[Factc] WACTC October Meeting

[Mcavoy, Carlea]

Hi everyone!
I attended the WACTC meeting at the State Board Offices on Friday, October 21st.  They also met in closed session on the morning of the 20th, and then for breakout sessions from 2pm to 4pm.  However since each group from the breakout session was reporting at the Friday meeting, I decided I could get all the information on that day.

I am not identifying any of the presidents specifically because I don't know all of them and I am not sure it is a worthwhile pursuit to know exactly who said what.

Report on the Competency Based Business Degree:
-modeled after the WGU model
-graduated one student
-many schools showed interest but then backed out when money was involved.
-accrediting board was slow to act, which held up the project
-faculty at Bellingham pulled out causing more difficulties
-AFT published derogatory, misleading information that made it seem bad for faculty
-program still has potential and will be pursued

CTC Link
There was much discussion on this topic and this was the only discussion that was eventually shut down.  Overall, there is a lot of anxiety amongst the presidents about CTC link.  In the end they said that People Soft has worked elsewhere and it can work here.
I am only giving the major takeaways from the conversation as I see them -paraphrased as close to the original comment as possible.
-report was given that Gardner (sp?) Consulting was readying a report that would come out in November.  One of the things they are looking at is governance -who is responsible for making decisions like will the wave 1 schools go live in January or not?-etc.  A project manager is being hired this week to oversee this. Question: Will schools abide by the decisions made by this person?
Response1: There is evidence that each school wants autonomy and will not be happy with a directive from a project manager.
Response 2: Yes we will abide, let's treat this like the FEMA model, there is an expert that ultimately calls the shot.
Response3: There has already been evidence that things people agree too -conformity to aid in the smooth implementation of CTC- has not been followed.  We have to stick to our agreements.
Response4: We need to know what things MUST have conformity for CTC link to work.  For example, if we have to have a common contract then that is a deal breaker because that will never happen.
Response5: I want to respond to this notion that if we agree to a certain level of conformity, the program will work.  The program is defective and does not work -not because of a lack of conformity on our part.  We need to fix the program.  Cyber and the state board came up with what they thought would work, but they didn't actually try to implement things as we wanted them to work.
Response 6: "I see this as a leadership opportunity for all of us."
Response 7: We have had trouble at our campus because of CTC link.  But CTC link cannot be blamed for our personnel leaving and it cannot be blamed for our lowered enrollments.  These things are happening outside of the CTC influence.  We need to stay positive and tell our people that we don't have all the answers but we will eventually get them.  What we really need to do is to get ahead of the media on this.  When the Gardner report comes out they will calling us --asking us for comments.
It was agreed that the day the report was released, they committee would meet, read the report and get information out to all the presidents that day, or as close to that day as possible.

Operating Budget Committee
The state overall is down about 4,000 FTEs.  However, the system has about 38,000 contract FTEs.  There was a discussion about finding a way to legally recode some of these FTE's so that the 4000 deficit would go away.  Someone asked if this was even a problem worth pursuing since when they were over-enrolled no one really cared -maybe no one will care if they were now under-enrolled.  The response to that was that there is this pressing, costly McCleary matter and the universities are overenrolled, so if there are cuts to be made, of course they will look to the group that appears to be under performing.  A committee is going to pursuit this recoding idea and get back to the other presidents.   Everyone seemed to agree that the model the state uses to determine the expected FTEs seemed arbitrary and flawed and one person suggested they should work to change the target numbers rather than defending a wonky system imposed by the legislature.  One person said if we are going to think about changing funding, then performance has to be part of the conversation.  If we were judged by our completion numbers then enrollment would not play such a big part.

Budget /Legislative Information:
Mostly we looked at documents for this part of the discussion.  I have posted a number of items for you to see.  1) Minor Works Project tells how things are going on each campus -on schedule or behind schedule.  2.) Capitol Budget Request  3.) Capitol End Run Policy -I don't know what this is about 4.) Capitol Projects Task Force -a summary of changes suggested or made by the task force 5.) 2017 - 2019 Budget Request and agenda
Another interesting document that they passed out, but is still a work in progress, is the Campus Impact Statement -one page for each college in the system.  This will be uploaded when all changes have been made.  The statements were written by the individual campuses with the financial bits added in by the state.  I have attached an example here -I chose Clark College (and it's flip side Clover Park) and South Puget Sound (and it's flip side) but would be happy to send anyone the one from their school on request.  Since there will eventually be a link to it from the State Board site, I did not want to post all of it here.
Presidents were asked to attend legislative sessions and reach out to their local legislators as well as the city governance in their areas -remind them that capitol funding means local economic growth.

Treasure's Report
WACTC dues are $1,200 per school and they currently have a balance of about $65,000.  Student services requested that they fund 1/3 of the speaker that they are bringing to their conference which is devoted to diversity and equity issues.

Equity and Diversity Discussion
The state continues to try to find ways to attract and retain a diverse teaching population.  To that end there is a new program of faculty mentoring where tenured faculty of color mentor non-tenured faculty of color.  (70 participants right now)  They have met and the response has been very positive.  Someone asked if they could get a summary of what is happening around the state.  Someone else said, it doesn't matter what is happening on a state level, what matters is what you do on your own campuses.  One person raised the concern the new hires that were not of color were asking, "What about us" and that we need to be mindful of everyone.  Another person said that after a training on his campus, all of the faculty involved felt empowered to make a difference and signed up to be on screening committees.

Respectfully,
Carlea McAvoy
South Puget Sound Community College
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