By Mitra Moassessi

For the past several years the state of California has experienced economic turmoil which has affected all aspects of public services. Education, the largest public program in California, has not escaped the effect of this economic downturn.

2010-11 marks the third consecutive year of  no cost of living adjustment (COLA) for community colleges, and on top of that there have been drastic cuts to many categorical programs.  Additionally the 2009-10 budget required every community college district to reduce its workload, which translated to a reduction in the revenue received from the state.   So the question is how have we at Santa Monica College dealt with all these budget pains? Has the pain been significant enough for our district to set priorities and make hard decisions? One would think that the educators who are the revenue generating group should be the top priority of any educational institution, and in times of distress, they should be the group least affected by the pain. After all, who produces the FTES that brings the revenue to the college?

The message that we constantly hear is that we are all in this together, and we all have to make sacrifices in order to make this work. Are we really in this together?

For the past several years, as faculty we have increased our efficiency to over 95%. We have taken more and more students in our classes, we have provided more counseling to students, worked on SLOs, program reviews, developing new courses, integrating technology into our courses, and more.  We have lost full-time faculty due to retirement, and have jumped up and down out of excitement about hiring few full-time faculty.  We have watched our part-time faculty become unemployed and lose their health benefits due to class cuts.

And then on the other hand, we continue to watch the pool of administrators grow.  We have observed the vacant administrative positions being filled, new positions being created and filled in no time.  Just in the last few weeks, we all received emails announcing three project manager positions. Yes, they are temporary grant based positions, but those of us who have been here long enough know that very often temporary administrative positions transform to permanent positions without much fanfare.

We have also observed the amount of reserve in our college budget go up at the same time that we hear about the danger of having a structural deficit!  Is that even mathematically possible?

Do faculty need to continue making sacrifices? The following data demonstrates that we as faculty have done more than our share of enduring the pain and thanks to our hard work, the district is in a very healthy financial situation. It is time for faculty to become a priority.

The data in the following three tables have been gathered from the documents provided by the district.

Change in number of full-time faculty =   0%
Change in number of part-time faculty = -6.7%
Change in number of academic administrators = 18.6%

Total salary:

2010-11 figures are based on the adopted budget

Percent change in total faculty’s salary = -0.49%

Percent change in academic administrators’ salary = 25.11%

Ending Balance:

Chancellor’s office recommendation for fund balance percent is 5%.