New Full-time Faculty

District to hire 43 new full-time faculty in 2021-22

The 2021 California Budget Act includes $100 million to hire additional new full-time community college faculty in order to increase districts’ percentage of full-time faculty toward meeting the 75 percent full-time faculty goal. SMCCCD’s share of those funds is at least $1.5 million. [See a memo from the CCCCO describing the special full-time faculty hiring funding, including how much each district would receive.]

In response to a query from AFT 1493 President Monica Malamud about the funding, Chief Financial Officer Bernata Slater informed the union that our District was already planning to hire 30 full-time faculty in 2021-2022, and that with the state funding (which is to be used for hiring above what was already planned), they will hire an additional 13 full-time faculty in this academic year.  Monica had reminded District leaders to use the funds, saying that, “By tapping into these State funds to help augment the amount of money that can be spent for this purpose, our District will be able to increase the number of full-time faculty that it was already planning to hire, without impacting our existing resources.”

Districts that intended to take advantage of the additional state funds to hire full-time faculty were required to report how many full-time faculty they had and and how many they were planning to hire as of July 1, 2021.  On that date, our District had 326 full-time faculty. While the plan to hire 30 faculty members in one year appears to be a very high number, CFO Slater clarified that  the 30 new faculty the district was planning to hire in 2021-22 included FT faculty who had already been offered a job for 2021-2022, but had not been “onboarded” by July 1, 2021.  Since those positions were considered vacant at the time, they were counted towards the original 30 planned new hires.