The San Mateo Community College District must make important financial decisions regarding faculty hiring while they wait to find out the extent of damage that this year’s budget woes may leave behind.
The extent of the budget crunch will not be made clear until Governor Schwarzenegger’s Jan.10 budget message. For now, the district must rely only on a set of hypothetical scenarios, preparing to act accordingly.
“30 percent of what I’m doing is worrying about this subject,” said Vicki Morrow, Skyline college president. “[I’m] thinking about ways that we can save money, dive back spending at the moment, and scrape together every little stash we’ve got to somehow minimize the effects of the current year.”
Each year the state’s board of governors issues a fulltime faculty hiring obligation for each district, meaning the district must fulfill a faculty count requirement. This year the state board has decided there is not enough money to do so, and for now the required number will stay set.
However, the hiring process for next fall will still be difficult. The district has been considering new options. According to Morrow, there are discussions circulating about retirement incentives for faculty, which would mean less staff and a lower obligation for the district to fulfill if some faculty members were to retire.
Also, the district is considering managed hiring, meaning the board will commit to retaining employees that want to stay and loop them into empty positions. But neither of these decisions can be made until the district chancellor’s visit to Skyline within the next few weeks, when the board will discuss its options.
“Then we’ll have a little more concrete sense of what the playing field looks like,” Morrow said.
Until then, the deans of the district are playing the waiting game, unsure of what will happen and anxious for decisions to be made. Despite the uncertainty, the deans are preparing to act¬¬.
“Even though we are unsure of how many, if any, faculty will be hired, the English Department is moving ahead very slowly to get things in place if and when the word comes that we can hire,” said Connie Beringer, dean of the language arts and learning center. “We want to be prepared even if only 1 or 2 positions are approved.”
While the district makes its preparations, everyone will have to wait until January to make any official decisions.
“We don’t know how deep the cuts will be,” said Donna Bestock, professor of philosophy at Skyline. “Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen.”