Negotiations Update 18 September 2025

Today’s negotiations meeting was to be expected. We continue to advocate for faculty navigating the precarity of shifting workloads and to ensure our work is recognized and fairly compensated while the District continues to be reluctant to invest in faculty who carry out the college’s educational mission. We made some progress today but will continue negotiations over compensation. 

📌AY 27-28 and 28-29 Calendars

The District presented calendars for the next two-year academic cycle. Both calendars proposed moving the start date for the semester up one week in August. Based on faculty feedback from our last calendar cycle, we emphasized the desire to keep the semester start date later in August. We’ll gather more feedback from faculty for these new calendars before we counter. 

📌Presentation on Short-Term Workers

The District gave a presentation on the categories of short-term workers in order for shared understanding as we move forward with changes to our staffing policies. 

✅Article 16

The final piece to our negotiations for Article 16 involved overlapping coverage. The District confirmed that no faculty would be negatively impacted by clarifying language around overlapping coverage, so we agreed and tentatively agreed (TAed) on Article 16. This article will still need to be ratified with the other TAed articles. 

📌Article 15

In Article 15, we focused on the following areas: 

• A pay increase - while we’ve seen COLA increases, COLAs are not raises, and we haven’t seen a raise since 2016. With the changes in our profession and inflation rates in our area, COLA has not been sufficient. 

• Prep pay for PT faculty and FT overload - given that this was proposed for the 24-25 academic year, the District is unwilling to compensate retroactively but indicated that they would be willing to entertain such proposals in the next contract. 

• PT representation on Senate - we requested a change from 4 to 8 paid part-time positions available on Senate. Should this be approved by the District, it would still need to go through Senate to adjust membership. 

Given the advice from our VP of Finance, the District is resistant to investing in any ongoing costs. Their initial counter was disappointing, and they heard - again -  our concerns for faculty. We will be prepared with a counter at our next meeting.

📌MOU_Acessibility Remediation

We had proposed compensation for this academic year to account for the work that needs to be done to meet accessibility standards in April. The District agreed to a portion of this compensation for part-time instructional faculty while arguing that full-time faculty could use their institutional service hours for accessibility work. Following caucus, we countered with a proposal that includes part- and full-time faculty, noninstructional faculty, and faculty on reassigned time. We hope to have their counter quickly so that we can compensate all faculty for this important work. 

✅MOU_ECELS

We agreed to an MOU reintroducing Grade A on the ECELS Salary Schedule. 

Discussion

• Vocational Salary Credits - we followed up on more individual concerns regarding related occupational experience. 

• Mileage - we confirmed contract language around mileage, and the District said they’d clarify the language with administration.

• ASL Interpreter for faculty - the District states that they are still exploring this position. They emphasized that they understood this is a District responsibility to our faculty, but they want feedback from those impacted before outlining the parameters and job description. We asked that they consult full-time and part-time faculty in the ASL Discipline. 

Next Meeting: Thursday, October 9th for Dual Enrollment specifically

Signing off—but still here for every comma, clause, and cause.