Quick Jump to Sections: Accreditation, Facilities, Budget, Determining the New Core, Other Things, Next Meetings.
Reminder of what College Council does + why you should care: The council is the chief/main/key way that the college president communicates with the various campus departments and groups on collegewide issues AND gets feedback, suggestions, input from those areas. The college president is at almost every College Council meeting leading the discussion (I think Greg missed just one meeting in his tenure, Nan missed just two in her interim tenure, and Bob Jensen did not miss any). The president weights the input from the College Council reps very highly. So if you have any concerns, questions, or input you want the college president to hear+consider, let your College Council rep (me!) know. I'm also one of the faculty reps on the Budget Committee that the college president presides over so if you have ideas or comments that you'd like me to bring to College Council or the Budget Committee, please send them to me!
You received a brief summary of the exit interview with the accreditation visiting team from Kate Pluta earlier this week. The accreditation commission will send the college a draft of their recommendations & report of findings in December or January for the college president to correct any errors of fact and the final report of the findings with recommendations of what we need to fix and our accreditation status will be received by the college in late January to early February. The accrediting commission has the big picture of where all of the colleges stack up against each other and they need to normalize all of the reports from all of the visiting teams before sending out their final accreditation recommendations.
Note that the District Office, district-wide processes, and Board of Trustees are not accredited, just the colleges are, so shortcomings in the DO, districtwide processes, and BOT must be included in each of the college's visiting team's reports. Here's the exit interview summary but note that the commission may further revise the recommendations as it finalizes its report.
Commendations (greater than best practices; far exceed standards)
Recommendations
Overarching: assess and evaluate everything (processes) and make changes as needed
No written report and Sean James rattled off a bunch of things quickly so I know I missed some. Here's what I got:
If Prop 30 fails our (BC's) new cap funding from the state will be 11,780—a cut of 916 in FTES funding that is retroactive to the beginning of this academic year (or earlier). That FTES number is for the entire academic year. We scheduled Fall 2012 for Prop 30 passing but we budgeted for it failing with the understanding that we would use reserves to cover the fall half of the academic year 916 FTES funding cut. Therefore, the spring semester will see class scheduling cut of 450-460 FTES rather than taking the full 916 out all in spring semester. Scheduling a 916 drop in FTES in one semester would devastate our college programs and lead to current full-time faculty teaching less than a full load. We do have some reserves to cover about 460 FTES of the cut so we're going to use it. However, that will use up all of our available reserve so the 2013-14 academic year will have the full annual 916 FTES cut in funding without any carryover. A faculty cut of 20 FTEF at BC (I think the number is 28 for the entire district) has to be planned for by sometime in February (for Board of Trustees approval) with notices going out by March 15th. There would also be cuts in classified and administration to meet the 50-percent law. Classified staff must have a 60-day notice of layoff according to their contract.
Even if Prop 30 passes, we're not out of the woods—BC would still see a cut of $1.6 million this academic year. To top it off, it looks like the governor and legislature were up to their usual budget accounting tricks with this year's budget: assuming too rosy a view of tax revenue so the state budget deficit will be $10-18 billion even with the passage of Prop 30. Difficult times still lie ahead even if Prop 30 passes but they would be even worse if Prop 30 failed. You know, sometimes I just hate having to write up the budget section of this report...
What is the "true core" of the college? We're going to continue gathering input from the entire campus as to what is the true core of the college using the anonymous web form with results being dumped into a folder in the Public Folders of Exchange. The web form is at http://www.bakersfieldcollege.edu/definingcore/ and the input is being dumped into the public folder called "Defining Core" (select the link to go right to it after logging into Outlook Web).
Interviews for the Vice President of Student Services will be held November 7+8th. I don't know exactly what role Sonya Christian will play in that since that is before her official start date but I do know that she has "skyped" with the finalists and she will have some influence in the determination of who is hired.
Next College Council meeting will be November 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM. I will not be there so our area will need a rep for that meeting.
Last updated: November 3, 2012
Document author: Nick Strobel