Congratulations to our new Academic Senate Vice President, Curtis Pembrook!

Looking forward, this year we face an unprecedented budget challenge of an approximate $9 million ongoing budget deficit beginning in the 2009-2010 academic year (out of a $90 million total District budget). In response, our new Chancellor, John Hendrickson, has worked with the Classified and Academic Senates and the Executive Management Team to hire an organizational study team to make recommendations for structural efficiency and budget cuts for 09-10. The recommendations will be reported in November and the District will begin collaboratively creating its budget for 09-10 in December of this year. The District Council is the steering committee for this organizational study and I will be posting minutes (or links to minutes) for all the shared governance committees on this website for your convenience.

At the college level, the Academic Senate is taking leadership in implementing our Educational Master Plan. We are forming a task force to make recommendations for implementation. At the current time, efforts to look strategically at enrollment management are somewhat isolated. Division Chairs and the Performance Goals Committee are working together with the Office of Instruction to ensure we are only offering classes with healthy enrollment. The Senate is looking at EFMP recommendations which include possible new program development. Marketing and outreach appear to interact at the Student Services and GAP levels of governance. It is my hope that we can bring all these activities together under one umbrella and include lots of data review/collection to develop a clear direction for the college.

In addition to our budget challenges, we are facing a deadline of November 30 to address all of our accreditation planning agenda items and the 9 recommendations from the visiting accreditation team. I have created an action plan to complete each of the items for which the Senate has primary or secondary responsibility. You will find this action plan under the Documents section of this web page. The accreditation team will be visiting us again in March, 2009, but our written report addressing all our planning items and recommendations must be in full draft form by December for review by the shared governance committees and the Board of Trustees before the March visit.

There is a lot of work to be done and we will be needing every faculty member to step up and fulfill his or her 5 hours per week of institutional responsibilities in order to address the accreditation work and the challenges in increasing enrollment. I will personally be working with each committee to ensure it has all the faculty participation it needs. I would like each one of us to be able to say at the end of this year that we each have done our absolute best to help the college succeed.

Stephanie Kashima
Senate President
Mission College Academic Senate