Heads up! Monday’s board meeting

IT'S ANYONE'S GUESS what will happen at tomorrow’s meeting of the SOCCCD Board of Trustees. It could be a slugfest—or just a slug.

DEALING WITH A TREND:

As you know, in recent weeks, the district has scrambled to deal with its apparent failure to comply with the “50% law” (requiring that at least 50% of expenditures be on instruction).

Possibly, the scramblage has paid off, and, owing to newly uncovered minor accounting errors and the like, we may be at 50% for instructional expenditures (06-07). Whew!

But if such is the case, the district has been steadily moving downward toward the 50% line for about five years, and so the emergency is by no means over. That is, over the last five or so years, the proportion of spending on the non-instructional has steadily risen. What's up with that?

The word in the trenches is that unusually much has been spent in recent years at the district level. Many faculty seem convinced that expenditures on ATEP in particular—the new facility has 8 full-time employees—go a long way in explaining our shift toward non-instructional expenditures.

Some of that expenditure, of course, traces back to decisions made by Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur.

Expect Mathur to do what he always does when he’s in the hot seat: point a finger of blame away from himself and, if possible, toward his “enemies.” No doubt, therefore, he’ll wield that nasty finger of his against “reassigned time,” the (universal) practice of releasing some instructors from some proportion of their teaching duties so that they may perform other crucial tasks—tasks best performed by academics—such as chairing committees (think “courses,” “academic affairs”), chairing departments, leading the Faculty Senate (which, as you know, is by law a key player in college governance), and the like.

Essentially, opposing Reasigned Time (RT) is tantamount to opposing faculty participation in college and district governance. Why would anyone oppose such participation? —Why, because faculty are liberals and secularists and unionists! Plus, things oughta be run "top down."

Thus saith the Neanderthal.


If Mathur points a finger of blame at faculty and RT, that will be some seriously red herring. It is true, of course, that reassigned time is a non-instructional expense. But there's no way that the RT of a handful of instructors can account for our 50% troubles. And, again, RT is essential to faculty participation in governance, as it is understood by the state legislature.

BUT NOW GET THIS. The district has for years inflated the expense of RT (a casualty of late-90s Board Majority spin) by calculating the cost of a (full-time) instructor’s reassigned time as a percentage of their pay. That is, if Smith gets 20% RT, then the cost of his RT is calculated by the district as 20% of his regular salary.

Ka-ching!

But, in truth, the cost of Smith’s RT is “backfill,” i.e., the cost of hiring a part-timer to cover that 20%.

That cost is much lower. It's not rocket science.

MEANWHILE, as you know, for over a month, Chancellor Raghu Mathur and the Board Majority have pressured the colleges to incorporate obnoxious, substandard elements into the (nearly due) Accreditation Midterm Reports, and that struggle continues. Expect fireworks when the board gets to item 7.2.

ANOTHER PERFUNCTORY BOARD FORUM:

The board has decided to hold another half-assed “board forum,” which they’ve added to their Monday schedule. The thinking seems to be: “hell, since we’ve gotta be here anyway, let’s get one of these forums out of the way, too.”

Surely that was the thinking behind the board forum recently held at IVC. It was scheduled immediately before IVC’s 9-11 commemoration event, which trustees seem to feel obliged to attend. At that forum, except for the board president, trustees barely said a word. They occasionally looked at their watches. They mailed it in.

THE CLOSED SESSION:

Monday’s CLOSED SESSION will include the evaluation of numerous administrators:

A. Public Employee Appointment, Employment, Evaluation of Performance, Discipline, Dismissal, Release (GC 54957)

1. Public Employee Appointment/Employment
2. Public Employee Evaluation of Performance

a. Deputy Chancellor [POERTNER]
b. Vice Chancellor, Technology and Learning Services
c. Vice Chancellor, Human Resources [KING]
d. President, Saddleback College [MCCULLOUGH]
e. President, Irvine Valley College [ROQUEMORE]
f. Provost, Advanced Technology and Education Park [KOPECKY]
g. Vice President, Student Services, Saddleback College
h. Director, Information Technology, Program Analysis
i. Director, Research & Planning
j. Dean, Counseling Services & Special Programs, Saddleback College
k. Dean, Fine Arts, Saddleback College
l. Dean, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Saddleback College
m. Dean, Liberal Arts, and Leaning Resources, Saddleback College
n. Dean, Bus. Sci., Workforce & Economic Dev., Saddleback College
o. Dean, Advanced Tech. & Applied Sciences, Saddleback College
p. Dean, Health & Human Svcs. & Emeritus Inst., Saddleback College
q. Dean, Math, Science & Engineering, Saddleback College
r. Dean, Career Tech. Educ. & Workforce Dev., Irvine Valley College
s. Dean of Business & Social Sciences, Irvine Valley College
t. Director, CACT
u. Director, Advanced Technology Center
v. Assistant Dean, Health Sciences, Human Services & Emeritus
Institute, Saddleback College

It is entirely possible that the board will feel that they can discuss our looming “50% law” difficulty in closed session—on the grounds that the matter falls under the agenda heading, “potential litigation.” If so, they’d better be careful. As you know, the SOCCCD board, and trustee John Williams in particular, have a history of violating the Brown Act, which severely limits the range of discussions that may be relegated to "closed" session and which requires that all matters discussed in closed session be properly agendized/described.

THE OPEN SESSION:

The OPEN SESSION is supposed to convene at 6:30 p.m., but it seems likely that the closed session will run late, delaying start of the open session.

It is important for people to attend these board meetings! (Faculty, are you listening?)

The fact is, trustees are not potted plants. With one or two exceptions, trustees respond to the audience in the way that sentient beings do. Those of us who regularly attend board meetings suspect that, were, for instance, faculty to routinely maintain a strong presence at meetings, board decision-making that affects faculty would be, well, more informed.

5.0 GENERAL ACTION ITEMS

Among these will be:

5.1 Saddleback College: Study Abroad Program to Salamanca, Spain [Spring ’08]
5.2 Saddleback College: Study Abroad Program to Brazil [Fall ‘07]

I’ve heard that Trustee Fuentes detests Brazil nuts, so this could get interesting.
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5.4 SOCCCD: Board Policy Revision: BP 4000.2 – Electronic Communication

— The revision was compelled by a recent successful student lawsuit against the district, which yielded a court decision that the existing policy was unconstitutional. (For review and study.)

6.0 DISCUSSION ITEMS

6.2 SOCCCD: Enrollment Management
Discussion regarding enrollment management strategies and successes at Saddleback College, Irvine Valley College, and the Advanced Technology and Education Park.


7.0 INFORMATION ITEMS

7.1 ATEP: Submittal of Short Range Plan to the City of Tustin
7.2 Saddleback College and Irvine Valley College: Accreditation Focused Midterm Reports
7.3 Saddleback College, Irvine Valley College: 2006-07 Release Time and/or Stipends: Actual expenditures for release time and stipends as identified in the 2006-07 budget. [“Actual”? maybe not.]
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