At the opening session of All College Day, Dr. Meadows revealed his plans for meeting the demands of the budget for the 2009-2010 academic year. Is it enough? What else can/could/should be done?
Here are the current plans for addressing the budget shortfall:
• Continuing and improving an energy savings plan.
• Reducing travel and materials expenditures from the operating budget.
• Replacing some print products with digital formats, including class schedules and course catalogs.
• Reduce funding for ceremonies - having a single commencement ceremony per school year.
• Increasing average class size by eliminating special and elective courses not required for major or transfer
• Program viability evaluations to eliminate low enrollment.
• Continue reorganization and downsizing of College administration.
• Retirement Incentive: $500,000 has been set aside from nonrecurring funds to fund this.
Also under consideration:
• Imposing a hiring freeze in all areas including faculty.
• College closure days - employee furloughs.
• Individual employee furloughs with days spaced throughout the year.
• Reduction in Force for administrative/professional/career service employees
• Retrenchment for faculty
• Across the board salary cuts.
5 comments:
Retirement Incentive: $500,000 has been set aside from nonrecurring funds to fund this.
In the last big budget fooforaw, Dr. Bedics alone received about $300,000 in retirement incentives, and I know one faculty member who was offered $100,000. Exactly which administrator or five faculty members will receive this great sum reserved for incentives? The 1.75 million for software seems even larger now, doesn't it? It doesn't look as if there is going to be much incentive to retire when a year's salary or less is going to be offered. What did the last two or three administrators get to retire?
For the 2009-2010 year, retirement incentives and hiring freezes in non-faculty areas should be enough.
For the 2010-2011 year, hiring freezes in non-faculty areas should be enough.
$500,000 isn't much of an incentive given the number of people eligible for retirement at the college. But they will retire in time.
Nowhere in this list did Dr. Meadows mention eliminating the Golden Parachute extra retirement plan for senior administrators. He also forgot about his free car, his wife's free health insurance, his free gas, and his maxed 403(b) contribution---all paid for by the college.
He did mention that he'd been working for free on the weekends and would continue to do so. Well, gee thanks! Perhaps he's failed to notice that most faculty members work on the weekends, too, also for no pay. Are we supposed to applaud him because he does what all the rest of us do?
How about the BOT only give him the benefits all the rest of us get?
Why aren't we eliminating the MIS Consortium, a dinosaur of a money-drain that creates more problems than it solves?
Why not have all janitorial and lawn maintenance outsourced to temporary agencies?
Why do we continue to sponsor sports teams and offer phys ed classes, which are being taken primarily by those team members? What revenue are these teams generating?
Outsource?
I thought PJC would rather KEEP all of it's employees and grow.
We would love for PJC to be able to keep all of its employees and grow. However, PJC has not been growing---not to the degree that other community colleges in the state have been---yet its non-instructional staff has burgeoned in the last 10 years.
The business of the college is education, so we should be fighting to keep all personnel essential to that mission: the registrars and counselors, librarians and faculty, department heads and Instructional Technology, administrative assistants and human resources. These types of jobs all directly impact the students and CANNOT be done by parttime or temporary workers. Many other jobs, though, such as janitorial and lawn maintenance work, while necessary for the college, can easily be done by temporary agency employees.
PJC needs to prioritize. The first priority should be what benefits students most.
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