Desert Community College District
Board of Trustees Meeting
CODAA Report
Mister Chair, Madam Superintendent/President, Members of the Board, and College Community
College of the Desert Adjunct Association would like to thank Dr. Garcia for agreeing to re-open our 2021-2024 contract. This position supports the concept of fairness to our adjunct faculty.
1. We prioritize getting parity adjunct pay and benefits with our full-time colleagues. What is parity? It is equal pay for equal work. Both full-time and part-time have the same teaching and expertise qualifications. Part-time faculty often have more substantial qualifications than their full-time counterparts, yet we get paid less than they do per class. California and the Federal Equal Pay Acts say equal pay for equal work, and California even goes further and says equal pay for similar work in the public sector. There can be no made-up rules such as “no me too” in our negotiation process. Full- and part-time salaried faculty are connected because we do the same work in the classroom and prepare for school. We currently get paid half of what a full-time faculty gets for the same three-credit class. We get no benefits. The full-time do. The lesser salary that we receive is impacting the respect we have from the college community.
2. Here is an example of two teachers, one full-time and one part-time. Both are new, and both have master’s degrees. The full-time faculty teaches a three-credit class and receives $7700 for the three credits, including class time, office hours, prep time, and committee work. The adjunct gets approximately $3500 for a three-credit class, including prep and classroom time. If you reduce the full-time faculty for the office hours and committee work, the new pay for that individual is $5775 per 3-credit class. So here we have it, approximately $5775 versus $3500 for doing the same work. How is this equitable?
3. When I listened to the Candidate forum respond to my question on parity, I realized that our Board does not understand how our budget works even though you are responsible for overseeing and approving it. Sacramento does not allocate the funds they give us for operations. We, the College of the Desert, allocate funds. They provide guidelines, such as the 50% rule for full-time faculty. They have also provided over $200,000 in seed money almost every year for the last 20 years to help our school get to parity, and we have barely seen any of it. Parity is internal to the college; it is not a comparison between colleges. It means we are asking the Board of Trustees to give our president and your only employee the direction to get us to parity on a specific date. There can be no made-up rules such as “no me to” in our negotiation process. Full- and part-time salaried faculty are connected because we do the same work in the classroom.
As a college, we have committed to diversity, equity and inclusion; without parity, there can be no equity; without equity, there can be no inclusion, and without inclusion, there can be no diversity.
Submitted respectfully,
Dr. Catherine Levitt, President of CODAA
