Mary Rees: Thank you for joining our fall 2020 town hall. We'll wait a minute or two for everyone to come join us, but we appreciate you taking the time this afternoon to be part of this.
We'll just wait it one more minute here while, people come are still joining the town hall.
Well, thank you for joining the Moorpark College Fall 2020 Town Hall. This afternoon's meeting is going to be recorded. It also is closed captioned.
So if you're interested in seeing the closed caption, please click the "CC" on the bottom of your screen. Today's town hall, has both options, the Q&A. So if you have a question about the material being presented, questions or comments please put them in the Q&A. If you have,
wanting to chat with other members of the panel or that are also attending the town hall, please feel free to use the chat option.
So we will have both the chat option as well as the Q&A. The Q&A will be monitoring and bring those questions up to whomever speaking at the end of their presentation, so that hopefully they can address the questions.
We're going to have two main topics, that we will hopefully provide additional information, if we don't cover everything at this particular town hall.
In the agenda for today, we're going to start with a welcome from our college president, then a budget presentation, followed by some question and answers, and then report outs from each of the social justice work groups.
After each of the social justice work groups do their presentation we'll have an opportunity for questions and answers as well as input
on some polls that we have available for that, and then we'll have closing remarks from Julius at the end as well. So shall we go ahead and begin the town hall? Good afternoon, Julius.
Julius Sokenu: Everyone, excuse me, welcome, and thank you for joining us this afternoon. It's a pleasure to be at another town hall meeting with our campus. These town halls on opportunity for us not only to share information, but to engage the college community as we
make decisions, as we address initiatives as they come across our community.
My cameras off. Oh, sorry, I'll put my camera back on. Can you guys see me now?
Okay, cool. So, could you go to the next slide please?
Thank you so much. So as Mary mentioned there's two agenda items for today's town hall,
and both agenda items are incredibly significant and important to the way in which we as a college community and a campus community
not only interact and the ways in which we meet the mission of the college, but also in the ways in which we engage with our students and the larger community around us. First of all, the budget. I want to thank our Fiscal Services
staff, as well as our Vice President of Business on Dr. Jennifer Clark, for the remarkable work that they have done and mostly from remote
location to keep the college's business operations fully functional. Thank you so much Jennifer and the team.
Just to give you a sense of this, as I said, we're in a time of uncertainty, we're in a time of budgetary social and civic unrest, and we're dealing with that but economic challenge that comes as a result of a pandemic.
Our commitment as an executive team at this college and in partnership with Academic Senate, the Classified Senate, and with our students,
is to make sure that when we work on the budget and as we're working in the budget that we safeguard the classroom and our services, both our business and our student services.
What that means then is that we want to make sure that whoever is here with us now, and particularly whoever is with us in a full time capacity,
that we're if we want to make sure we're able to retain them. We also want to make sure that we're able to retain as best as we can schedule so that we can maintain our cadre of faculty, and support service, and support staff.
We don't make decisions at this college in isolation. We put the information out there, we engage in consultation with the stakeholder groups and with each one of you,
and we ask for feedback, you can direct feedback to me, you can directly back to the vice presidents, to your deans, you can direct feedback to your senate president, or you can direct feedback to individuals whom you are, who you are, where are, in the process of that
decision making.
So no decision, as I said are made in isolation, and then, as always, when we talked about the budget, we're planning for the long term, with the mission in mind. Yes, we are facing a pandemic.
As we all pray and as we all hope this pandemic will be over at some point,
and this college will still remain doing the phenomenal work that it does, making sure that students are successful and that we're serving the needs of our community.
The budget decisions that we make now need not be budget decisions that will adversely impact us for the future. So when we make those decisions now we're thinking of the future as well. Next slide please.
We'll also at this town hall be continuing our dialogue and our conversations around social justice, and particularly social justice, as it as it pertains to this particular campus community.
There is commitment from stakeholder groups across the system. There's commitment from stakeholder groups within our
college district, and there's commitment from our senates, there's commitment from me, there's a commitment from the Academic Senate Council at Moorpark College, from our faculty, from our staff, and administration,
and there's a regional organization called the VCCARA, which many of you are a member of that has made a commitment to addressing social justice, addressing racism, addressing social inequities.
We at Moorpark College are responding in reaction to the Call to Action from Chancellor Oakley our State Community College Chancellor. In that call to action, you will see the list of
I guess a call to action of charge that the Chancellor has posited to us so we're doing this we're engaging in open dialogue to address campus climate,
we are auditing the classroom climate, and in with intention of creating an action plan to address racism and build curriculum that supports that.
Our district board is reviewing our equity plans and engaging in conversations with stakeholder groups so that we can do better in the way in which we serve our students,
our faculty, our staff, our administrators, and the way in which we advance the mission of this college district.
We also need to shorten the timeframe for the full implementation of the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda of the system, which means
it is imperative that we are work on these issues we work on this concerns of racism, of inequity right now. It's not something for the future, it's something we build the building blocks to accomplish right now.
We cannot solve it today. We cannot solve it tomorrow, but what we do is we continue to build the building blocks towards
our ideals and our goals for ourselves and our communities. Next slide please.
And on the part of this college community this has been a college community like no other
in the way in which we have, in which we've embraced this work, in the way in which this work has been decentralized, so it's not just a handful of people who are doing it.
We still need more people to join the choir, we still need more people to actively engage in the work, but certainly, there has been commitment across the board,
and there's been engagement and I want to thank each of those social justice work group members,
particularly those of you who are also working in sub groups because you're digging deep within your social justice work group and looking at how
our actions impact students, how they impact your colleagues, and what our actions actually say about the campus climate that we create and that we hope for.
So, a big thank you to everyone who served on a social justice work group, and thank you to the leaders, excuse me, of those social justice work groups.
You have come, you have developed book clubs, lecture series. You have engaged in courageous conversations. You have built curriculum.
You have shared resources and developed resources that are available on our websites. Our senates have come up with resolutions and each one of you in your own way
are part of this work> Kudos to you and I thank you so much for engaging us today. I ask that you participate fully in today's
town hall and then if there are questions or concerns as our town hall involves please don't hesitate to reach out. Reach out to me, reach out to
your stakeholder leaders and we will definitely, definitely continue to engage each one of you in this work.
I'm going to pass this on now to our Vice President of Business Jennifer Clark. Dr. Clark came to us three weeks before the pandemic and she has fully demonstrated that she has a Moorpark spirit and we're very glad that she's on our team and responsible for our budget. Thank you, Jennifer.
Jennifer Clark: Thank you Julius. So happy to be Moorpark. So happy to be with all of you this afternoon to speak about what I can quite honestly, talk about for a very long time, but I would be boring you all with this. I'm going to try to be brief, but just hit on some salient points. So, next slide.
I wanted to provide everybody some background before I get into the specifics of our budget, just to kind of remind everybody about the climate that we're in. So this is California,
this is the system wide, right? So we know that we are experiencing a great deal of apportionment deferrals over about a billion and a half dollars in apportionment deferrals,
to our unrestricted general fund as well as our SEA, Student Achievement program that's also being deferred.
What does that mean, it means that we don't receive our cash as soon as we should. So really, this means it's a cash issue for the district,
it's not really impacting college budgets, at this point, but know that it's a strategy that the state cannot continue to do, year after year. It's sort of a shouldering strategy, it's kicking the can down the road a little bit, but that's where we are right now.
I did want to mention the Student Centered Funding Formula that we are technically in the third year of the Student Centered Funding Formula,
and I have on the slide, just a reminder of what it's comprised of, the 7 2010 components. I do want to say though that
only the first year, did we actually receive, so that was '18-'19 did we actually receive the money that we were allocated as a district and as a college by this Student Centered Funding Formula only in that first year, ever since then we have been only funded on a Hold Harmless
level and so that last bullet as talks about Hold Harmless, and that is basically going back to our funding level at 2017-18,
taking that level from three years ago, and then simply applying a COLA or a cost of living increase only to that dollar amount for three years. Now, incidentally, this last year and in FY 21,
there was no funded COLA. So we only received cost of living on that three year old allocation two of the years have the so we're really down.
I want, so the last bullet there on this slide, points out that overall as a district, our unrestricted general fund revenue at our adoption budget is that 170 million dollar number which is actually a decrease of a little more than $200,000 district wide from last year.
Next slide please.
So there is a little bit of relief, and I want to just to hit on this very briefly. You all know about the CARES Act, and you've probably heard about the COVID-19 Response Block Grant that the system
has been receiving we, you know, as a college and the system has been receiving and this has really helped us mitigate the costs that have been associated with
the COVID-19 pandemic. So costs, the obvious ones, you know, PP&E and cleaning supplies. They're also paying for our screeners so this allows us to have
the on ground components of the curriculum of the classes that we're offering this fall. This allows us to be able to have those people in place so that we can operate in our, our classes in a very safe manner.
It also gave or allocated over two and a half million dollars directly for students, which I've been keeping you all abreast of, we've allocated just over $2 million of that already
to students in need that have been directly impacted by the pandemic, and then the last
bullet there is talks about STRS and PERS, there's a system wide relief for this year fiscal 21 and next year fiscal 22 a temporary reduction in those PERS and STRS rates. So I do want to,
I do want to point out, as I'll point out in another slide or a couple of slides from now that the cost of these still have risen so it's not like those costs for us have decreased, they have not.
What the state has done is just maybe get the amount or the percentage or the rate that it would have increased otherwise. So we're seeing less of an increase, if you will, slide, please.
So I wanted to, before I get into the details, just let everybody know that, of course, you know, our these are our strategic masterplan goals they look real familiar to all of us, of course,
it drives everything we do, including our budget, although I have to say that, from what I've seen, and from what I've heard, and what again what I experienced,
it's not directly, our budget is not sort of explicitly driven by these goals, and I know that the few months that I've been here at Moorpark we've started having many, many conversations about how to do that, how to make it more, these goals
really more explicitly drive our budget. So I'm personally I'm really looking forward to this joint meeting that we have coming up with
the first time ever, between EdCAP and our fiscal planning committees, so at that joint meeting the plan is to do a gap analysis between
all of the funded lists from the year before, so the faculty prioritization, the staff or classified prioritization list, all the FT CAP lists from FRAWG, TRAWG, PAWG, all of those things that we funded from fiscal
20, so last year '19-'20 that we're funding this year and then look at our annual plan for this year and look at, "Hey, you know, let's do a gap analysis. Let's compare the two and see, you know, where we fell down and what's missing."
Now the prob- the purpose of doing that is so that in our spring planning retreat,
you know, a month or so after that we'll be able to incorporate the results of that gap analysis or lessons learned, right from the prior year,
into the draft of our next year's work plan. So again, more of a, it's an attempt a really good first attempt at us making a more explicit connection between these goals and our planning.
I also didn't wanted to give a little bit of time. Just a little
bit on the the graph to the right, just to point out that this is basically how our unrestricted general fund is broken out by division.
Those of you in student support services, the orange will say, "Hey, you know, that's a really, really small part of the pie."
I do want to remind everybody that our students support services relies very heavily on categorical and grant funding,
to our restricted general fund. So not too much from the unrestricted general fund, a lot from our restricted. So actually, that orange piece is larger if we were to look at restricted and unrestricted. Next slide please?
This is a,
I live and breath by this, these documents. This is our district budget allocation model. So this compares last year, fiscal 20 to this year fiscal 21. So on the left is last year on the right is this year.
I've circled a few numbers to call your attention to. The red number circled on the left is our new allocation that we received last year that 61,815,000 dollar number.
The number on the right that's circled in red is our total allocation, our new money for fiscal 21, so the current year.
You can see it's about, well, actually I have it at the bottom the total allocation decreased by $640,000. Okay, so our ongoing money decreased. At the same time look at the numbers in blue. This is our carry over. So our carry over is one time revenue, it's...
okay, here's your ongoing salary is the red number at the top, that's money you get every year, you can kind of depend on it.
That the blue number below is what you've managed to save. So once you spend it, it's gone. So the number on the left, the two numbers at the left total that $2.4 million number, it's sort of the last line on the slide it says increased 2,423,495,
and then if you add up the numbers on the right in blue, this fiscal year that totals over 4.5 million. So the difference is, what do I have, 2.137 million dollars is the difference, that pretty much is because we have this one time carry forward from the SCFF '18-'19,
which I said earlier was the only year that we received money from the Student Centered Funding Formula,
but we received it so late, in fact, after the fiscal year ended, and again it's not ongoing we only got it that first year, and we're in our third year.
This is money that we like Oxnard and Ventura have carried over and it's a good thing that we have it because
this is going to play a big part in our, how am I terming it I have a program, what is it? Budget stability plan that's what how I'm going to be terming this. Big part in our budget stability plan over the next three years. So, next slide please.
So what I wanted to do is illustrate the steps or sort of the major pieces in
balancing our budget for this year. So looking at last year compared to this year, we were down $640,000 in revenue which I already covered in the last slide.
What are some other things that we, that happened some major moving pieces? We actually increased our FON or full time faculty number by almost two full time faculty, yea,
last year over this year. We have some additional classified staff that we were able to fund, yea, the instructional designer and half of a marketing coordinator, because the marketing coordinator
also is paid by the unrestricted fund as well. So 1.5 classified staff. Meanwhile you all will know that we had a salary increase last year 2%, 6% this year so
again, the change from last year to this year is 6% for everybody's salary, which was over $2 million of additional costs,
and then we had our STRS and PERS increases, which I talked about earlier as well. Remember, they did, the state did temporarily drop the rates, but we're still having to pay more almost $300,000 more.
We did have some relief our health and welfare costs have dropped, we moved to Cal PERS. So that has saved the college this year about $600,000,
and then that also saves us on our retiree health and health, the retiree health and welfare benefits as well $480,000. So when you add all those numbers up, we have about a $2 million gap that we have to close. Next slide please.
So how do we close the gap? How do we do that? Well, we look at a lot, there are a lot of strategies and we implemented a few. So the first one was, we really looked at our
our sections and really maximizing productivity. I think this is going to be sound familiar to a lot of you.
We were trying to maximize, you know, as many students in those courses as possible.
If we could reduce sections that were only going to have a few students in it, and we did that, we tried to do that as earlier is because keeping the ones that, you know, had a lot of students that's
going to save us money. We reduced we looked at discretionary budgets, right, provisional salaries,
not too much student workers because we want to keep our students employed, but travel budgets things that we saved over $300,000 just reducing that some discretionary budgets.
Vacancies, this is huge, even though we only have a few vacancies, and I think if I remember correctly, this is like five or six positions. It's not many between faculty and classified. Actually, it was only one faculty position that we couldn't hire,
as we went through our hiring process for the rather either
managers, supervisors, or classified, but this saves us a lot of money. If we can keep vacancies, even for half a year that saves a ton of money.
So that's going to be something we would much rather, of course, have attrition than have to lay anybody off. So that is absolutely our strategy, you know, district wide.
And then I mentioned our, what did I call it the budget sustainability or program sustainability plan.
Our one time carry forward. So I would like to make that last as much as we can, if we can make it last three years, or maybe even more that would be fantastic. We can mitigate any budget reductions that we have to make.
We applied a million dollars toward that and that was how we balanced our budget. Next slide please.
So planning considerations for moving forward. So I'm already really thinking a lot about this, even though it's only October, fiscal 21 I'm already paying
great attention to fiscal 22 and what has to be in place in order for us to zig and zag or, you know, have to, you know, if we have to reduce. So again, we're not sure,
we're not sure what's going to happen, we did get a glimmer of hope, a little bit ago from the state that the tax collection.
In July was better than they had anticipated, so that's good. A little glimmer of good news. So again, all my fingers are crossed, toes are crossed for all of us,
but we know right away that first bit on the slide there. We know that our costs are going to go up by almost 1.4 million dollars, and you can see these are things we know these cost increases are a given.
Going to the, onto to the left below if Moorpark College's revenue allocation is is reduced. So if our revenue is reduced, and again, we have no idea if it will be and if it is by how much,
but any reduction in revenue is going to be added to that 1.38 million dollar
cost increase that we know we have to cover. So for example, if our revenue is reduced next year by 2% that's $1.2 million so that we know to balance our budget, we have 2,000,005,
sorry 2.58 million dollars of a hold that we need to, you know, we need to balance we need to look for ways to reduce our budget.
So how do we do that? Where do we look for for additional savings or budget reduction? I have a few ideas on the left, but I literally have a sheet that's probably three pages long, of all kinds of different strategies that can be used.
You know, it just depends on goals and and perspective, and, you know, what we're trying to preserve, what's most important to a campus, right?
So there's also I wanted to point out just the second bullet. There is a conversation district wide at using reserves and how reserves might be used to mitigate a
budget reductions at the campuses, whether it will be done on a district wide expenses, whether some would be actually given to the campuses for campuses to make those local decisions.
You know, those are conversations that are happening right now. Again, no decisions have been made whatsoever,
but these are all conversations that are happening, and again, this list is pages and pages long I've just throwing up a few ideas that are pretty common ones of ways that we look at possible budget reductions. Next slide please?
And finally, I did want to circle back to our one time SCFF money addition, I should say additional revenue that we received in that first year only of the Student Centered Funding Formula was about 3.3 million dollars.
We want to get back to what we plan to do with that money. You know, we spent a lot of time
focusing on, you know, what can we do with this money, you know, we want to use it strategically, we want to plan carefully, we want to
use it over a multi years. So we want to do it in ways again, strategic as possible, look at enroll the enrollment management plan that was developed, how can
we put money one time money into programs that will sustain our enrollment long term, that will grow our FTES, that will improve our student success
allocation or our students success markers that eventually we will be funded on? So this is an important mindset as the economy
recovers and we begin to come out of this, this is what we want to get back to as soon as we can. So with that, I can go to the next slide and my next slide is simply questions and then discussion. Thank you very, very much for listening to me ramble.
Mary: Jennifer, we very much appreciate you monitoring all this and keeping us all so well informed on all what's going on and that. There were a couple of questions that came up. One is, has the district considered golden handshakes as a way to save money?
Jennifer: So that comes up every year. Someone always actually couple people will always bring up golden handshakes. It is something that I think
it depends on a lots and lots of factors, whether or not it actually saves money for a district. In some instances it's actually more costly, but it is certainly, and I'm sure that because we do every year, we look at it every year district wide,
so it's always a conversation, yes.
Mary: Thank you, there was a second question that talk about maybe you could explain a little bit more about what is meant by decreasing money spent on professional development. There was a question, "If we decrease money to professional development, does that impact contractual obligations?"
Jennifer: No, no, absolutely not. So I didn't put that on there as a bullet point, but I actually did want to mention in our DCAS meeting, which is our DIstrict Council meeting on Administrative Services,
we have actually got a draft document that we've put together. That is a, it is an overall sort of guiding the guiding principles for how our as a district, we want to
approach any possible budget reductions and I want go over the first one, the first bullet says that "Decisions must place priority on the colleges and districts missions, and service to students. Colleges will consider the needs of their most vulnerable students impacted by COVID-19
in all budget decisions. Budget... strategies prioritization and recommendations will focus on preserving programs and services to students,
staff, and community," and I did want to point out another bullet on that same guiding principle document, it talks about honoring contractual obligations, so yes.
Mary: Thank you. There were two other questions. One is to explain what golden handshake means.
Jennifer: Golden handshake means basically an incentive
to, an early retirement incentive if you will. So it's a golden parachute, golden handshake, there are lots of terms for it.
But it's actually paying someone, it could be a lump sum. It could be an annuity over 20 years. It could be there are so kinds of so many different kinds of models, but it's usually monetary incentive for that you pay someone in order to retire.
Mary: Thank you. There was a question about budget allocation for students who are facing technology and Wi Fi barriers. Does that impact our budgets?
Jennifer: So students facing, yeah facing Wi Fi barriers,
facing technology yeah...
Mary: Are we providing technology and Wi Fi for students and how are we
going to do that? [Jennifer]: Absolutely. I mean, we have I talked about the relief funding. Number one, we have CARES money, we have COVID-19
Response Block Grant money that is going to last for the at least the next year and a half. So we have money, specifically set aside for exactly that,
but again, it goes to our priorities. What are our priorities? I would venture to say that what you just mentioned that question, those going to be very high on the priority list. So we are going to find a way come hell or high water to fund that for students.
Mary: Thank you, and right now we are currently paying for funds using CARES funds too?
[Jennifer]: We are. [Mary]: Yes, thank you, there's additional questions too about professional development and if we decrease money for professional development, how do, how do faculty and staff do professional development?
Jennifer: Well, you know, that's the $64,000 question, and again, it was just one bullet and probably a bullet from, you know, a three page long document that I have just in my possession.
Again, it's a discussion, there's maybe some professional development that could be
postponed a year or so. There's other professional development and perhaps depending on what it is we don't want to wait. It is important, and so we don't want to cut that out entirely.
I would say that our approach to budgeting should follow, should use a fine scalpel approach as opposed to the chainsaw approach,
which is just lopping off absolutely everything without thought to, you know, any of the nuances or details. So I would be a strong advocate that we not do that, that, you know, we not take the chance on just lock it all off that we actually have a discussion about priorities.
Mary: Thank you Jennifer and I assume that you'll continue to keep us updated at the Moorpark Update?
[Jennifer]: Absolutely. [Mary]: Thank you so much.
Jennifer: Thank you.
Mary: Then we'll transition on to the other issue that we were other big topic we're going to talk about today at the town hall,
the social justice work group, giving us information about what's been accomplished and what their priorities are.
The next slide. We'll just kind of go over what we're going to be, how we're going to be covering this information.
Each of the social justice work groups are going to give us a brief update on what's been done and what their priorities are for the five to seven minutes. Then if you have questions or comments, and then we've got a interactive poll
regarding each of the individual. So we'll go over the first social justice work group and then a poll on that. The second work group and then the poll on,
related to that particular work group. All poll responses are
anonymous, and we will take all of the information and presented at the Moorpark updates or a town hall, depending upon all the information so that we've got time
to have some good discussion on the data that's come out rather than rush it at the very end of the town hall today.
The two poll questions. One is, we'll say whatever the particular outcome is from that work group. Is this a or this is a high priority for Moorpark College,
and then you can either strongly agree, somewhat agree, neutral somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree.
And then the second polling question allows you to give some information as far as the timeframe, when which you feel this action should be taken.
Tier one activities, one would hope to accomplish within this this year within 6 to 12 months and tier two is a longer term 1 to 3 years in order to accomplish that particular
topic. So we start with
social justice group one. Thank you, Patty.
Patricia Colman: Great. Hi, everybody. I hope that you can all see my screen at this point. So I am representing theme one Diversifying the Curriculum,
and if we all think back to the wake of the George Floyd murder,
we received a mandate from our students. Our students told us that many of them don't feel welcome on campus.
Our students told us that they want to be better represented in the classroom, they want to learn about their histories, they want to understand racial inequity,
and so given that a lot of the work from the summer and into this fall, came together and we really we I think accomplished a lot of amazing work.
There's over 30 people in this particular work group, and people have been doing an incredible job. Some of the accomplishments from theme one, the Social Justice ADT,
the culturally responsive pedagogy resources, they can be found on the Moorpark College Library website, you might remember Danielle presented on those.
We also created an Ethnic Studies Department and a new course, Introduction to Chicana/ Chicano Studies.
There's also been a series of speakers, webinars, just one as an example, Erika Lizee and her wonderful artist lecture series that she hosted.
We also had a book club Ruth and Cynthia lead us in "Reading Between The World and Me,"
and there are some January professional development sessions that are being organized. So these are just some of the accomplishments that theme one was able to
make happen in a very short amount of time. So really it's pretty amazing that people work so hard over these last few months to do this.
But our work is absolutely not finished. We have identified two goals that we think are most important here as we go forward into 2021 and beyond.
There's two goals that you will then be voting on in the polls. I know right now no one wants to talk about voting or polls, at the moment, but
we're presenting two. The first one is Culturally Responsive Education.
Now you may notice that I took pedagogy out of that and put education because I think what we really want to look at here is not just in the classroom,
but also counseling, coaching, our services all across the campus. So some examples of how we could do that are putting on discipline and department specific workshops,
looking at how we can work on our program plans our learning outcomes, looking at how the curriculum review process can start to integrate some of this culturally responsive work into that.
Also we have a really great start on a land acknowledgement statement that just
recently got passed by emotion in our Academic Senate to start working on that. So that's something that we hope to continue as well.
And again, I just, I want to kind of emphasize something that Julius had on his first slide the Chancellor and his Call to Action. One of the things that the Chancellor told us to do,
is to create anti racist curriculum, and so I think that this is a really, really important priority for us to think about. The second priority that I would like to introduce to you all and for your consideration, is expanding our work on Ethnic Studies.
We as I put in the accomplishments, we do now have an Ethnic Studies Department, and we have one Ethnic Studies course that we need to create more.
As I think a lot of you know AB 1460 was passed, which is now mandating that all students who graduate from a Cal State must have a three unit Ethnic Studies course,
and since it's lower division, that means we need to start offering these classes too.
Those classes, need to be an American Indian Studies, African American Studies, Asian American Studies, or something within the Latinx community as our Chicana/ Chicano Studies does.
We also want to explore, for example, making ethnic studies a requirement for all associate degrees at Moorpark College.
Now this is something that several of us have been talking about since the summer, but since then
the state has started to move on this as well, there is a law that has been proposed within our state legislature to do just this. I know our California
Academic Senate is also looking at something similar. So this may be, you know, mandated and we will have to do the work on it, but regardless of that
many of us feel strongly that our students before we put them out into the workforce, before we put them out into society, they need to critically examine
issues of race, and ethnicity, and inequality in our country. Finally, this is another example of how we could expand the ethnic studies offering by creating a non credit social justice course
for CTE and possibly even for community groups, where local businesses and organizations could come to us, or we to them, or on Zoom and provide kind of a short workshop for social justice.
So again, I just want to say thank you to everybody who has put in so much work to get so much accomplished this semester,
and I really look forward to working on these very important imperatives in the future, and I think I am under my time allotment and if there's any questions, I'll certainly take those, but I'll go ahead and stop sharing now.
Mary: Thank you Patty. There are a couple of questions. One is, what does a land use, land acknowledgement statement mean?
Patty: Great. So a land acknowledgement statement is something that we can put on the college website we can put on our syllabus, we can put on our websites,
and it just is acknowledging that the land that Moorpark College that sits is historically belonging to the Chumash and
Susan Kinkella and Ashley Vaughan have really been working on this and they're much better at explaining it than me, but it's just a really nice way to kind of remind students that we are on Indigenous land.
Mary: Thank you. There was a request to put out information to faculty and staff as to far as what are some social and racial justice courses that we could recommend to students for spring.
Patty: I maybe I'm not understanding the question. You mean just general courses that might...
Mary: Yeah, for example, they mentioned that
Oxnard has some LGBTQI literature courses or... [Patty]: Yeah, yeah.
Certainly, we don't have any courses
yet that look like they will meet that AB 1460 requirement, but as far as classes for students who are looking for some diversity in their education,
I know, for example, Diane Scrofano in English, she's doing I believe her Chicano Literature class again.
I know, certainly not to plug my class, but I teach a course on race and ethnicity in American history. Of course,
in Sociology they have one as well. We have courses in Mexican American history, American Indian history. I think Anthropology, of course, has some courses there. So there's a lot and I'm happy if anyone wants to email me, I can help with that.
Mary: And or we could perhaps
help to, if you generated such a list I could probably send that out to faculty that might be, and staff that might be, and or to Counseling, we could probably do that as well.
Patty: I am writing that down. Yes.
Mary: Okay, that would be fabulous. Thank you.
Oh, and I think Jill wants us to make sure that we mention that she also has an Intercultural Communications, so let's put that on the list as well. So, and I think that's an excellent point,
as well as Anthro, I think that it points out that there probably are some that were not aware of or aren't that very quick is to come to our mind. So let's put together that list and then we can send it out to everyone, so that's our...
Patty: Our course, we, of course, we do have area F in our General Studies degree which has the gender and multicultural classes and you can just quickly go there and see a list there, but I think we could probably build on that.
Mary: Fabulous. Thank you. So, so we go ahead and give our interaction time. This is always an experiment. So let's give this a try.
We are going to hopefully come up on your screen is a... a response, a polling please mark down. So we've got Culturally Responsive Education. This is a high priority for Moorpark College.
Please indicate your preference. There are what you believe strongly agree, somewhat agree, neutral, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree,
and then what tier order or what timeframe do you feel that work needs to happen and then in the tier one within the next 6 to 12 months which would mean, you know, within next semester or in the 1 to 3 years. If you could go ahead and indicated and then submit. Thank you.
And then Michael, we have a second poll, correct?
Thank you. So now you have the second poll which is the second outcome that social justice work group one believes are high priorities for our campus, Ethnic Studies, again strongly, somewhat agree, neutral, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree and which order.
There was a question. Yeah.
Then what order as far as would you rank it. Tier one needs to happen in the next 6 to 12 months or Tier two.
Thank you all for participating and allowing us to engage you all in these kind of important conversations. For theme two,
the diversity hiring.
I think that we've got several people that are going to present this, I believe, Perry...
[Perry Martin]: Yes. [Mary]: ...and Robert, and I have,
is it Kristen, I think I'm forgetting one person, so I apologize.
Perry: All right. Well, thank you, Mary, appreciate this.
For theme two is designed to address the hiring of staff, faculty, and managers that represent ethnic diversity and our student population. The work group leads and myself Perry Martin,
Jennifer Clark our Vice President you heard from earlier, Gerald Richardson, who is a student representative, Linda Resendiz and Celine Park. First slide please.
For theme two in diversity hiring here are our priorities for the fall, as well as the spring of 2021. We understand that this work is ongoing, this is not something that can be accomplished
overnight, this district has been in existence or nearly a century. Moorpark has been around for over 50 years. So we do recognize that this is going to be a pretty
lifelong endeavor. However, what we first want to accomplish is to conduct a thorough P3 plan. I put the P3 plan, we want to identify the policies, procedures, and practices, we want to analyze those.
The second is that we want to make immediate recommendation at all levels of leadership to remove identifiable discriminatory practices and to establish best practices in that P3 plan.
Third, we want to invite all interested classified professionals, faculty, and administrators to join
in the subgroup to do this work. So I want you to know that this work, although you might, you will see
in the template that there's a lot of work that's already been done, but we're just really getting started with taking the deep end dive, so we are welcoming folks to come join our sub groups and you'll get to meet our sub group leaders in just a minute.
Number four, we want to leverage all the efforts from the key stakeholders anywhere from, and this list is not exhausted, because there are so many people working on this,
we, these are just a few of the stakeholders anywhere from the Board of Trustees, the Board of Trustees has set up an Ad-Hoc created an Ad-Hoc Committee,
the Chancellor has a legal advisor on this issue, the district HR human resources, as well as the USC Senate Race and Equity,
the VCCARA, the county anti racism alliance, and NAACP, and the institutional researchers that are at the district level, as well as the campus.
These are four main issues that we want to focus on right now, and what we've been focusing on from the time we were given this task. Next slide please?
Now, the way we have this setup is through a template, because this is work and we want to be clear about what we've done, our objectives, this template is designed to show you the objectives, the key action steps,
recommendations if we're able to make them now, ultimately the desired outcomes, and then give you a current status.
So I serve as the EEOC the Equal Employment Advisory Committee representative for Moorpark campus, we decided to break this down into four sub groups, the EEOAC,
as well as faculty/ administrators, and then number three is classified, and number four we have an administrative and a quality control
group that helps us put it, put everything together and to do conduct some of the research. So our first objective that we have is to analyze the campus and district hiring policies, procedures, and practices.
The key action steps is that we put in a request for the policies and practices information to the Academic Senate.
Once that was sent a recommendation is for them to outline specific practices that may enable discriminatory practices.
Then we know we need to conduct a campus hiring practices survey. Many of you have served on hiring committees, many of you shown interest, we need to find out exactly where we stand in terms of hiring.
The ultimate, the outcomes are the desired outcomes, we want to eradicate immediately ending discriminatory practices that we may be able to do,
we also want to make the necessary board policy and administrative policy changes,
and we also want to make sure that the academic senate establishes clear guidelines on the policies, procedures, and practices. We want to make sure that that's clear, transparent, and everyone understands
the guidelines, and currently the status is that the Academic Senate sent, delivered their information to the district EEOC Director.
The Equal Employment Advisory Committee will send Academic Senate requests for information related to specific practices. For example, if you are going through tenure, can you sit on
a hiring committee? Those specific that specific types of information, we're going to be asking those questions of academic senates and campuses.
The next one, the next objective we want to gauge in ideally, if there's no leadership buy in from the top as well as the bottom,
we need to make sure first that we have that buy in. So we want to gauge the leadership's commitment to a diversity inclusion.
So the, the recommended or the next step was for us to meet with the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and after having a conversation with them about it,
we decided to conduct a Board of Trustees panel on transformational leadership, diversity, and inclusion, equity, anti racism, culture, and social justice issues, and I just want to say that it took it took some courage for the
Board of Trustees to come to that panel and answer those questions, because those questions that we set for them were probing and it, it did
give you a sense of if they were really doing the work rather than just signing on to a resolution.
So, the outcome is that we had that special advisory meeting on October 8, the 8th. It gave us a clearer perspective
on what we came to understand now is that the district has created an Ad-Hoc committee consisting of Dianne McKay, Trustee McKay and Trustee Torres,
and that was their first time meeting with us, but their first meeting is scheduled, so the current status is because that they'll invite us back to that Ad-Hoc
first meeting so we can continue to discuss and give them some insight as to what we've been doing as the Equal Employment Advisory Committee,
and they made it clear that the Chancellor's number one priority and his goal was diversity hiring.
The next objective is to create transformational change in the campus culture related to diversity and equity.
What we, the key action steps for us is to synthesize this multilateral approach towards P3, social justice, and anti racism, and equity issues because there are so many stakeholders that are involved
rather than reinvent the wheel than working in silos, we recognize the benefit of working together.
The outcome that we want to have is that we want to centralize effective and efficient management oversight in all of these EEO initiatives. Recommendation to the Chance- we made this recommendation to the Chancellor, the campus president, as well as the district HR. Next slide.
Next objective is to attract, recruit, and retain a diverse applicant pool. Key action step in that process is assist the district HR in these EEF
efforts. Now I'll use the term EEFs. You many of you know them as screening facilitators, but they have evolved to the term be called Employment Equity Facilitators.
So what we needed in this area is the district to commit to the resources necessary to achieve this objective. That means finding
the right type of sites, going to the right schools, going to, whatever resources we can to attract and recruit a diverse pool.
We also recognize the benefit of leveraging our relationship with the USC Race and Equity Center and they have a program that has a pool that's already there, so we recognize the benefit from there.
The ultimate outcome is that we want to improve the campus diversity and equity at all levels. Status is to be determined.
The next objective is to empower our Employment Equity Facilitators to address EEO issues during the hiring process.
Now, that does not mean they have not been affected, but we want to strengthen them with more training, more resources so they can advocate for fair practices, even on a higher level.
Key action steps in that process is that we are asking deans, chairs, co-chairs, to assist in immediate implementation of fair practices and just step up just a little bit more by exercising a little bit more leadership in terms of facilitating.
We also want to create and many of you if you've taken that hiring video, you know, it's outdated with the whole the last regime. We want to create a new one or find some other video that effectively teaches the training before you go into hiring committees.
A recommendation we want to create an employment survey, a survey for the equity facilitators, the one that have already facilitated and they are
for lack of better term, they know where the bodies are buried, they know some of the systemic issues that have already been happening in hiring committees. So we need to find that information out so we can address those.
Also, we want the hiring committees to evaluate the facilitators and give them feedback on how well they've done so we can address it at the EEOAC, as well as the district level.
And then we want the president all the presidents to allow the Equal Employment
Facilitators to go through the entire hiring process, and that means you got eyes on and they can vouch that this process from beginning, and that's not questioning the integrity of the process that just allowing us to have eyes on from the beginning to the end.
The outcomes ultimately is to increase empowerment and transparency in the process, and then also make any necessary BP Board Policy or administrative policy changes. The status, our community stakeholders, such as a VCCARA, there was a sub group that is working on
survey instrument, as well as the institutional researchers from the district level coming from the district level, and I'll be reaching out Oleg to work on the campus level,
and the sub group will be working on the development in this process.
The next objective is, is to institute a campus why implicit bias training for all faculty, especially the hiring, the folks that are on hiring committees. The key action steps in this
is to recommend to the Professional Development Committee to choose the most effective course of action to implement this campus wide training.
Recommendations is that we encourage every faculty to take the implicit bias training and be willing
to address, because Implicit bias is something that we all have, but how, and deal with how it affects you, and ultimately how it affects the decisions that you make, and so we want, we recommend that everyone does that.
The outcomes, this will significantly improve the campus'
ability to remove or reduce implicit biases at all levels. There's no us against them, there's no faculty versus classified, you'll see with the sub groups this is all of us working together classified, faculty, and administrators and then
status, TWMOCAs, if you have not heard of the TWMOCAs, the Teaching Women and Men of Color Advocates, we conducted a presentation just a small presentation because we are, we consider ourselves the conscious of
the campus. We created and you got to hear, a chance to hear from Patricia Colman, she gave a really good sizzle,
not the whole steak, but gave a real quick 15 minute presentation on implicit bias which was well received.
So as far as the Professional Development Committee that's still to be determined as to how we go about getting that process implemented.
And then we want to target Black and Indigenous, people of color recruitment. Now the key action steps in this process is to identify additional resources that are necessary to increase the applicant pool,
and in this we will request funding from the district to do, to to accomplish this objective.
We also need to and collect the information from exit interviews or for those folks, you can go into diversity
website and you can see the dashboard, we've had people that were that tried to apply, or thought about applying, but the just things such as the salary or the commute, all of those areas, we need to address and
ultimately the outcomes
is to increase diversity at all levels classified, staff, faculty, and administrators. We made these recommendations to the Chancellor and the district HR,
been made by the Equal Employment Opportunity Advisory Committee. Next please.
Mary: Thank you Perry. I think we're finished. We're ready to do the poll, the pool, the poll for work group two now?
Are you guys...
were you guys finished, are or you about finished?
Perry: No, no, we weren't finished.
Mary: Okay 'cause we're like, way over for your particular group we're at...
Perry: We were taking some of Patty's time, remember she yielded the balance of her time to us.
Mary: I... [Mary laughs]
Can't we...can we do
one more minute to finish up and then do the poll? Will that work?
Perry: That's okay, Linda,
if you would, since this slide has been up, if you could just go to the next slide,
and what you'll see is that Maria Thayer represents to classified sub group, and this is the work that they've been doing,
and it's a call to get involved or Call to Action from our faculty sub group lead Brandon Elliot to increase everybody, we need everybody to be a part of this process.
All right.
[Mary]: Very good. [Perry]: Thank you. [Mary]: Thank you so much.
So much work going on here. I appreciate, we really appreciate that. Can we do the poll then thank you?
Let's see. So are you all seeing the poll?
So for poll one the P3 plan. Please rank that.
The timeframe... submit.
The second objective or outcome.
This is the recommendation for all levels of leadership,
to remove discriminatory practices.
The third poll question...
invite all interested classified staff, faculty, administration to join the subgroup work.
And is there a fourth...
poll question?
Leveraging the efforts from the key stakeholders, we have a nice list here of many of the groups that have been working on this.
And then submit that poll question as well.
Thank you for all of the presentation and also for the participating in the feedback on related to diversity in hiring. The third theme?
Leadership on Racial Issues.
Kristen would you want to lead us on this?
Kristen Robinson: Terrific. Yeah. Next slide please?
So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Kristen Robinson and I work in Student Life for Moorpark College, and today I have the privilege of sharing on behalf of faculty,
staff, administrators, and students who make up the racial and social justice work group theme three, and so a few colleagues and I will spend a short time this afternoon, sharing our goals for moving the college forward in the areas of civic engagement and empowerment. Next slide please?
But before we talk about our priorities for spring 2021 I wanted to quickly revisit what has already been done this semester in the area of civic engagement.
So in September dozens of community members tuned in to learn about how to effectively advocate for racial and social justice during a training, led by Moorpark College English professor and Multicultural Day specialist Tamarra Coleman.
Additionally, many faculty, staff, students and administrators listened in as three Moorpark College alumni shared their path to landing careers in law and politics during a Constitution Day panel moderated by Moorpark College Communications professor Rolland Petrello.
The Associated Students Voter Empowerment Committee with advisement from our workgroup hosted a presidential debate watch party on October 22.
I'm really happy to report that the event included very civil conversation about the candidates as well as discussion on state ballot measures.
And lastly, our work group partnered with campus and district marketing to promote voter registration information deadlines via social media, Canvas, and other outlets.
And so with that, I want to turn it over to Interim Dean of Student Learning Monica Garcia to outline our first recommended priority for spring 2021.
Monica Garcia: Good afternoon, everyone. I hope everyone can hear me.
So,
our first initiative is to possibly hold or host a representative or a panel of representatives that will walk us through the legislation
process and procedure, and initiatives that are that become laws and and affect students. So, for example, our first initiative is to
invite Assembly member Jacqui Irwin, who is from the 44th district and she is the person who authored AB 705,
and that particular bill, as you all may know, was a huge implication, had huge implications for the California Community College operational part of students getting through their cour- getting assessed in order to assess them to their courses. So it would be interesting to find out where
Jacqui Irwin, or when Assembly woman Jacqui Irwin got the idea the process and really help our students understand our legislation, our legislature process. We've also considered maybe providing a panel of people who were instrumental in passing AB 19,
which is the California College Promise program or SB 728 which is the housing and hunger hardship fund that was established to make funds available for students who are going through hardship and whose assistance emergency assistance is available to them.
So these are all the legislators that truly affects students, and it's important that they understand the process so that they can become more engaged and maybe more interested in the following up or following through or making themselves available to
go in and possibly be a part of the of the change. Next?
Tamarra Coleman: Alright. Hi, I'm Tamarra Coleman English faculty, as a follow up to the training that Kristen talked about the advocacy one on one, one on one training that was offered this fall, the community organizing training would be sort of the next step to that for
folks within our campus community who are interested in learning how to bring groups of people together on different issue areas. Obviously, we have a strong interest in racial and social justice, but these are skills that
the folks can use, not just on racial and social justice issues, but in any issue in which you're trying to bring people together for change or for a particular purpose.
In our group we're also looking at how we can connect this course to other things we are doing.
For example, thinking about what this looks like as possibly a non credit course or a CTE course or pairing it up
with an internship that students could do with community organizations so that they can build those leadership skills in a training or a course like community organizing, many of those skills which are transferable, not just in community organizing, but also in
the business world, but making those connections and figuring out how this could be more than just a single instance sort of course, but something that we can offer our community, our campus community, but also our community off campus folks who may not be taking
courses here in terms of getting a degree, but folks who are already in their career or in an ethnic community organizing course for many different reasons.
So this is again going to be a great opportunity to continue to develop those leadership skills, those advocacy skills, those organizing skills that I think are really crucial in many areas of other person's life, or advancement, or career.
Next slide?
Robert Cabral: Thank you Tammy, I can talk, I can speak to this one. So my name is Robert Cabral I serve as Interim Dean of Student learning and it's been a great honor to be part of this
theme three that focuses on leadership in racial issues and facilitating social justice through civic engagement.
One of the things that we had a chance to talk about in our group is how to contextualize leadership and on racial issues and facilitating justice, social justice for students, and so what we had a discussion at is taking a work based learning model where and applying that
to removing the words career, for instance, career awareness, career exploration, and career preparation.
If we remove the word career and apply this work based learning model, it applies to social justice it sounds something like this.
For awareness building an understanding on the scope of social justice and how it relates to you the student, exploration, diving into learning more specifics about social justice through
working or engaging with nonprofit agencies. Think about what Patty Colman talked about culturally responsive education, it really fits into that theme as well preparation.
Applying learning through experience within nonprofit agency world in developing a social justice interest and skill set. So by taking this body of knowledge or this pathway,
this group found a way how we could collaborate, not only with other themes within this campus, but also with another institution,
and so we created this partnering goal and the partnering goal is partnering actually with Cal Lutheran University Center for Nonprofit Leadership.
Their program, and again, this is thanks very much to Dr. Celine Park and her external effort works with the campus, providing the service learning internship within the social justice framework.
Students would have the ability to not only
engage in a social learning, social justice learning internship, but also have the opportunity to work with Cal Lutheran students through their leadership academy.
So Moorpark College would actually play a role in helping grow students and become more engaged citizens.
We'll be creating an inclusive climate where students are actually feel value through their social justice practices.
The student outcomes that would come from these internships and social justice would be work experience, contextualizing the leadership skill sets from class,
creating and developing relationships within constituents in groups and agencies, developing skill sets and the student focused training from the nonprofit leadership networking opportunities that will, they will have. Thank you.
Mary: Thank you all for group threes.
Can we do the poll, the interaction for group three? Thank you.
Hold a legislative talk.
So these are with Leadership on Racial Issues and Civic Engagement polls.
The second poll...
offer a community organizing training.
This is a high priority for Moorpark.
The third poll. If your polls are not showing up, perhaps, do you have at the bottom of yours to click "poll" is that one of your options?
So hopefully you're seeing theme three, action item three, proposed a racial and social justice internship program.
Just as a reminder to to everyone that the town hall is being videotaped and once the closed caption or the captioning is finished, it will be posted and we can also
send out the recordings, and we can also send out a poll survey with the link to the recordings so that we can make sure that we've gotten everybody's feedback so we can
if you feel like you're having some trouble with the polling, we can work on sending out a polling survey with a link to the recording to ensure that we do get your feedback. So thank you.
Okay.
The fourth theme...
Providing Culturally Responsive Student Services.
And to present that group. We've got Johnny, do you want to start us off?
Johnny Conley: No, I think, Marnie, Marnie. Next slide. I believe the first slide.
[Marnie Melendez]: On the first slide. Okay. [Johnny]: Yes.
Marnie: First slide please.
Hi. So our theme is theme four culturally competent student services. Next slide?
So we had three subgroups.
So what are the sub group is commitment, the other is cultural competency, and then the other one is community. Next slide?
So,
one of the things that we heard Dr. Sokenu talk about is the mission of the college and as we evolve with all this professional development
in regards to social and racial justice, we need our mission and our vision of the college to evolve and to evolve with our students values,
the stuff that they're asking for, the stuff that they need us to do, and so this is something that we are working on in our group.
And so we, another thing that we wanted to do is we went on an immediate statement of solidarity with the Black community and it could be as simple as
this, I don't know if you can see this example of the statement that Moorpark College stands in solidarity with the Black community to end systematic racism, oppression, and inequality. Next slide.
So the recommendations out of this sub group is to have a Moorpark College post a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement on the web page.
For example, Academic Senate has already approved a resolution supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
Students Services as a whole will be developing a statement, and we really need the campus as a whole to participate in real dialogue, fearless inquiry,
the deliberate action that will align community colleges with the core beliefs that systematic racism has no place in our society. So these are some of the recommendations that we want to propose to the group. Next slide. I think that would be
our next lead.
Deborah Brackley: Good afternoon, everyone. Our piece is cultural competence and student services. Next slide please.
So one of the things that we are focused on right now is our group is developing a culturally competent training for all employees that would be
delivered on during Flex week and all employees will be invited. The research was based on and inspired by Dr. Frank Harris,
Who's come to our campus several times to provide training. This training would be a three pronged approach focusing on three major strategies:
conveying unconditional regard, building relationships, humanizing yourself, and in this training we would be providing concrete examples of how to achieve these things.
We would also be providing a self-reflection assessment tool kit that everybody would get at the end of the training,
And the last thing I wanted to share is we have a tutor and a member of our group that has been working with the student athletes for the last two years, and she's done a fabulous job of building relationships, and she was working with the students and posed a question.
What do people get wrong about you? And our group really wanted a homegrown approach. So this was a very excellent example of one of our students speaking to us about some of the misconceptions
of him. So if you could play that video. This is Kenny and he's gonna answer that question for you.
I hope...
Jasmine Betka: So what do you think people get wrong about you?
Kenny Ward: I think one of the main things being a Black athlete is that we don't, or that I don't care about school necessarily like
I don't want to pay attention in class. I'm just there to get a C or something, just so I can get my scholarship, which is completely the opposite 'cause
I crave knowledge, you know, knowledge is power. So in my mind I want to do the best that I can with the tools that I'm given
just so I can make it you know because football is not going to be there when I'm 40 just because, you know, your body wears out and stuff so,
being able to have something to fall back on, you know, school's is really important. And as we were talking about earlier is just, you know,
I've been, I've been basically trained my whole life to be around sports and I haven't been trained my whole life, you know, to be an academic student, so I feel like that's one of the things that I feel people
look at in a different way is that they always see me as an athlete, but not as a person that wants to learn more about any said topic, just 'cause I'm not good at it, doesn't mean I don't want to get better at it. I feel that's
that's probably one of the main things that I just want to...
[Jasmine]: So what do you think people get wrong about you? [The video repeats]
[Deborah]: Okay... [Kenny]: I think one of the main things being a Black athlete...
There we go. All right. We're hoping that Kenny will make it to the training. He was slotted to come, his situation has changed, but the hope is that he will be part of that training. Next slide and Allison is up.
Allison Case Barton: Alright so I'm Allison Barton, I work at the Student Health Center and
so just a few of our accomplishments, and actually many of these are works in progress.
We did have
developed a Canvas name pronunciation procedure. So where that came from was part of the part of unconditional regard that Deb mentioned earlier,
is taking time to pronounce somebody's name correctly. So to that end, we asked Michael Ashton to develop a Canvas name pronunciation procedure that
professors can assign students, not only does it make the task of learning how to pronounce people's names easier, but it also creates a cultural norm of respect for students and professors.
So these other items are again a work in progress. We're, we're working diligently with our awesome sub group to come up with a working definition of cultural competence.
We're designing the training that Deb mentioned, and we're also developing an online toolkit, as we speak, that will be housed on a page somewhere, hopefully we'll have an equity website for the
for the college or something like that. So that anything that we come up with people could have access to 24 7, and that's it. Thank you.
Mary: Thank you so much. If we look at the interacting questions for group four...
Johnny: There are a couple extra slides that I can run through in a bit.
Mary: Oh I'm sorry, excuse me.
Johnny: No worries. So we had a third sub group for our larger group four and that sub group was focused on the community at Moorpark. So we're looking to host a student driven town halls.
Using those town halls really get feedback from our students, and then also using some of that data that qualitative data on how we can advocate student spaces on our campus. Next slide?
Save the date. So our town hall that we held ourself too earlier this semester, was to host a town hall. So you all save the date, please. December 2, 4:30 to 5:30 working with Oleg and his IR team to pull our entire student body,
pertaining to students that may have experienced biased, or racist, or culturally insensitive experiences in student services.
So we are working with his team to gather all of that qualitative data. Any identifying measures with names and programs we have a team that would exclude all that in this town hall.
So save the date. Encourage your students to participate. We're working on an email that should go out to the to the student body hopefully by the end of next week,
to give them a few days to actually participate in the poll and then on the 2nd we'll have a panel of students as well as breakout sessions, and kind of have themes and kind of see what themes or issues that some students are experiencing in our, in our division.
And the next slide is really just a questions.
Mary: Thank you, Johnny. Sorry about that. So if we go back to the, go to the poll questions.
Posted a statement on the Moorpark College website in support of Black Lives Matter.
The second outcome.
Develop resources to support culturally responsive student services.
It's that priority at Moorpark and then the tier order.
Next poll question.
Enhance student feedback channels to hear student voices.
The next poll question.
Okay, thank you for participating. We just wanted to do the polls to get people's input on that. There was a question as to where the
tape, the videotape will be recorded and the results we will have to be able to post those online.
And we'll have it in several places and we will send out information. I'm sure it'll be on the President's
web page, which is where we have all of our Moorpark Updates and I know there is work a lot of talk about having an equity web page where this would be a certainly appropriate to put as well.
The town hall could also be go to our planning websites. So we'll end up putting a couple of links for it available for you on that. So thank you, and Julius do you...
some closing comments for us, please? [Julius]: Sure.
Thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon, the work that we're doing here
on the budget, as well as in our social justice
direct imperative is central to the soul and the future of this college, and I want to thank you each and every one of you for that for doing this work. From this
town hall, a couple of things popped up, and as I was thinking through what we're doing and listening to your presentations. On the budget front, we know that
there's increases to the cost of doing business, and that it, that there's the possible budget reductions about to be undertaken. We also know that they're unfunded liabilities, such as the SCFF
funding that has not come through in the past two years, and that, that offers an opportunity when it does finally come through to support the work that we do here at the college in a much more robust way.
I want to put,
emphasize that whatever work we do regarding budget and budget reductions that we will be doing it in a consultative way, that there is engaging our stakeholders that matters, and that
I appreciate Jennifer's reference with fine scalpel as opposed to a chainsaw, as a way to engage and do this work. At the end of the day, really, we're here for students and we have to make sure that the work to develop systems that support that success, their success.
As far as work on social justice, I am in awe of the energy, of the commitment, of the thought, and of the overall
vision that has gone into the work that each of these groups has undertaken, and this is a true reflection of our college community.
This tells me that we have a college that is invested in doing the work of equity, we have a college that's invested in making sure that we're inclusive in our practices,
and most importantly, this tells me that we are all committed to making sure that our students experience irrespective where they come from, irrespective of what they look like,
that our students experience Moorpark college as a welcoming, as an inspiring, and as a supportive place.
We have to contextualize the work that we're doing regards to social justice and I think a focal point of that context is that this is about creating community and this is about enforcing and empowering
students to be the very best and to empower ourselves to be our very best.
That means that it is challenging. That means that it is difficult. That means that it requires courageous and difficult conversations,
but that also means that if we truly commit to do it, it will be better off at the end of all of this.
We are doing the work of system change. We're doing the work of cultural enhancement. We're also doing the work of living up to the
ideals that we as a college have set for ourselves. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much for the work you continue to do.
This is an ongoing conversation, of course, but it is a conversation that requires participation from all stakeholders.
If you're not participating, please do connect with one of these groups. You can see the work that they do. You can see the investment that they have,
in making sure that our budget, making sure that our community, and making sure that we are treating everybody with equity and that we're an anti racist institution.
At the end of the day, we're here to build a community and a culture to give on to our next generation to go give to the faculty and the staff who will be here 30 years from now.
We celebrate and appreciate the culture that's been handed down to us. We know we need to do some work to modify aspects of it, but that this college has always been invested
in what's best for students. What's best for students is a safe learning environment that embraces all their identities. It's a safe work environment that embraces all our identities.
It is not free of conflict, it is not free of struggle, but it is one that leans into that conflict and that struggle and looks to make the best of the campus. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend.