore (at the time President of Cañada), Skyline President Melissa Moreno, and Chancellor Mike Claire averaged ratings that fell between those of deans and those of VPs. 28% of respondents gave Cabinet-level administrators a rating of “highly effective,” with 30% giving them a rating of “effective,” 16% giving them a rating of “somewhat effective,” 16% giving them a rating of “not effective,” and 9% saying they could not judge.

64% of responses that rated cabinet-level administrators described them as “highly effective” or “effective.” However, one of these administrators was an outlier, receiving more ratings in the “somewhat effective” and “not effective” categories than in the “highly effective” and “effective” categories.  View all results for cabinet-level administrators.

Moving forward, AFT hopes to work with District administrators, Academic and Classified Senates, CSEA, and AFSCME to institute a process that allows all faculty and staff to evaluate the administrators they work with. We are also hopeful that administrators will act on the data we share with them to improve working conditions in our District.