Recommendations from a California Community College Board of Governor’s task force that could drastically alter the way students attend community college in California have employees deeply divided. On one side are the two big faculty unions and the coalition of independent unions.  On the other side is the administration.
Following Senate Bill 1143, the Board of Governor’s (BOG) and the state California Community College Chancellor’s Office put together the Student Success Task Force (SSTF) to look at improving student success.
Mary Kay Rudolph, SRJC’s vice president of Academic Affairs, said the task force is focused on making classes more portable from college to college. Schools often have different course numbers, she said, and some have a different amount of units for the same course.
Under the current system each school has to contact each UC and CSU for every transfer major to come to an agreement on major requirements. This creates a lot of administrative tasks, she said. The California Community College (CCC) system has been moving away from that model. Senate Bill 1440 mandated community colleges had to have two Transfer Model Curriculums, standardized majors across the UC and CCC systems, by fall 2011. SRJC has three. “[That] was the first time we worked as a system,” Rudolph said.
In addition, each school currently can define its own assessment tests for math and English course placement. Assessment is used to place students into appropriate classes. “[Someone who] struggles in psychology class because they don’t have the English to get the papers done,” Rudolph said, “is more likely to drop out.” The SSTF is trying to remedy that.
Some assessments aren’t valid between schools in the same district, Rudolph said. “That’s redundant and stupid.”
The SSTF defines student success mainly as transfers, degrees and certificates. “We looked at our numbers and we weren’t finishing,” Rudolph said. The recommendations in the SSTF seek to improve those numbers.
Under the recommendations, students will take a mandatory orientation, assessment and remedial classes for math and English to get them up to college level courses. In their third semester, students would have to declare an educational goal (transfer, degree or a certificate) and come up with an education plan to get to that goal.
The most recent data SRJC has on student educational goals comes from a 2007 survey.
SRJC’s Vice President of Student Services Ricardo Navarrette said students whose goals are “undecided” or “personal interest” would be impacted the most by the SSTF. In 2007 these groups made up 34.5 percent of students at SRJC, down from 37.1 percent in 2003.  “Given the fee increases and reduction of ‘personal’ interest courses there are far fewer students in these categories in 2011,” Navarrette said.
If a student deviates from his or her educational plan, the student would lose priority registration, which is becoming more and more important as classes are being cut. However, Rudolph said students would retain the ability to change majors, so they would still be allowed to discover and explore academia at SRJC.
If the recommendations are put into place, they would change how Rudolph plans the course scheduling for each semester. “I used to go solely on historic enrollment,” she said. But with student education plans, “I would use them to figure out what classes students need.”
Rudolph and the SSTF agree schools need more counselors but Rudolph goes further by wanting more full-time faculty as well. “They connect directly to the students,” she said.
While Rudolph paints a more intuitive and less confusing college environment for students and employees, many are unconvinced the SSTF is in the best interest of students or faculty.
The California Community College Independents (CCCI), a coalition of 13 independent faculty unions including SRJC’s All Faculty Association (AFA), stated in a resolution the front and center of all education reform should be the need to increase investment in education. CCCI is not opposed to improving the college system but finds the task force to be missing a recommendation for refunding the CCC system.
The Community College Association (CCA), the California Teachers Association (CTA) for community colleges, stated in its feedback that the SSTF would give the Chancellor’s office and the BOG comparable powers to the University of California Regents and the California State University Chancellor’s Office. It then stated, “Both faculty and students are not supportive of the outcomes that have been secured with the CSU Chancellor’s Office.” The CSU and UC systems have both seen significant protest in the past two years ranging from student occupations of libraries and administration buildings to union-organized faculty walkouts, marches and rallies.
CCA also stated using Prop. 98 funds (which funds k-12 and the community college system) to fund the Chancellor’s Office would weaken education for students and that any additional fee-based funding would adversely hurt those students who can least afford college.
CCA also claims many implementations in the SSTF would consti tute a change in working conditions for faculty, which would be subject to